10 Coaching Meltdowns That Went Completely Off the Rails

Coaching is a job that runs on pressure. A career can hang on a handful of plays, and it all happens in front of cameras and stadiums packed full of people. Most of the time, coaches keep the lid on. But every so often, they explode.

What follows are ten moments when the lid came all the way off. Some were shouting matches with the press. Others got more physical and even led to the end of coaching careers. Fans are still talking about these decades later, usually with a smile on their faces. Here are the 10 meltdowns that earned their place in the highlight reel.

Indiana hosted Purdue on February 23, 1985, and the Hoosiers barely got five minutes into the game before being whistled for six fouls. Bobby Knight, never a patient man, could take no more. Following a technical foul and with Steve Reid from Purdue set to make the shot, Knight picked up a red plastic chair from his team's bench and flung it across the court. It skidded past the free-throw line as jaws dropped all over Assembly Hall.

Knight was naturally tossed from the game, but the strange part is how the crowd reacted. Indiana fans gave him a standing ovation on his way out, chanting his name. He later joked on David Letterman's talk show that he was merely providing a place for a little old lady to rest. Four decades later, the chair has become an Indiana legend, with more than one person saying they own the real one.

This one ended with Hayes getting fired. At the time of the Gator Bowl on December 29, 1978, Ohio State was losing 17-15, with two minutes left in the game. The Buckeyes were driving when Clemson linebacker Charlie Bauman intercepted a pass. As he was running out of bounds near Ohio State's bench, the 65-year-old Hayes grabbed him and threw a punch. He then struck his own guard, Ken Fritz, who was trying to prevent things from escalating further.

Ohio State fired him the next day. He didn’t even apologize, and when Hayes called Bauman a few weeks later, he didn’t apologize then either. Instead, according to Bauman, Hayes only wanted to know what type of defense that Clemson was playing.

During Monday Night Football on October 16, 2006, the Arizona Cardinals squandered a twenty-point lead and lost to the Chicago Bears 24-23. Dennis Green went into his post-game press conference already simmering and, once the questions started, he erupted.

"They are who we thought they were! And we let 'em off the hook!" he bellowed before whacking the microphone and storming off. The clip became a catchphrase and then a meme. It was even turned into an insurance commercial. Green won a lot of football games in his career as a football coach, but for many people, this thirty-second tirade is the first thing they think of.

The Cubs were off to a poor start with an overall record of 5-14 after losing a tough game to the Los Angeles Dodgers at home on April 29, 1983. The fans who showed up booed them for it.
Lee Elia didn’t take it well. In a post-game rage rant that would go down as one of the most famous in baseball lore, Elia raged at the approximately 9,000 fans present there, using very colorful words and telling them to get real jobs and find out what real work felt like.

The rant went on and on. His speech has so many curse words that the cleaned-up version barely conveys the original message. It was a sustained, furious monologue against his own paying customers. He kept his job for a few more months, but the speech outlived his tenure by decades.

Tennis is a lonely sport. There's no bench to yell at and no assistant to blame, just a player and an umpire under a whole lot of tension. Since tennis doesn't have coaches on the sideline to lose their cool, McEnroe had to do it himself. During his match against Tom Gullikson, his fellow American, in the opening round of Wimbledon in 1981, John McEnroe argued about a particular line call.

"You cannot be serious!" he bellowed at the umpire. "That ball was on the line! Chalk flew up!" This became the famous statement he is known for, so much so that he even gave the same name to his autobiography. His temper was a defining feature of his career too, and the British press had nicknamed him "Superbrat" early on. Still, this was the eruption that outlasted them all.

After Oklahoma State beat Texas Tech on September 22, 2007, Mike Gundy entered his press conference with an article from the local newspaper that was critical of one of his players, Bobby Reid. Rather than shrugging off the criticism, Gundy began defending the quarterback and, waving the paper, launched into a rant that gave birth to the quote that defines him, "I'm a man! I'm 40!"

Fans were ecstatic back then as they witnessed a coach putting his reputation behind one of his players. The video went viral and helped establish Gundy as a national character. There is, however, a back story behind this rant. Reid reportedly felt the whole thing was more about Gundy's image than his own, and he eventually left the program feeling let down rather than protected. What looked like loyalty in the moment reads a little differently now, which somehow makes the rant stick even harder.

Say the word "playoffs" in a high-pitched voice around any NFL fan and see how they react. That’s the legacy of Jim Mora, whose Indianapolis Colts had just been beaten 40-21 by the 49ers on November 25, 2001, with Peyton Manning throwing four interceptions. Mora began his press conference with an angry tirade about the turnovers, calling it disgraceful. But a journalist then asked whether the team could still make the playoffs.

"Playoffs?!" screamed Mora, raising one eyebrow in disbelief as his face contorted in shock. "Don't talk about playoffs! You kidding me? Playoffs? I just hope we can win a game!" The way he said it makes it memorable. Mora tried to convince people that it wasn’t a rant but an honest reply to a question for years. Nobody believes him. The man won 125 NFL games, and he is famous for eight seconds of pure exasperation.

No other manager ever challenged an umpire quite like Lou Piniella. "Sweet Lou" turned the ejection into an art form, and his arguments always included props. The standard Piniella routine always began with a bad call against him, from which point he would storm out of the dugout, kick dirt, throw his cap, and, for the grand finale, pull up a base and throw it.

The base toss became Piniella's trademark move, and he perfected it over his entire managerial career, each one a little masterpiece of controlled chaos. Piniella was aware of the performance aspect of what he was doing. He was putting on a show as much as blowing his top, and he was performing brilliantly.

Long before instant replay, Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver declared his lifelong war against the umpires during his tenure on the bench. Weaver got tossed roughly 95 times in his career, always in style. He would get in the umpires' faces, putting his hat backwards to get even closer without touching them.

On one occasion, he ripped up a rule book on the field during an argument. The temper tantrums were regular for Weaver, and he did it so impressively that his classic episodes are still passed around and watched to this day. He's in the Hall of Fame as a manager, but for many fans, his antics became the lasting image.

Jim Playfair is proof that the minor leagues can produce big-league fury. In March 2010, during an American Hockey League game between the Abbotsford Heat and the Hamilton Bulldogs, Jim Playfair, the head coach of the Heat, found out that one of his players had been thrown out of the game. His response was hard to believe if you hadn’t seen it.

Jim Playfair went to the nearest hockey stick and smashed it against the boards until it splintered. He then strips off his suit jacket as if he were going to turn into the Incredible Hulk himself, climbs back onto the bench, breaks a second hockey stick, and begins sharing his thoughts with the referees.

Playfair's players have said that this was totally unlike him, a coach they'd always known to be level-headed. As for Playfair himself, he shrugged it off afterward, not really offering any kind of explanation for this outburst. The video became an instant internet sensation, and it's easy to see why.