Northwestern fired Mick McCall after he became the scapegoat for the offense's turn to avant-garde pukeishness. I have written before about fans' bizarre fixation on coordinators earlier, but the offense has been stagnant for many years and Pat Fitzgerald is not going anywhere so McCall got the boot. This move meant Northwestern was about to become exposed to a coaching search, something that has not happened for the program in a dozen years. In a sport that can be characterized by the insane turnover of coaches-- a relentless migration of the last people in America named "Walt,"-- Northwestern's coaching staff resembled tenured faculty. I can't say to what extent this helped or hindered the Wildcats when it came to stability versus a sclerotic status quo, but I do know that Northwestern has not hired a coach or coordinator since 2008, and therefore has missed out on the blooming of the college football coach search into its gloriously deranged final form in the twitter age.
College football coaching searches bring out the best in college football-- unsourced rumors, feuding boosters, flight tracking software, message board "insiders," an infinite network of savvy people on the internet insisting that Chip "Boomer" McRench is using the open job to secure a lucrative extension but pay close attention to the buyout situation with Bear Chowderston, and an unending roster of maniacs and weirdos who get these jobs even though they may have been caught in a morally compromising situation involving a burner phone and either an ATV or a fishing boat.
College football fans scan the skies for Coaching News
College football coaching searches harness an undeniably appealing goofiness. People tracking private planes to divine coaching hires is inherently funny, the innuendos and double crosses are funny, and the idea of fans demanding a coach firing by hiring an airplane to fly a banner over the stadium with that message is so profoundly ridiculous that it makes me giddy. But once you give yourself over to the ins and outs of this insane sport, the contours of the depravity and skulduggery get even more rewarding. It is nearly impossible to explain to someone who does not follow college football, concisely why Lane Kiffin, for example, is funny. Or to explain the whole deal with Greg Schiano or the Bobby Petrino saga, or the complex circumstances involving Hugh Freeze, the University of Mississippi, and Houston Nutt other than the fact that college football employs people literally named "Hugh Freeze" and "Houston Nutt."
In an earlier age, Bobby Petrino would have been known as "Col. H. Robert
Petrino," and he would have claimed to invented a game that was far more
popular than football as you can see from these Testimonials from Townships
of West Brunk and Potter's Grove about the Healthful Benefits and Manful
Discipline it provides to Young Men and you can get started playing once
you place a small deposit for the Numerous Equipments and Apparatus and
coaches providing Expert Instruction that are currently stalled on a freight car
because of Routine Track Maintenance, you know how these things go,
but I do require that check now because the town next door is very interested.
One of the weirdest things about college football is that it is the closest thing we have to a government-run sports league with the vast majority of teams part of state-run universities beholden to legislatures and taxpayers, but for some reason the operations of football teams have been completely outsourced to wealthy boosters all named Theophrastus "Bud" Hamdamper who made their fortunes as early investors in truck nutz and now spend all of their time in a private box in a college football stadium and have gotten a special law through the legislature that allows them and only them to celebrate touchdowns by shooting revolvers through the ceiling. These people are allowed to hold enormous amounts of power over college football teams and all scheme against each other in coach searches that result in them having someone drive them in a motorcycle sidecar to through the quietest university library they can find so they can bellow "I TOLD THAT ASSHOLE I'VE GOT HIS GODDAMN BUYOUT RIGHT HERE. YEAH. YEAH, I WAS POINTING TO IT. UH HUH THAT'S RIGHT. THE BALL SACK" into a cellphone.
College football coaches inspire such lunacy because they hold a crazy amount of power in the sport. Their most important job involves traveling the country and convincing teenagers to play for them for free; the difference between millions of dollars, job security, a lineup of lucrative opportunities to stiffly appear in a local car dealership commercial and say "Vance Grabaznick's Dodge and Chevrolet Will Make Your New Car a Touchdown" is often times whether or not he can get a 350 pound seventeen year-old to volunteer to get screamed at by him in a maniacal blocking-sled reverie. Coaches hire their staffs, beg boosters to build them Advanced Performance Facilities where strength coaches can more effectively beef up their players by screaming at them through heads held up through a network of veins that look like jungle overgrowth reclaiming what used to be a neck. And most of them can expect to be fired within a few years until they resurface at another press conference grasping another football helmet.
One thing that has changed about sports leagues in the last decade has been the growth of attention on ancillary bullshit around the sport. The NBA has leaned into its reputation as the preferred league for online intrigues, where stars are constantly joking, feuding, and portending seismic roster upheavals by posting the auspicious Eyeballs Emoji. Football has turned its entire drafting process into a weeklong carnival, and every couple of years has a scandal where the Patriots attempt a minor Football Watergate. None of these can rival the ludicrous drama of the college football coaching search soap opera. This is because everything about college football itself is a psychotic fever dream, a sport with the structural aesthetic of a bag of money with a dollar sign on it illicitly passing through people's hands, where the entire edifice of goateed scream-mongers and pink-faced moneymen and university bureaucrats who spend all of their time wielding fake shovels at ceremonial ground-breakings, have all wrought this ludicrous Rube Goldberg contraption funneling millions of dollars to this rotating cast of squareheaded Football Guys all to keep a few scraps from falling to the unpaid players who are responsible for all of it.
One of the weirdest things about college football is that it is the closest thing we have to a government-run sports league with the vast majority of teams part of state-run universities beholden to legislatures and taxpayers, but for some reason the operations of football teams have been completely outsourced to wealthy boosters all named Theophrastus "Bud" Hamdamper who made their fortunes as early investors in truck nutz and now spend all of their time in a private box in a college football stadium and have gotten a special law through the legislature that allows them and only them to celebrate touchdowns by shooting revolvers through the ceiling. These people are allowed to hold enormous amounts of power over college football teams and all scheme against each other in coach searches that result in them having someone drive them in a motorcycle sidecar to through the quietest university library they can find so they can bellow "I TOLD THAT ASSHOLE I'VE GOT HIS GODDAMN BUYOUT RIGHT HERE. YEAH. YEAH, I WAS POINTING TO IT. UH HUH THAT'S RIGHT. THE BALL SACK" into a cellphone.
College football coaches inspire such lunacy because they hold a crazy amount of power in the sport. Their most important job involves traveling the country and convincing teenagers to play for them for free; the difference between millions of dollars, job security, a lineup of lucrative opportunities to stiffly appear in a local car dealership commercial and say "Vance Grabaznick's Dodge and Chevrolet Will Make Your New Car a Touchdown" is often times whether or not he can get a 350 pound seventeen year-old to volunteer to get screamed at by him in a maniacal blocking-sled reverie. Coaches hire their staffs, beg boosters to build them Advanced Performance Facilities where strength coaches can more effectively beef up their players by screaming at them through heads held up through a network of veins that look like jungle overgrowth reclaiming what used to be a neck. And most of them can expect to be fired within a few years until they resurface at another press conference grasping another football helmet.
One thing that has changed about sports leagues in the last decade has been the growth of attention on ancillary bullshit around the sport. The NBA has leaned into its reputation as the preferred league for online intrigues, where stars are constantly joking, feuding, and portending seismic roster upheavals by posting the auspicious Eyeballs Emoji. Football has turned its entire drafting process into a weeklong carnival, and every couple of years has a scandal where the Patriots attempt a minor Football Watergate. None of these can rival the ludicrous drama of the college football coaching search soap opera. This is because everything about college football itself is a psychotic fever dream, a sport with the structural aesthetic of a bag of money with a dollar sign on it illicitly passing through people's hands, where the entire edifice of goateed scream-mongers and pink-faced moneymen and university bureaucrats who spend all of their time wielding fake shovels at ceremonial ground-breakings, have all wrought this ludicrous Rube Goldberg contraption funneling millions of dollars to this rotating cast of squareheaded Football Guys all to keep a few scraps from falling to the unpaid players who are responsible for all of it.
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