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O'Leary revives career
By David R. Henry
The home of Disney World, Orlando, Fla., is full of fantasy and imagination. However, the best storyteller in town might not be Walt Disney himself, but rather the head coach of Central Florida, George O'Leary.
Entering his fourth season at Central Florida, who hosts Texas on Saturday, O'Leary will be forever haunted by a couple of fibs on his resume that were on there for years and didn't get uncovered until five days after Notre Dame hired him to be their new head coach in 2001. After seven seasons at Georgia Tech with a 52-33 overall record plus winning the national coach of the year award in 2000, the Irish Catholic O'Leary appeared to be the perfect fit for Notre Dame. It was not to be. O'Leary put on his resume that he was a three-year letterman on the football team at New Hampshire and then received a master's degree in physical education from New York University. When the background check came out, it revealed that O'Leary did not play a down of college football in his life, and was a student at NYU. He never got his master's degree. O'Leary admitted he put the inaccuracies on his resume earlier in his career and never went back and changed them. He resigned five days after being hired. "Due to a selfish and thoughtless act many years ago, I have personally embarrassed Notre Dame, its alumni and fans," O'Leary said in a statement released after the incident. UT communications studies professor Mark Knapp, an established researcher in lying and deception, says that resume-checking firms operate on the assumption that about 25 percent of the resumes they check will have some major representation in them, the most frequent being lies about education, particularly degrees obtained, schools attended and courses taken. "Some have argued that O'Leary's punishment was too severe," Knapp said. "After all, he was a successful coach, and the falsification on his resume took place many years ago and he just forgot to remove it. The other side of that issue, however, is that O'Leary got some of the jobs that allowed him to become a successful coach with his false resume, so there is always the possibility that he was chosen for a job over a person who had a truthful resume." The Texan strives to present all information fairly, accurately and completely.
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