Saturday's Games Prove There's No Such Thing As "Bad Time" To Fire A Head Coach
Sometimes it's as simple as making a change.
In case you missed it, with their win yesterday, the 2-4 UCLA Bruins are squarely in the hunt for the Big Ten title.
How is this possible after the team looked so listless for the past year and a half?
Well, you might think it's a complex equation that will have you arrive at some nebulous conclusion, but in all reality, UCLA is here because their athletic director had the balls to do something that seems to be increasingly unpopular among once-proud programs.
He fired his head football coach.
That's it. There really is nothing else to it.
After jettisoning DeShaun Foster from the program, interim coach Tim Skipper donned the headset and appointed Jerry Neuheisel to be his offensive coordinator.
If that name sounds familiar, it's because he's the son of former UCLA head coach Rick Neuheisel, and he has proven to be just the antidote this once-sorry offense needed.
If you needed any proof that Neuheisel was some sort of play-calling savant, look at what he's been able to do with beleaguered quarterback Nico Iamaleava these past two weeks.
And although UCLA is the most prominent example of successfully firing a coach, they aren't the only ones.
The Arkansas Razorbacks fired Sam Pittman just two weeks ago and walked into a hostile Neyland Stadium against a likely playoff-bound Tennessee Vols team and nearly pulled the upset with Bobby Petrino as their interim coach.
Now what does this mean for the other side of the equation?
There are coaches who are being retained well past their expiration date, and the excuses are always the same.
Either it's a monetary issue, as is the case with guys like FSU's Mike Norvell or Penn State's James Franklin, or it's a case of not wanting to disrupt the status quo and affect the culture.
With a guy like Florida's Billy Napier, it's a little of both, and neither are holding weight anymore.
Florida has the money, and the culture means nothing when your coach is 21-23 in his tenure at your school.
Napier dropped another entirely winnable game to Texas A&M last night, and yet, the administration is still holding steady with their failure to remove the disease from their ecosystem.
More schools should take a page out of the Bruins' book, because more often than not, you are doing far more damage to your program and your fanbase by keeping a coach who has worn out his welcome.
It's a classic case of sunk cost fallacy; cut the deadweight sooner rather than later and you may end up capturing lightning in a bottle.
If doing the same thing over and over again yields the same subpar results, wouldn't it make sense to at least try something else?
I'm hoping more AD's follow the lead from Los Angeles, because anything else would be the literal definition of insanity.