A stubbed toe, paper cut, nagging headache or coffee stain. Any one of these things has the unique power to turn a bad day into a worse one, or a relatively sane person into a nutbar.

It’s with this principle that we can look at coaches and give them a break. “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” the saying goes, and it’s with a compassionate view that we can look at a red-faced, hoarse-voiced steaming coach and shrug our shoulders.

A pissed off coach is a part of sports – and I, for one, am enamored with it.

Perhaps it’s because I never took my high school coaches too seriously, but when I see a coach like Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy last weekend get all worked up on camera, I can’t help myself but think “Yeah, you tell ’em man!” (Although I don’t fully agree with what Gundy did, but more on that later).

The best angry coach in the litter has to be former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka – the mustached man who was once famously photographed giving Bears’ fans a gesture that would make mothers wince. The sideline presence known for collaring his players and a detest for referees, the flattop-cut man was adored by Chicago so much that he is simply known as “Da Coach,” even after this stunt.

There are countless other such coaches too, each bringing his or her own qualities in front of the camera. Sometimes they’re nail-bitingly awful, like former Arizona Cardinals coach Dennis Green’s meltdown after a Monday night loss to the Chicago Bears a year ago. The former leader of the red-birds, whose emphatic yell “They are who we thought they were!” can be seen in Coors Light commercials to this day, has since left the desert. Thankfully, everyone with a computer can relive what is arguably the most well-known clip of coach Green’s Arizona career.

Sometimes fans can feel an eruption coming. You don’t need to be a seismologist to predict that when a manager bolts onto the field after a close call at first base, inevitably there will be some chest-bumping, close-talking and finger-pointing.

On the opposite side are the coaches that seem too calm. They can never be seen yelling, but they aren’t seen smiling very often either.

Northeastern’s head football coach Rocky Hager is good at this. The flatlander from Fargo seems like the nicest coach around, always there for a good quote and more than happy to talk about his squad. While his motivation technique geared toward his players might be different, his cool, collective manner with the pen-jockeys of sports media is more than inviting.

It isn’t that I get my jollies by watching old men scream and yell; rather, it’s the passion of them that signifies the importance of the moment. If sports is nothing more than a competition between two opponents, what better symbolizes that struggle than a screaming, berating coach?

What’s unfortunate, however, is when the berating makes every sports fan wince. This causes flashes of Texas Tech coach Bobby Knight to come to mind more often than not. This is an example of not being cool, a long way off from the niceties of Hager and the intensity of Ditka. Embarrassing comes to mind more than any other word, and if stories of your head coach are appearing on 60 Minutes more often than SportsCenter (as was the case for Knight during investigations of physical abuse by one of his former players), then perhaps it’s time to rethink who is roaming the sidelines.

But it’s the in-game arguing that I enjoy so much, not the outside stuff. For Gundy, verbally berating a media member is an odd thing to do.

Most of the time, the lesson to college football quarterbacks from coaches concerning the media is to let it go, don’t worry about it and focus on your game. Writers are there to write (obviously), and columnists criticize. It’s their job.

What Gundy did, dramatically attack the credibility of a newspaper columnist, seems to be akin to a comedian walking into someone else’s job and booing them. It was out of the ordinary, and not the type of fire I enjoy watching from a coach.

Fire is usually a good thing, it just has to be the right type. And if I have any advice to depart, it’s this: take a clue from some coaches, be cool when you have to and livid when the time calls for it.

Oh, and one last thing, make sure your facts are correct.

– Matt Foster can be reached at [email protected].