If Dolphins coach Joe Philbin didn’t know what was happening in his locker room, he should have.
Michigan State men’s basketball coach Tom Izzo explained on Friday’s edition of The Dan Patrick Show that Izzo relies on workers other than assistant coaches to keep an eye on the locker room.
“I think our trainer and our equipment men are my two pulse guys, even over my assistants,” Izzo said, via MLive.com. “And I’ll tell you why. When we’re up [in our office]) working and [the players] are down in the locker room, the trainer is there, the equipment man is there. They give me better pulse than even my staff.”
Izzo called the Dolphins’ situation “alarming,” but he pointed out that locker-room activities don’t always reflect normal life.
“We’ve tried to nip things in the bud,” Izzo said. “Players get in arguments with players. Sometimes it’s just ‘guys will be guys,’ sometimes it’s taken too far for a million different reasons. You do need to have a pulse on your team and that includes in the locker room, out in public and on the court.”
Philbin obviously didn’t, or the Jonathan Martin situation wouldn’t have exploded the way it did.