No rhyme, reason to in-season firings of Haley, Sparano, Murray
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| If Black Monday is the new black, Sparano (from left), Haley and Murray are its supermodels. (US Presswire) |
Looks like a few really rich guys woke up on the wrong side of the web Monday morning. They walked into the office, threw their briefcases down (or threw the people carrying their briefcases down) and bellowed, "BRING ME THE HEAD OF ___________!"
And before you know it, those heads were fragged, tagged, bagged and produced as proof that when it's your time to go, there's no "I need 15 minutes." You're gone.
Todd Haley in Kansas City. Tony Sparano in Miami. And because rage knows no bounds, Terry Murray in Los Angeles. Between that and the New Orleans shadow government vetoing Chris Paul trades (Miami offered LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Udonis Haslem and were turned down flat), lots of deep-pocketed folks were in the mood to say either, "No!" "Hell no!" or "Get the Hell Out!"
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And most amazingly of all, Tim Tebow was offered none of the three jobs, though rumor has it he is merely waiting to see how well Newt Gingrich does as the Republican presidential front-runner before committing to anything longer term.
Haley and Sparano were pretty much ambulatory corpses, given the way their teams had performed, underperformed and non-performed. Murray was a victim of higher expectations, a remarkable concept given the Kings' history. And Paul continues to be in the right place at the worst possible time.
And no, there seems to be no real reason for it, unless the wealthy have their own hormonal cycle. They went through a long period of not wanting to pay guys not to work, and suddenly the urge to shove people out the door is back in vogue. In short, Black Monday is the new black.
Murray is the fifth NHL coach to be fired in the past five weeks, and since no team has played even 40 percent of its games yet, there is an awful lot of rush-to-judgment-ing going on here.
But Haley and Sparano went the same day, believed to be a first for in-season firings in the NFL, and they are the third this year and 12th in the last five. The last time coaches got piano-wired in-season this frequently was the mid-70s, when 17 got worked over between 1974 and 1978, with six alone getting smoked in 1976.
Hmmm. We never realized Gerry Ford's loss in the presidential election had that kind of effect.
Which is to say we don't have a good theory why, although in this case we could speculate that Kansas City, which is not known as an impetuous operation, got the ball rolling by garroting Haley right after breakfast.
The Dolphins, for reasons only they can fathom, let Sparano do the media post mortem before inviting Sparano to his own. And Murray had to fly to Boston with his soon-to-be-ex-team so that he could hear it.
There is backstory we don't know here, but this sounds like "Well, if that guy's going to fire his guy, maybe I should fire my guy, too."
The NBA could have chimed in here with a firing or two, but having blown away a part of its season, it has no coaches in trouble, and won't until the day after Christmas. All it has going for it now is the continued administrative incarceration of Paul -- convicted of wanting to work somewhere else at a time when the owners were in let's-teach-them-a-lesson mode.
Point is, this is a bacchanal one typically finds the day after a season, not with time still on the meter. And with questions swirling about Raheem Morris in Tampa, Steve Spagnuolo in St. Louis, Norv Turner in San Diego, Andy Reid in Philadelphia, Tom Coughlin in New York, Jim Caldwell in Indianapolis, Jason Garrett in Dallas and Chan Gailey in Buffalo, we may not be done yet.
After all, you know rich folks love to compete with each other:
"Seriously, you should fire your guy today, too. It was a total rush. I had to lie down after and catch my breath. In fact, I'm thinking about crap-canning the interim guy tomorrow. I just wish I could remember his name."
Ray Ratto is a columnist for Comcast SportsNet Bay Area.com.
