Have you ever been fired? I have, and it is terrible. Being fired is brutal and discombobulating immediately \u2014 How am I going to pay my rent? How will I feed my family? Where am I supposed to steal pens from now? \u2014 but it can also rattle you existentially, shake you to your very foundation.\u00a0Not only does your place of employment not want you to do the thing you\u2019ve worked your life trying to be good at, but it thinks someone else, someone you don\u2019t even know, can do it better. It can make you feel useless. It\u2019s a devastating thing.<\/p>\n
The Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory<\/a>, used to assess emotional stressors that lead to physical illness, classifies \u201cbeing fired at your job\u201d as one of the most stressful things that can happen to a person, just below \u201cdetention in jail\u201d and just above \u201cmajor change in the health or behavior of a family member.\u201d<\/p>\n Being fired is something that you would never wish on anyone. Unless, of course, they are a college football coach. Then we love it.<\/p>\n When Florida State beat Alabama<\/a> this past weekend, thoroughly, in a way we have not seen Alabama beaten since before most of the humans playing for Alabama were born, I suspect your first thought was not, \u201cFlorida State must be a lot better this year\u201d or, \u201cWow, what a delightfully unpredictable sport this is! How magnificently droll!\u201d<\/p>\n Your first thought was the same as mine: Oh, Kalen DeBoer is toast.<\/p>\n And worse: Everybody\u2019s eyes lit up.<\/p>\n We do love ourselves a College Football Coach Death Watch. It\u2019s a feeding frenzy for the entire college football industrial complex, once we see blood in the water. There is a well-trod process at this point. We research buyout numbers<\/a>, we sniff around replacement candidates, we hop on message boards to see fans of the suffering team vent their spleens. (I find it fun to listen to the local station\u2019s postgame call-in shows myself, just four hours of primal screams occasionally interspersed with ads for local used car dealers.)<\/p>\n We even like to imagine sadistically entertaining scenarios in which the coach might get the axe.\u00a0Maybe they\u2019ll get kicked off the bus like Lane Kiffin; maybe rich donors will try to plant salacious rumors<\/a> to push him out, like Bryan Harsin. Recently, there have been fake AI press conferences<\/a> in which the coach is made to look as foolish as possible. Once you find yourself in one of these death spirals, like DeBoer seems to already be, it can be near impossible to pull yourself out; in recent memory, only Florida\u2019s Billy Napier has escaped, and, honestly, the jury\u2019s still plenty out<\/a> on that one.<\/p>\n Once we\u2019ve got our teeth in you, you\u2019re unlikely to make it out alive. It is as part of college football as the coin toss.<\/p>\n At a certain level, coaches understand this, not least of all DeBoer, who, in replacing Nick Saban, surely knew there wouldn\u2019t be much of a grace period in Tuscaloosa. And coaching is a calling for many of these men, the single driving ambition of their lives. They can\u2019t imagine doing anything else.<\/p>\n But honestly, having every single person in your professional and personal life drooling with anticipation of you getting pink-slipped, right out there in the public square, seems like a terrible profession to spend the precious few days we have on this earth doing. This is a lousy way to make a living.<\/p>\n Sure: As Don Draper said<\/a>, that\u2019s what the money is for. Ohio State\u2019s Ryan Day just won a national championship and makes more than<\/a> $10 million a year, a big wad of cash with which to therapeutically swaddle in if you happen to find yourself offended by an anonymous internet commenter. (Or, say, a rival player briefly smiling while standing on your 50-yard line.) But $10 million sure seems a lot smaller in context. Ohio State brought in $251 million<\/a> in football revenue last year, revenue it\u2019s hard to argue Day isn\u2019t at least partly personally responsible for, and that\u2019s not even accounting for NIL, collectives and whatever other under- or over-the-table cash that\u2019s flowing in.<\/p>\n And you know all those donors who run schools like Ohio State? Ten million is the interest their grandchildren accumulate on trusts they don\u2019t even know they have, just extra cash that just casually sloshes up on the beach.<\/p>\n