Failure to chill in Madison

Woody Hayes could have warned the man, the way he once warned Bob Knight. But Woody is long dead, so there will be no moment when he tells Michigan basketball coach Juwan Howard, "Listen to me, Juwan. Listen to me, because I've made a lot of mistakes and you don't have to repeat mine."

Woody's biggest mistake, of course, was throwing a punch at Clemson linebacker Charley Bauman after Bauman intercepted a pass in the 1978 Gator Bowl. It was also Woody's last mistake, because it got him fired.

Juwan Howard likely will not be. But when he took a swing at Wisconsin assistant coach Joe Krabbenhoft yesterday after Michigan's loss to Wisconsin, he had his own Charley Bauman moment -- and it was just as shameful as Woody's.

By now the video has entered Zapruder film territory, so often has it been dissected and re-dissected. When Howard and Wisconsin head coach Greg Gard came together in the postgame handshake line, the two exchanged words. Gard put his hands on Howard; Howard put his hands on Gard, grabbing his sweater and shaking a finger in his face.

At that point, Krabbenhoft said ... something. We know he said something, because Howard reached over Gard to take a swipe at him. That touched off a near-brawl involving players and coaches from both teams.

For that, Juwan Howard is wholly to blame. If the head coach thinks it's OK to throw a slap/punch/whatever that was, how will his players not think it's OK, too?

It escalated a heated discussion between two head coaches into something else, and even if you want to argue Krabbenhoft escalated it first, Howard was the one who chose to react. Without Howard's rabbit ears and loss of his chill, it's just he and Gard jawing at one another. And that's never happened before, right?

Not even Knight and Gene Keady ever threw a punch at one another, heated as their rivalry was. Knight did once smack Joe B. Hall on the back of the head during a fierce Indiana-Kentucky moment, but it was vague enough that Knight was able to alchemize it into a friendly pat. 

Howard can't possibly pull off a similar transformation. He threw hands at an opposing coach. And it doesn't matter why, or what the opposing coach said, or even if he had a reason to be upset with Gard and his staff.

Which he didn't, by the way.

Gard called timeout with seconds to play in a blowout win because Michigan was still pressing the Badgers' scrubs. If Michigan isn't still pressing -- and it made zero sense for them to be doing so at that point -- there likely would not have been a timeout. The game would have ended with some Wisky kid dribbling the last seconds away out by the timeline.

So there was no excuse for any of what came later. As if there ever could be.

Somewhere on the great celestial sideline, Woody's likely saying just that.