Espousing unique takes in the college football world, something the Idiot Prognosticator is known for, becomes challenging after a while. Because surely not EVERY consensus view is wrong on EVERY topic, right? Take the alliteratively named Coaching Carousel, which is both an apt metaphor (it’s circular in nature; it’s not much different if you’re riding the tiger or the bulldog) as well as a completely misleading one (it is NOT a gentle ride for children!). The general consensus is that agents of big-name coaches have created an escalating market in which there is NO BAD OUTCOME for the agents and the head coaches. Coach succeeds, he (always he!) gets paid more. Coach fails, he gets paid to go away, and then OTHER “good” coaches get paid more NOT to leave their current job, except for ONE coach who gets paid to fill the vacancy, making another vacancy that some get paid not to take and one gets paid to take, repeat ad infinitum, ad nauseum, ad aurum. Fans get re-engaged, schools and big donors get fleeced, and only assistant coaches get screwed (sort of). But don’t feel that sorry for those guys, because they know the game and are willing to take the hit because they plan to BE the head coach getting the silly money one day.
Easy, right? We all agree this is just how it is. And hate me if you like, but I’m a free-market kind of guy, and quite frankly have no issue with this setup, as long as we all UNDERSTAND what’s actually happening, which we do.
OR DO WE?
FA SO LA TI DO oh sorry, got confused for a minute. Do we, fans and followers of college football, TRULY understand the nature of this beast? Let me offer a COMPETING NARRATIVE.
Big-name College Football Coaches are Time-Prisoners From a Distant Future Society Being Punished for Intellectual Crimes. Wild? Perhaps, but you will see this idea is the ONLY WAY ANY OF THIS MAKES SENSE. It’s Occam’s Razor. Let me unpack:
First, consider a future society with free energy and perfect egalitarianism, in which human beings have copious free time to pursue intellectual…pursuits. The only crimes possible in this society are intellectual ones…for example, saying that the 21st century college football overtime rules are the “best we can do”. False! Go directly to jail! And what is jail in this far advanced society? Duh, Superman the movie taught us that, it’s some weird dimensional prison thing. What they didn’t say was that this weird dimensional thing actually IMPRISONS YOUR INTELLECT in the body of a college football coach of our era! In which you are forced to:
- Convince young men to “play” for you in a game that will almost certainly injure them seriously
- Choreograph a series of complex movements that will allow your “team” to “score more points” than the team of another mind-imprisoned individual
- Maintain a positive and healthy relationship with people who SELF-DESCRIBE themselves as FANATICS
- Speak at press conferences
Barbaric! NO HUMAN BEING would subject themselves to this existence voluntarily. “But aren’t they just doing it for the money?” you say, you poor thing. These tortured souls barely UNDERSTAND money, they are from the 29th century, where your perfectly balanced nutritional pellet has a quantum AI microprocesser that integrates with your nanobot-enhanced neurons to taste like whatever you are currently hungry for. Which is almost always bacon, by the way, and the nutritional pellet manufacturers know this and hence save a lot of space in their 5-D storage pocket dimension by leaving out recipes like tofu pizza.
“Ok,” you say, “this all makes perfect sense, but why then are these captive intellects MAKING so much money if they don’t understand concepts like ‘getting paid’?”.
That’s easy of course. Super Agent Jimmy Sexton.
Jimmy figured out the time-prisoner situation, because he’s from Memphis — it’s only like the third-weirdest thing that happened that day. He realized this group of people, forced by untold powers across time to hold these lucrative roles in our society that otherwise no sane being would hold, created this massive positive-feedback loop of epic proportions. Get-hired/get-paid/get-fired/get-paid-more, keep coming back to it because you are forced to. Do the crime, do the time, make a dime. Like, a billion dimes. And so he began representing these coaches, priming the situation by pulling a few financial levers, no doubt, and voilà: the insane money exchange known as the Coaching Carousel.
The proof on this one is simple. Jimbo Fisher. Wins a National Championship in 2013 at FSU, starts to suck, gets paid bonkers money by Texas A&M, truly sucks, gets paid absolute bonkers money to leave Texas A&M. At this point, a free man takes the money, lives life doing what he loves on his ranch or whatever, story fades to sunset. But, no, not Jimbo. Barely two years later and Jimbo WANTS BACK IN.
So next time you see your favorite coach, give him a wink and a thumbs up, let him know you empathize with his imprisonment. He will most certainly appreciate the gesture.
