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USC's Pete Carroll is a great college football coach, maybe the best walking a sideline today, and the embodiment of what college football would like to be about, says MSNBC.com columnist Mike Celizic.

In the pros, you are ultimately judged on your won-lost record. Lose enough and you’re gone, no matter how great you were. In college, the judgment is based on winning, to be sure, but also on character and the contribution to the community that is a university. One reason is that the college game is so steeped in ritual and tradition and emotion, while the pro game is steeped in trophies.

NFL rivalries ebb and flow depending on the relative strengths of the teams. College rivalries are always incandescent. Army and Navy are near the bottom of the NCAA Division I-A pecking order, but even non-fans watch their annual game because of a welter of intangibles. No matter how good Ohio State and Michigan are, their annual game is played in an incandescent glow. But if the Giants and Cowboys are both in a down cycle, nobody cares.

In college, you recruit; in the NFL, you draft. Carroll may want the challenge of having total control of a professional team, but in reality the game controls you. It’s a 13-month-a-year job, with no time off to even celebrate the ultimate triumph of the Super Bowl. The unflinching constraints of the salary cap tell you who you can keep and who goes. The lottery luck of the draft dictates which players you can sign.

Carroll knows what it’s like to coach in the NFL. It didn’t work out well for him, neither with the Jets nor the Patriots. Like Lou Holtz before him, reality showed that he was simply too bright and bubbly for the professional game. The antics and speeches that college kids loved were seen as childish by the pros. In college, the players listened; in the pros, they laughed behind his back.

He may think he won’t make the same mistakes again, but to fulfill that promise to himself, he’d have to change who he is. To Carroll, football is fun. He can be more serious and businesslike if he wants, but he won’t be happy because he won’t be himself.

“Above all things, to thine own self be true,” was the advice Polonius gave his son, Laertes, in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” It was sage advice from the play’s most duplicitous character, an irony fully intended by the playwright.

It’s also good advice to Carroll and every one of us, even repeated by a sports columnist.

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