Yes and no. I think pretty much everyone who has played serious competitive sports has not been aligned on the side of 'keep everyone happy and give them all a trophy', nor are the people running companies, or managing a staff, or teaching. At some point in the development of children, they need to learn the distinction between participation and excellence, between effort and success. They need to understand there is such a thing as failure, and how to respond to it. And that every day doesn't end with a present. The extension of the everyone gets a trophy theory is that everyone gets an A in math, and everyone gets a raise and promotion each year - and we all know that isn't happening. In education we have experimented with Pass/Fail grading and it hasn't worked really well, and various places and countries have experimented with everyone gets a job and that hasn't worked very well either. We are like rats in a maze, we need the piece of cheese at the end to motivate us to learn and succeed.
We can argue about the age at which distinctions get made and we seem as a society to be pushing the point further up in age. And part of it may have to do with a societal issue that is putting more of the 'nurturing' of children onto extra-familial groups because we recognize that a lot of the children are not getting the nurturing they need within the familial group. (Some will argue that it is an increasing failure of the 'family', but I think it was always an issue, just never recognized.) Family isn't providing the 'its OK, here's what we do now' support so schools and athletics and _____ are being tasked with that job.
And I don't have a problem with Jeff's rant, and I don't have a problem with his recruits nor does he really. He is frustrated just like Geno was a few days ago, and countless other coaches have been in the past. And they all recognize that the recruits they are getting today have a different mental make-up than they did ten and twenty years ago. They may attribute it to slightly different things - Jeff to participation trophies, Geno to AAU expansion, ____ to HS coaching, _____ to parents, _____ to too many individual trainers - but they are all getting at something fundamentally different in preparation, expectations, and development of college age athletes. To ignore the fairly universally expressed opinions because one person does it with humor and another with anger or frustration is probably not a good idea. And it isn't just athletes and their coaches, but listen to job recruiters, and college professors, and a host of others who deal with people entering a new phase of their lives - almost all complain about similar changes. And the statisticians get involved as well - math scores, writing scores, literacy rates tell similar kinds of stories at a national level of statistics.
We all avidly follow every 'scandals' with athletic programs where coaches are accused of improprieties in the way they treat their athletes, and every off-season there seem to be more long term successful coaches being caught up in them - some are obviously serious, but many of them come down to some team members being unhappy and some being fiercely supportive with most of the alum of the program coming down on the coach's side. And my feeling is that this is another symptom of the above issue - good athletes can get to college without ever having failed, and they don't know how to deal with being told by a college coach that they are failing, so they blame the coach and they convince a few of their teammates that is why they aren't starring as well. (I am definitely not talking about a Tyler Summitt or Mike Rice at Rutgers situation, but more the Bill Gibbons kind of thing at Holly Cross.)
FYI We can argue about the quality of coaches like JPM or Mitchell at KY and the way them seem to drive off talent or their public persona, but their players leave because of basic coaching issues and not it appears for some impropriety and I think their situations are different.
But drop the ACC.
