A CLEAR VIEW OF NEHLEN`S PIQUE

Despite what the poet said, living on the road does not really keep you free and clean, but it does remind you that life is interesting, as long as the road you are on is not the interstate.

Interstates, like airports, are all alike, and like airports, they have little connection with the real lives of real people. Off the interstates lies America in all its variety, the base as well as the noble, and driving across a third of it on real highways tends to invigorate the soul.

If, for instance, one were to zip through West Virginia on the interstate, or zoom over it by jet, either of which would be quicker than U.S. Hwy. 50, one might never have learned of Nehlen`s pique.

This is not an Appalachian mountaintop. Don Nehlen is the head coach of the University of West Virginia`s football team, the one that went 11-0 last season until it met Notre Dame in the Whatever-it-was Bowl, losing that game and the nonexistent-but-all-important national championship all in one afternoon.

Yes, that was last January. But the National Football League draft was just the other day, and eight seniors from the Mountaineer squad were chosen, as many as had ever been chosen before, but not enough to suit the coach.

”It just makes me sick,” Nehlan told the Dominion Post in Morgantown, where the university is located. The cause of his indisposition was the conviction that even more of his players should have been drafted.

What is it about coaches, especially football coaches, which impels them toward petulance? Yes, a coach should be loyal to his players as an officer should stick up for his men. But it is possible to demonstrate such loyalty without appearing to be a bitter adolescent.

But then, coaches, too, have their problems, and some of those problems are related to the hypersensitivity of others. Players, for instance. Consider the case of Fred Akers, the football coach at Purdue, who thought he had himself a pretty good quarterback for the next few years, what with starter Brian Fox returning as a sophomore.

Akers also decided to switch to an offense based on the quarterback rolling out instead of dropping back, NFL-style. Just why he so decided is unclear, but he is the coach, and desgigning strategies is part of a coach`s job.

According to Akers, the change seemed to suit Fox just fine. The coach said his young quarterback was having a great spring practice.

Then he quit. ”I feel I can realize my potential better in a pro-style, dropback offense,” said Fox, announcing he would transfer.

Realize his potential? What is he, a quarterback or a poet? Was there not a time when the worst we could expect from an athlete in such a situation was an awful cliche, such as: ”I`ll do anything to help the team,” or ”Coach knows best.” Granted, coach does not always know best, and student challenges to authority should be encouraged (though if nothing else Fox`s decision did make clear that ”student” is not one of the words to describe his situation).

But realize his potential? Not long ago, the only men on college campuses who spoke that way wore turtleneck shirts even in summertime and carried around well-fingered copies of novels by Djuna Barnes or Alexander Trocchi or some such. Woe betide the people whose quarterbacks begin to speak like aesthetes.

Nor is Akers the only coach in the state of Indiana who deserves some sympathy. Ron Felling and Joby Wright, assistant basketball coaches at the University of Indiana, were accused last week of violating an NCAA recruiting rule. The rule, 13.1.15.1 just in case you doubted that the NCAA is any simpler than the Securities and Exchange Commission, forbids ”recruiting contact” with a prospect during or just before ”any athletics competiton in which the prospect is a participant.” Felling and Wright were accused of having some kind of contact, recruiting or otherwise, with Lawrence Funderburke, a 6-foot-8-inch senior from Columbus, Ohio, during a high school basketball tournament last month in Lexington, Ky.

Okay. Rules are rules, and if the coaches broke this one they should be disciplined for it. But the accusation comes not from the NCAA but from a Lexington television station, which could say with certainty only that the two coaches talked to the player, which itself may or may not have been a violation.

Besides, there are violations, and then there are violations. This one comes under the heading of a technicality. The regular high school basketball season was long over for Funderburke, who has since legally and properly signed a letter of intent to attend Indiana. No one even hinted that the coaches passed brown envelopes stuffed with cash, altered SAT scores or offered the player`s mother a job.

It`s kind of like the big scandal at the University of Maryland, where basketball coach Bob Wade has acknowledged that members of his staff provided transportation to a recruit but denied with great gusto charges that members of his team had used the coaches` courtesy cars.

Which raises this cosmic question: Why do coaches need courtesy cars?