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Jack Parker, NCAA hockey’s fiercest advocate, retiring after 40 seasons at Boston U

Neate Sager

The code dictates recognizing an adversary who fought well, although it's hard to imagine the heads of all three Canadian major junior leagues sending Boston University coach Jack Parker a card to congratulate him on his upcoming retirement.

Attention must be paid, though. Parker fought a good fight — the last thing this post intends to do is kick up another tiresome CHL vs. NCAA debate — as one of the most outspoken advocates for playing college hockey instead of major junior.

Being from a generation that predated political correctness does not diminish that in the slightest. Coaches today at every level of sport are steeped in spin control. They buff the rough edges off the message, mostly. They don't say the only reason to play in the CHL is if "you’re real dumb or you don’t want to go to school at all and want nothing to do with school, or you're an 18 year-old phenom that is going to be in the NHL at 19" like Parker infamously did last season when Charlie Coyle, who just made it up to the NHL's Minnesota Wild at age 20, left BU to play for the Quebec League's Saint John Sea Dogs. That doesn't diminish a great's legacy.

If anything, now that Parker's retiring, it could be spun off as part of his charm. He had a sense of humour, something people in hockey are seldom accused of displaying too often. He even did that right after winning his last NCAA title in 2009.

There is the complicating matter of Parker retiring at the end of a season that dawned with a media maelstrom spawned by a Boston University "study which found a 'culture of sexual entitlement' surrounding the team. The report was commissioned after two BU players were charged with sexual assault in separate incidents three months apart. Parker was stripped of his title of executive athletic director after the details came to light."

That was serious, but you have to consider the place of the main sport at a Division I school. There have always been coaches who have been so exalted, and schools so craving success that there is willful blindness to to bad behaviour by entitled 18- to 22-year-olds, that things can get out of hand. Long, long before people suggested Joe Paterno's statue at Penn State should be turned toward the wall to depict JoePa looking the other way, others went on on sour notes. See Bobby Knight at Indiana. Or Woody Hayes, perhaps the most misunderstood coach of all time, at Ohio State. With Parker, the proof is in the players he had across four decades.

That should be top-of-mind for people in the CHL and NCAA spheres. Parker wasn't the one who pressed the red button that was the NCAA's decision three decades ego to ban former major junior players, but he seemed to relish his place in the battle.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet. Please address any questions, comments or concerns to btnblog@yahoo.ca.