Feeling sorry for a football coach who gets the boot because he didn't win enough is foolish for a number of reasons. He's paid far too much money to start with, and firing is as much a part of the game as is hiring. What a coach does between those two events is what should be remembered, but unfortunately most people just remember how it ends. Not all coaches end up being fired. They have long and successful careers and retire as sports heroes, but most coaches aren't that lucky. Mack Brown has had a 16 year career at Texas and is being pushed out because his teams have lost 20 games over the past 4 years. If you do that at Texas, you can forget about all those years he won ten or more games. This season his team is 8-4, not good enough at Texas.
Texas beat Oklahoma this year 38-20, a sound drubbing. Bob Stoops at OU is headed off to a bowl match against Alabama, where Nick Saban coaches. Rumor has it that Saban might bail out at Alabama and go to Texas. Texas football fanatics are sure working that deal at the moment, but what if Saban's team loses to Stoop's OU team? What then? Is that going to kick off a frenzy of discussion about Stoops moving to Texas? When you hot, you're hot, and when you're not, you're not. It seems that football fanatics live in the moment, and they've got short memories when it comes to winning. If Stoop's fortunes at OU tour sour for a few years, his supporters there will turn on him like a pack of starving wolves. You can count on it.
What we too often remember about almost anything is how it ends, and that's sad. If you look at the overall picture, you see something else quite different for the ending. We get lost in the moment - the wrong moment. I don't care about football, not really, and I'm not concerned about what happens to coaches and teams and schools that support them. If I had my way, football would get put on the back burner of college affairs. Any idiot can be a football fan; not everyone can be a college graduate. I spent over 30 years of my life being a college professor, and I was a college coach for a while. That's over now, and fortunately I don't think about how it ended. All things end, don't get bogged down in it. And when you stop to think hard about it, almost all endings are good endings - maybe not happy, but good. All's well that ends.
Death is the only ending I know of that's final, or at least we think of it as final. As far as most of us know for sure, death is definite . . . but we can't know that for sure. All other things that end can actually be viewed as a beginning. OK, so my career as a coach is over, so what's next? Perhaps another career awaits, or even if it's just retirement, that's another phase of life to go through. I've been a much more content man since I retired from my chosen profession back in 2000. It wasn't a happy ending, just an ending, but I look back on that retirement as the best thing to happen to me in a long time. I struggled for a while finding something else to do with my life, but I adjusted. I live in the moment, but I don't get lost in it.
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