no denying the ineptitude of our Athletic Department, i even spoke of it numerous times before the Saban hire. i just knew there was some way we could fuck up the firing of Mike Shula and manage to hire somebody else that would fuck the program up. Mal Moore finally did something right with the CNS deal (blind squirell, nut, etc.) don't look for that shit to happen again. the only difference is our coaches didn't have a colossal fuckup here and there over a period of 10 years, they were just fuckups to begin with. we have plenty of experience with a fucked up coaching situation. however, Alabama didn't fuck anything up yesterday.
And we don't know if Auburn did either.
There's no good way to fire people if you have to can more than one at a time. I've been on both sides of the table.
I once worked at a place where they fed us a "last supper" on Wednesday and the CEO assured us everything was fine, money was good and we were going to keep rolling. Friday morning they invited my entire media group (43 of us) to a retreat at a country club. But the catch was we all had to arrive 15 minutes apart.
It started at 8 a.m. By 8:30 all 43 of us knew there was a massacre going down. Phones were buzzing. People knew that when they showed up they were going to either be sacrificed or saved. Wives were calling other wives to see who survived, and dropping accidental bombs on the ones who didn't know. I was one of the fortunate nine who avoided the cuts and nearly got into a fight in the parking lot with one of the axed ones because I didn't exit the building with my separation papers like he did.
Three years later we bought another company in New York. I worked up there for a couple of months with the people in that office, assuring them the entire time that we had no plans to eliminate their positions -- even though that determination had been made before we made the buy. I knew I was up there milking their knowledge, but couldn't tell them, even though I grew pretty close to a couple of them in that time. When it came time for that massacre, the word got out quickly because of the Teamsters. We couldn't move the equipment out of the NY office ourselves because of Teamster rules, so they showed up a day early to clean it out. I told the head guy that afternoon -- he was the only one who got a severance package -- but the rest knew. My phone rang all night. The next day, my boss and the HR people arrived "unexpectedly" and we whacked them all. That sucked ass.
But it's business. No good way to do it.
This was business too.
Coaching change might hurt recruiting. Might help it.
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