Sports movies starring inspirational coaches are such a Hollywood standard that they have practically become their own genre. But while the world is busy fawning over Coach Carter and telling you why Norman Dale from Hoosiers is the best coach of all time, nobody ever talks about the sports movie coaches who are less inspirational and more, you know, awful. But they’re out there and wouldn’t you know it, we found them just for you. Some of them are lousy because they are horrible jerks who ruin their players’ lives while others stink simply because they can’t coach. A few are just wildly inappropriate. But whatever their differences, the one thing they all have in common is that they are eight of the worst sports movie coaches of them all.
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8 Jackie Moon – ‘Semi Pro’
Player, owner, coach – Jackie Moon is a man of many trades. Unfortunately he isn’t good at any of them. As coach of the Flint Tropics, you get the sense that Jackie has never even seen a game of organized basketball. His team stinks, his players don’t respect him and he spends most of his time whoring around and gambling. Sure, that might have worked for Billy Martin, but Jackie is clearly in over his head. On the other hand, he’s still a better coach than Mike D’Antoni so maybe the Lakers need to give him a call. After all, Kobe could always use a good whoring partner.
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7 Jack Reilly – ‘The Mighty Ducks’
Sure he’s a successful coach – well, as successful as you can be as the coach of a pee-wee hockey team anyway, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that Coach Reilly is a tremendous asshole. He routinely manipulates his star players, breaks them down emotionally and then abandons them whenever they need him most. You know, sort of like Jimmy Johnson did when he coached the Cowboys. The only difference of course is that Jimmy was dealing with felons like Michael Irvin and Nate Newton while Coach Reilly was dealing with little kids. I mean, come on, the dude almost ruined poor Gordon Bombay’s life just because Gordon missed one goal. The man is a sociopath. Then again, from my experience this makes him only slightly less reprehensible than the average hockey dad.
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6 Kevin and Danny O’Shea – ‘Little Giants’
I included both of the O’Shea brothers here because honestly they are both pretty awful. Sure, Kevin aka Ed O’Neill aka Al Bundy is a perfectly competent football coach but he’s also a huge asshole. And sure, Danny aka Rick Moranis aka The Keymaster is a nice guy but he’s an awful football coach. But what really makes them both reprehensible coaches is that both cavalierly use their own children as well as the rest of the town’s kids to further their own petty bro feud. They cajole the kids into playing for one or the other, they force their own kids to join in and Kevin even basically whores out his own little daughter. Some family film. Like Coach Reilly, the depth of their involvement in pee-wee sports raises some serious red flags. These dudes should be on a watch list somewhere, not lauded as great coaches or role models.
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5 Ed Gennero – ‘Necessary Roughness’
We’re told over and over again what a great coach Ed Gennero is, but really, do we ever get to see it? I mean, the dude is reduced to taking over the reins of an upstart football program coming off of the NCAA death penalty so how good could he really be? And then that team proceeds to go out and lose every single game he coaches. But wait, you say, they won the last one. That’s right, they did, and that’s the biggest point in my argument’s favor because they won that last game only after Coach Gennero ended up in the hospital and his longtime assistant and friend, Coach Rig, had to take over. And the only reason the team even got to that point is because Scott Bakula and Sinbad rallied the boys and basically coached themselves, all while Gennero was riding Bakula’s ass and bitching him out for getting into bar fights – bar fights, I might add, which were just the thing that caused the whole team to bond in the first place. What a fraud.
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4 Coach Nickerson – ‘All the Right Moves’
Another spectacular asshole, Coach Nickerson sets the plot of All the Right Moves in motion by bitching out a player in the locker room for fumbling, calling him a quitter, which causes Tom Cruise to rebel against his own coach and tell him he was the quitter, leading to Nickerson kicking his best player off the team. Really great locker room control there, coach. This then leads to the town losing its shit and vandalizing Nickerson’s house. You know you’re a lousy coach when high school fans hate you so much that they commit crimes against you. So Nickerson does the typical horrible coach thing and devotes all his time to blackballing Tom Cruise from getting a college scholarship. Sure, at the end of the movie Nickerson learns his lesson and ends up coaching Tom Cruise in college but then again Tom Cruise ended up devoting himself to L. Run Hubbard and Xenu so clearly something went wrong there too.
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3 Mr. Miyagi and John Kreese – ‘The Karate Kid’
Sure, Kreese is the obvious choice here. I mean, he was a notorious asshole who drove his students so hard that they eventually snapped and ended up rebelling against him while he melted down in the parking lot and tried to kill Miyagi, (by the way, what is up with all these insane coaches of teenagers and little kids?) but we shouldn’t overlook Miyagi himself here either. Sure, he taught Daniel-San karate and how to stand up for himself, but at what cost? His relationship with young Daniel is totally inappropriate – we’ve all made the wax on/whacks off joke about the two of them and everyone in the world has made fun of Miyagi “massaging” Daniel back to life – and someone from protective services should have stepped in the moment Miyagi took Daniel-San as his plus one back to Okinawa to meet the family. Plus, let’s not forget that he beat the shit out of a bunch of teenage boys. Put it all together and it’s clear that neither one of these dudes should be allowed to work with minors.
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2 Coach Kilmer – ‘Varsity Blues’
This dude is such a jerk that his own team throws him out of the locker room and decides to coach themselves in the big game at the end of the movie. Sure, the dude apparently had a lot of success as a high school coach – gee another petty tyrant of teenagers, what a shock – but short of pulling a Sandusky or a Paterno, nothing is more disgraceful or legacy destroying than your own team telling you to go screw because you’re such a horrible human being. No wonder Angelina Jolie won’t talk to him or let him see his grandkids. She saw what he did to Dawson.
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1 Coach Klein – ‘The Waterboy’
This poor fool is the lousiest coach in football (or foosball as Mama Boucher would say) history. For starters, he’s certifiably insane. Second, his team is the worst collection of losers and screw-ups that the college football world has ever seen – well, except for any Lane Kiffin coached team but let’s not go there for the sake of Spags. Sure, eventually the team catches fire but that’s only because Klein shamelessly uses a retarded water boy, manipulating the poor son of a bitch into giving into his vilest base instincts, like some kind of animal, just because he’s too shitty a coach to win the right way. Shame on you, Coach Klein. For both your incompetence on the field and for your humanitarian abuses off of it, I have no choice but to place you here at number one and declare you the worst sports movie coach of them all.
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