This morning, Jeff Jagodzinski was scheduled to meet with the New York Jets about their de-Mangini'd coaching job, at the risk to his own job at Boston College. Seems his current boss, BC athletic director Gene DiFilippo, told Jagodzinski that he would be fired if he even interviewed for the Jets job.
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| Feel sorry for Jeff Jagodzinski if he is fired? Not in the Wild West world of college coaching. (Getty Images) |
But that's where we get off the train, sympathy-wise, for either Jagodzinski or DiFilippo. These are two adults doing what they want to enhance their own positions, either for money, power, reputation or leverage. Who wins? Who cares? Here's hoping they both fail.
Why? Because it's just what coaches and athletic directors do. Meanwhile, the players, the students, the people who make the entire machinery function, still get squeezed from both ends without recourse. They have to grow up and get jobs in the industry to touch their inner child.
We think here of Robert Marve, the Miami quarterback who crossed swords with head coach Randy Shannon, announced his intention to transfer and was promptly handed a list of 27 schools he could not transfer to because Shannon wouldn't sign his release.
The number was later reduced to 18 after Shannon and the school were publicly shamed, but the point remains clear. Marve was at the adults' mercy, while the adults come and go and be free agents unbound by the strictures of contracts or loyalty and cut each others' throats with ethical impunity.
This is accepted as part of the fun of college football, of college sports as a whole -- adults acting the ass. And we applaud it all, for people embarrassing themselves for our amusement is largely why we care at all.
But the essential lack of fairness when the same right is mentioned for the athletes makes them all turn blue and eat each others' eyes.
That's why we don't care about Jeff Jagodzinski, or Gene DiFilippo, or Boston College's football program -- except when it turns out that any BC players who want to transfer have to hit their knees and beg, or if the new coach needs to take a few scholarships back and goes back on his predecessor's word. That, we'll care about.
And we'll be the only ones, because the school surely won't. And BC isn't unique here, not by a long shot. These are rules set up by athletic directors across the country, who used to be coaches themselves, enjoyed the restrictions placed upon their own athletes and would think of them as the only right way to do business.
And maybe that would be true if they didn't behave so badly in search of the next buck, or the one after that. That they don't leads us to the only fair solution -- that Jagodzinski talks to the Jets, gets fired at BC, doesn't get the Jets job and has to find a job at a smaller and less accomplished or endowed place, while BC hires a new guy who proceeds to lose games at a frightful rate.
None of this would help the athletes, we know, and would in fact hurt those athletes who like BC and want to stay. And again, we could care less.
But for some reason, this nonsense, placed atop that at Miami, just got us to thinking that a system that allows the three freedoms of greed, disingenuousness and petulance to all but its athletes deserves any bit of mud that happens to kick up.
And in this case, it's BC. And maybe Miami, too. Just because we need to be reminded that this idyllic world of venality, bullying and pathological fibbing comes at a price -- a price we should remember while we're enjoying the show.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
