I just got off of social media and the prevailing sentiment essentially boiled down to this:
Fire Mario Cristobal.
Fire Gus Malzahn.
Fire Billy Napier.
Fire the athletic directors who hired them.
And, yes, fire the sportswriters like Mike Bianchi who say they shouldn’t be fired.
I’m only slightly exaggerating.
Over the last two weeks, there has been no shortage of irate fans on various social media platforms who have called for the firings of UCF’s Malzahn, Miami’s Cristobal, Florida’s Napier and who knows how many other college football coaches across the country.
Not that college football coaches shouldn’t be second-guessed, but when did it become all the rage for fans to want to fire the coach at the first sign of adversity? When did we go from Tammy Wynette’s patient and forgiving “Stand By Your Man” society to Taylor Swift’s defiant, temperamental “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” culture?
I know, I know, it’s not the vast majority of the fans who want their coach to be fired; it’s the lunatic fringe on social media that’s creating all of the commotion, but, these days, even right-thinking fans and traditional media members are too often influenced by the tone and tenor of the social media mob.
Don’t get me wrong, Cristobal deserves to be lustily criticized for his boneheaded decision on Saturday that will go down as one of the biggest coaching blunders in recent college football history. All his undefeated Miami Hurricanes had to do was take a knee and they would have run out the clock and won the game against a bad Georgia Tech team, but Cristobal chose to run the ball instead. As result, UM running back Don Chaney fumbled and Georgia Tech quarterback Haynes King threw a 44-yard touchdown pass to Christian Leary with two seconds remaining to give the Yellow Jackets a 23-20 victory.
I understand fans being upset, but I don’t understand the lunacy of calling for Cristobal to be fired. It’s one thing to be a fan; it’s another thing to be a complete moron. As if Miami is really going to fire Cristobal, who is only in his second season and has eight years and $62 million left on his contract.
The same goes for Napier, who is also just in his second season at Florida and has five years and $32.3 million of buyout money remaining on his contract. Yes, he deserves to be blamed for some of his team’s lackluster performances (see Kentucky loss two weeks ago), but who in their right mind thinks he should be jettisoned after 1 1/2 seasons on the job?
It’s become very popular on social media to compare Napier’s record after 19 games (10-9) to his two UF predecessors — Dan Mullen (16-3) and Jim McElwain (14-5). Of course Mullen and McElwain got fired when their programs collapsed after their initial smoke-and-mirrors success.
Question for UF fans: “Do you want Napier to use the right materials and build you a nice house that’s going to last or do you want him to be like Mullen and McElwain and slap something together that’s going to collapse the first time the wind blows hard?”
As for Malzahn, it was just announced last week that he has been given a contract extension right in the middle of UCF losing its first three Big 12 games. Granted, the contract extension leaking out the week after the biggest collapse in school history against Baylor and the week before getting stomped by Kansas was sort of like scheduling a church picnic during a hurricane, but why would any right-thinking fan think firing Malzahn is the answer?
Did anybody really think UCF was going to join the Big 12 and immediately become a championship contender? It’s not just coincidence that the three teams at the bottom of the Big 12 standings — UCF, Cincinnati and Houston — are 0-7 in league play as first-year members from the American Athletic Conference.
Call me a fuddy-duddy if you want, but it just seems like there are too many people in today’s iPhone world who simply don’t have the patience to work and then wait for the results to pay off. Even something as simple as sending a text or a tweet is littered with spelling and grammatical errors because, well, who wants to take the time to actually get it right?
I heard former Ohio State star linebacker Bobby Carpenter speak to the Orlando Touchdown Club earlier this week and he talked passionately about how “delayed gratification” is still something to strive for even in today’s instant-gratification society.
Remember delayed gratification? That’s when you were actually willing to work diligently and wait patiently for the fruits of your labor to ripen. Or, in the case of college football fans, it was when you allowed your coach to implement his structure, recruit his players, restock his roster and develop his culture.
Can you imagine if we were as impatient with, say, farmers as we are with today’s college football coaches?
“Fire Farmer Brown! His radishes are growing way too slow! He’s not using the right fertilizer, his farmhands are terrible and he’s using the drought as an excuse! Get rid of the bum!!!”
I believe this rush to judgment in college football started with the Internet — and the trailblazer, much to his chagrin, was former Gators coach Ron Zook.
Zook replaced the legendary Steve Spurrier and was a very unpopular hire because he didn’t have a track record as a head coach. It was during a time when social media was just starting to crank up, and as soon as Zook was hired somebody started a website called FireRonZook.com.
After his first year at Florida, Zook’s former boss — then-Pittsburgh Steelers coach Bill Cowher — came to visit him in Gainesville. As he sat in Zook’s office, Cowher cracked, “Zooker, you’ve really screwed up this profession. Now they’ve got a FireBillCowher.com in Pittsburgh.”
In telling me the story several years ago, Zook just shook his head and said, “That’s my legacy to the profession. I’m the first guy who had a FireTheCoach.com website. I had no chance. From the day I walked into the introductory press conference, I was fired.”
Now, of course, with Twitter and Instagram, the fire-the-coach crowd has an even bigger platform to spew their buffoonery. Who will ever forget when some Michigan fans wanted to fire Jim Harbaugh a couple of years ago because he couldn’t beat Ohio State. Now there are Ohio State fans who want to fire Ryan Day because he can’t beat Michigan.
“There’s a standard, and then there’s a psychotic standard,” former Buckeyes quarterback turned ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit said recently on the Pat McAfee Show. “And I would say that the 15% that represent Ohio State on social media fall into that category of ‘psychotic.’ They’re out of their minds. … They’re just such jackasses. They drive me crazy with everything that they do.”
Fire Mario Cristobal.
Fire Billy Napier.
Fire Gus Malzahn.
And, while you’re at it, fire Kirk Herbstreit, too.
Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on X (formerly Twitter) @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com/listen
