Pardee was an extraordinary football player and a good coach. He played three seasons for Bear Bryant at Texas A&M, where he survived Bryant’s notorious 1954 boot camp, a part of the coach’s brutal strategy to re-energize a once proud program.  That experience, in Junction, Tex., was chronicled by Jim Dent in the 1999 book “The Junction Boys.” Dent described the ordeal A&M players endured under Bryant, who tried to toughen what he considered a soft football team by putting it through grueling workouts in unbearable heat with no water breaks.  Pardee was one of 35 players — the Junction Boys — who survived the grueling 10 days.  We would like to think, in our enlightened era, that Bryant would be fired if he were to try those tactics today. But then we see a video in 2013 of Rice hurling basketballs at his Rutgers players, screaming homophobic slurs at them and aggressively putting his hands on them.  How far have we really come? More to the point: how far have we as fans sunk? Have we become numb to the by-any-means-necessary approach by Bryant and now by Rice?  The Rutgers episode raises troubling questions about whether variations of the Junction Boys imperative live on in the contemporary college sports arena, where young players still see the coach as the ultimate authority figure.  In a 2011 interview with the The Mineral Wells Index in Texas, Pardee explained his view of what Bryant was attempting to accomplish.  “Coach Bryant wanted to find out who wanted to pay the price to not only play football, but to win,” Pardee said.  How effective were Bryant’s tactics? In 1954, the boot camp season, A&M finished 1-9; the next year it improved to 7-2-1. Pardee was a captain on the 1956 team, which was 9-0-1. The N.C.A.A. declared Bryant’s 1956 team ineligible for a bowl game because of recruiting violations committed in 1955. He was 8-3 in 1957 before moving to Alabama.  Rice’s tactics yielded consistently dismal results. His Rutgers teams were 44-51 over all, including 15-16 this season. He was 16-38 in Big East play, including 5-13 this season.  What was striking about the Rutgers video were the reactions of the players. There appeared to be no resistance, no angry scowls. None of them had to be held back. They seemed resigned, anesthetized, to the tirades. By the time most players are 17 years old, screaming and yelling are as much a part of the game as wearing sneakers.  For many players, a college scholarship is the one great opportunity for a shot at a better life, an education they otherwise might not be able to afford or reach. In that case, what’s a little screaming — or in Pardee’s case, sprints in the heat — when opportunity hangs in the balance?  In the interview with the Mineral Wells newspaper, Pardee said that he never considered giving up at Bryant’s brutal camp. “I never thought about quitting,” he said. “If I did, where would I go, Christoval? Hey, I worked hard to get out of there,” he added, referring to the tiny Texas community from which he had come.  There is a razor-thin line between motivation and abuse, between tough tactics and bullying. Some episodes illustrating that line occur in high-profile arenas, but many take place out of view across the country.  In 1997 Bob Knight, then the basketball coach at Indiana, grabbed one of his players, Neil Reed, by the neck and pushed him backward in practice. Knight initially denied the accusation when Reed made it in 2000, but a videotape recorded the incident. Knight was fired six months later.  There are plenty of long-forgotten, borderline cases of abuses of power. In 1990 Duke was defeated badly by Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. Mike Krzyzewski, apparently angered by his team’s performance, held practice as soon as the team returned to campus. During this extra session, Grant Hill, the Blue Devils’ starting forward, broke his nose. Shortly afterward, delegates to the N.C.A.A. convention passed a regulation that prohibited practices on the day of a game. The rule was not aimed at Duke or at Krzyzewski but at curbing the unchecked power and influence wielded by college coaches.  Contemporary viewers can look at Bryant’s treatment of his players in 1954 through the prism of disbelief, wonderment or admiration. We can say Bryant’s actions were relics of a bygone era. Rice’s outrageous behavior suggests that, from Junction, Tex., to Piscataway, N.J., that era may still be upon us.
It’s easy to say Bear Bryant’s tactics in 1954 would be universally unaccepted today. Then we see how the Rutgers coach firing played out.