<p>Quoted in the New York Times story about the Yale football coach, who resigned after an investigation showed he had lied on his resume about a professional football career and about being a Rhodes scholar, one of the fine young men on the Eli squad offered this:</p>
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[quote]
I think there are a whole lot of people at this school that are overplaying the article about his Rhodes scholarship candidacy. I think thats a moot point, really. I think that doesnt really have anything to do with what kind of football coach he is. Hes a great guy and a great football coach, and hes the right person for the job at this school
<p>it seems he lied about a lot more than just the faux Rhodes interview:
"Williams, it turns out, also misrepresented his pro football credentials as part of his official Yale biography.</p>
<p>“He had asserted that he signed with the San Francisco 49ers as a free agent in 1993 and spent 1993 on the team’s roster as a linebacker. Both claims proved to be untrue. There is no mention of him in the team’s media guide under “all-time roster,” and when contacted by The Times about Williams’s claim that he had signed with the team as a free agent, a spokesman said the team’s accounting office had no record of ever issuing a W-2 form to Williams”</p>
<p>Lying about his football credentials is more than enough ground for dismissal from a Football program. Remember MIT’s admissions directors fuax resume?</p>
<p>Resume inflation got George O’ Leary dismissed as head football coach at Notre Dame. I can’t recall whether it was over a degree, or over letters he claimed to have won. Maybe both. He was dismissed about a week after he was hired. </p>
<p>Interestingly, in the book on Vince Lombardi ‘When Pride Mattered’ , the author spends some time talking about the fact that Lombardi’s “resume” as noted in the press at one point asserted that he had been an honor student. Apparently this was not true, but no one cared much about it, and its not clear that Lombardi himself made the claim.</p>
<p>I’m aware of a professor at a large institution who claims a letter in a particular sport which doesn’t show up in the records book of the school which awarded the letter. Its not related to his field of study, and he did letter in two other sports, so it seems a bit inconsequential. It does make me wonder about some of the other things on his CV, though.</p>
In a post about lying, you might want to be accurate about what he’s supposed to have lied about. In his resume, he said that he was a “candidate” for a Rhodes scholarship, and that he signed with a pro football team and was on the practice squad. The truth (apparently) was that his advisors at Stanford told him he was qualified to apply for a Rhodes but he never did, and that he went to a tryout weekend with the pro team but wasn’t signed. Essentially, both lies involved things that he claims he tried to get–but failed to get. As lies go, they’re pretty pathetic.</p>
<p>I was surprised that he survived the 2009 Harvard-Yale game, when he called for a fake punt at 4th and 22 on Yale’s 25-yard-line, with a 10-7 lead and two and a half minutes to go in the game. It was pretty clear at that point that he was no Rhodes Scholar.</p>
<p>“In 2001, O’Leary left Georgia Tech to take over as the head coach for the University of Notre Dame…inaccuracies were discovered in his published biographical sketch. In the biographical sketch, it stated that O’Leary had earned a master’s degree from “NYU-Stony Brook University,” a non-existent institution…he had taken only two courses at SUNY - Stony Brook, and never graduated…He also claimed that he had earned three letters in football at the University of New Hampshire, when the school claimed he had not even played in one game.”</p>