Yesterday: The Jon Gruden Era at UM

Lyrics from a melancholy acoustic guitar ballad about a break-up:

Yesterday,
All my troubles seemed so far away,
Now it looks as though they're here to stay,
Oh, I believe in yesterday.

Jon Gruden turned down the opportunity to coach the University of Miami's football team. Here's one perspective on why the megalomaniacal albino's no, while clearly not the act of a friend, may not be a bad thing.

Gruden made his mark in winning the Super Bowl in his first year as coach of the Tampa Bay Bucs in 2002. Gruden won [altogether now Cane fans] with Tony Dungy's players and a great defense built by Lane Kiffin. If that seems harsh, consider that Gruden never won another playoff game at Tampa Bay and his teams lost home wild-card playoff games in the two years they did make the playoffs. His final season there featured a team which collapsed after the same Kiffin announced he would be leaving when the season ended. Like Randy Shannon, Gruden was fired from his last coaching job in a year which began with a contract extension.

All in all, Gruden produced a .507 winning percentage in his seven year stint as a NFL head coach with Tampa Bay. I guess the genius bar is much lower in the post-Shula era, but even Trinidadians would blush at this level of limbo.

If, like me, you thought it odd that the negotiations with UM involved his brother. We shouldn't have. Coaching is apparently the most family of businesses. Gruden himself is the son of a coach and the 2nd generation names which have crossed his path in his career include; Griese, Kiffin, McKay, Shula, Simms. The theme from Deliverance would seem a nice fit for this degree of inbreeding.

However, given that Gruden is a fellow Roman Catholic, we shall put the above speculation aside and spare him the Saban treatment [eternal sports (i.e. unactionable) hatred]. But the Gruden era was instructive. As we get ready to watch the Heat travel to Cleveland tonight, if Gruden annoyed us this much in just 24 hours, imagine if they had televised his decision after dragging it out all summer.

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When Bad BCS Football Happens To Good People

Among the unfortunate by-products spawned by the justified firing of Randy Shannon is that fans actually suffering from Mad COW [Coaching Obsessed Whiners] disease will now go undetected for a longer period of time. Far from a victim-less disease, these volume-rich, content-poor purveyors of sports ignorance in Miami have actually been emboldened. The horror. In their heart of hearts, COWers think ... no, they KNOW ... that Kurtz should have switched to a pro set once Marlow was dispatched.

See the type of people who have been calling for Shannon's firing have been doing so since 09/08/07. So God help us, these maggots of misinformation have actually been proven to be prescient for once. Sadly, various clinical experiments have confirmed that Mad COWers don't -- not unlike some of the college football programs they obsess over -- regroup, they reload.

What can uninfected fans do? To paraphrase Jerry McGuire, we can help them by helping ourselves. Identifying the COWers is the first step. Fortunately this will be easy. Any mention of the word Heat, even from a meteorological perspective, will elicit a Dionysian spewing of invectives towards a Mr. Spoelstra [the Filipino-American NBA head coach, not the folk and blues guitarist].

If you are a liberal and feel a need to confirm the obvious before 'Baker-acting' the poor bastard, go ahead and ask a follow-up question. See some sample questions below. Warning - questioner should be prepared to respond with a Zombieland [Rule #2 double tap] lack of emotion should the specimen have a violent reaction:

• Did the U wait too long to fire Shannon?
• Could Jimmy Johnson [pronounced as one word] have done a better job?
• Name any player [ever] Butch Davis could not have recruited? Trick question, does not exist.

Here's what I think about the firing. UM players who have gotten to know Shannon will never forget that their besieged coach acted with class throughout his time here. That he didn't seem to turn on them or throw others under the bus for the failures in his program. They will remember that the guy they most respected in the game, was dismissed with three years left on a guaranteed contract.

So among the lessons Shannon's players could draw from their experience is to use your skills in the game to eventually get paid and never confuse the people who casually state that "it's all about the U" with someone who has lived it by example. There are people who we have to deal with in life and people we respect. They are not mutually exclusive by rule, but overlap only if we are fortunate. If they learn that, that's a pretty good education. Maybe not the type of education they discussed when being recruited, but no less useful. Godspeed with that guaranteed contract Randy Shannon.

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