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Purple and pink?
Published: 1/20/2007 4:50 PM
Last Modified: 1/20/2007 4:50 PM

This is a confession: I never felt comfortable criticizing former University of Tulsa football coach Steve Kragthorpe.
One reason is because I think Kragthorpe stood for many of the right things. Another reason is because it seemed like the miraculous turnaround he engineered almost made him immune, or untouchable, in regard to criticism.
It isn't easy criticizing a fellow who took a laughing stock of a program and took it to three bowls in four years. Given opportunities to write columns about Kragthorpe and TU over the past couple of years, it seems like I almost always gave Kragthorpe benefit of the doubt because any negative I could think of paled in comparison to the overwhelming positives he brought to the city.
I think my outlook was shared by other media in Tulsa because, even in the wake of a late-season 2006 slide, the media still seemed to look on the bright side rather than point fingers at the coaching staff. Even if Kragthorpe had changed the school colors to purple and pink, some may have said "well, that's OK considering that he virtually saved the football program."
We respectfully disagreed in regard to his top-secret injury policy and I disagreed with his decision to make players off-limits after two losses at SMU (if you talk after wins, you should talk after defeats), but the job he did was top-notch. If I was an AD, I would have hired him -- and then told him the university had a policy that injuries would not be top secret. It's called having your cake and eating it, too.




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Tulsa World sports writer Jimmie Tramel is a former class president at Locust Grove High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern State University with a journalism degree and, while attending college, was sports editor of the Pryor Daily Times. He joined the Tulsa World on Oct. 17, 1989, the same day an earthquake struck the World Series. He is the OSU basketball beat writer and a columnist and feature writer during football season. In 2007, he wrote a book about Oklahoma State football with former Cowboy coach Pat Jones.

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