The Side Line

When team owners get impatient, everyone loses. First and foremost, the coach usually loses his job. The players lose their leader, a man they have trained under for at least one offseason, and looked to for answers when they had questions. Finally, the fans generally lose most of all, because they are the ones paying, not getting paid, to watch the poor product on the field.

I understand the argument that sometimes you just need to make a change. Fine, then make changes. Lower ticket prices if your team is losing. Work with the players and coaches to find out what would help them perform better. Listen to your fans, find out what they want the franchise to do.

The midseason firing of a coach by an owner is equivalent to a kid getting a Christmas gift they just had to have, then getting tired of it and exchanging it a month later for another model. Professional sports owners are nearly impossible to please, a character they all share, so if a team starts losing, they start to get upset, like the kid with the toy gets upset when it breaks.

My opinion is that when an owner chooses a coach, he is picking his guy, the man he wants leading his team, and therefore should support him through tough times, even if there is a whole season full ahead. Take your shots, lick your wounds, and decide what to do in the offseason. If the decision is to let the coach go, the owner should do it with class and take the blame. After all, he chose the coach as a good fit, and for whatever reason, it didn’t work out. Pick a new guy, and start again next season.

I have chosen not to name specific owners here, but if you know football, you have some idea of the guys I’m talking about. They believe that any failures their franchises have are no fault of their own, and instead decide that letting a coach go and throwing the team into disarray is the best solution. So what happens when his replacement goes 2-10 the rest of the season? Is that his fault, or the previous coach’s?

Owners in the NFL should take a cue from those in MLB. Sometimes you just have to suffer through a bad season, but there is always next year and a new chance to win. I wish they would stop treating coaches like babysitters and more like men.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Oct 24 2008. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry