Football coach Steve Spurrier is catching a lot of flak from critics about the quality of his South Carolina football team.
Some say the game has passed him by or that he doesn't care about defense. Many want him fired. But can we take one low point in the coach's career and conclude that he's a failure?
Steve Spurrier knows as much about football today as he did five years ago or 10 years ago.
In a nutshell, an excellent coach with a great system doesn't win every game. In fact, sometimes he might even have a losing season.
The same can be said for the Violence Reduction Initiative.
The recent spike in violence likely has nothing to do with the program. The program is simply that - a concerted effort to manage a complex issue.
We have programs to help people quit smoking, to lose weight, to teach people new skills. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. What matters is fidelity to the goal on behalf of all agents involved in the process.
In the case of violence, that includes the police department, the justice system, the economic development experts, educators from preschool through universities, politicians, churches, community advocates, parents and so on.
Full disclosure, I was involved in authoring the original Comprehensive Gang Assessment. In that report, we stated: "Many of the challenges facing the city have formed, solidified, and hardened over multiple generations. The comprehensive gang assessment does not provide any silver bullets or magic solutions to solve the gang problem because there are none."
If you expect any program to erase decades of community neglect and magically transform rough neighborhoods into Mayberry, you don't understand programs.
Assume that over the last 10 years you've put on an extra 30 pounds. What do you do? Well, you can continue business as usual or you can implement a plan. You can hire a personal trainer, you can buy P-90X, or you can do it the old-fashioned way: change your diet and start exercising on your own.
Each of these approaches these programs can be successful if you implement it with fidelity. Whether you sweat to a 60-minute exercise video six times a week or pound the pavement for 60 minutes a day five days a week, you'll eventually lose weight. Some weeks you will lose a pound or two and some weeks you might gain weight. The key is to stick to the program with fidelity.
"Lose weight fast" schemes appeal to an instant gratification society. However, folks who have gone through the arduous process of losing a lot of weight and keeping it off will tell you that it required patience, vigilance and permanent lifestyle changes. Yo-yo dieters typically end up worse than they started - disillusioned and more hopeless.
Part of the problem of managing complex public policy or public safety issues is that political leaders tend to oversell their programs. Whether it's the governor and education or the mayor and violence reduction, elected officials want to show that their program works - and can work fast.
Voters and residents don't want to hear leaders say "this is going to take a long time and a concerted effort by all of us."
Losing the weight - slowing the violence - is one thing. Keeping it off is the goal, and that takes life-long effort.
As Coach Spurrier can tell you, even good coaches have bad seasons. I bet Butch Jones isn't ready to write off Spurrier just yet.
Ken Chilton is assistant professor of public administration at Tennessee State University.