Have you ever been fired? I have, and it is terrible. Being fired is brutal and discombobulating immediately — How am I going to pay my rent? How will I feed my family? Where am I supposed to steal pens from now? — but it can also rattle you existentially, shake you to your very foundation. Not only does your place of employment not want you to do the thing you’ve worked your life trying to be good at, but it thinks someone else, someone you don’t even know, can do it better. It can make you feel useless. It’s a devastating thing.
The Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory, used to assess emotional stressors that lead to physical illness, classifies “being fired at your job” as one of the most stressful things that can happen to a person, just below “detention in jail” and just above “major change in the health or behavior of a family member.”
Being fired is something that you would never wish on anyone. Unless, of course, they are a college football coach. Then we love it.
When Florida State beat Alabama 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, “Florida State must be a lot better this year” or, “Wow, what a delightfully unpredictable sport this is! How magnificently droll!”
Your first thought was the same as mine: Oh, Kalen DeBoer is toast.
And worse: Everybody’s eyes lit up.
We do love ourselves a College Football Coach Death Watch. It’s 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, 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’s postgame call-in shows myself, just four hours of primal screams occasionally interspersed with ads for local used car dealers.)
We even like to imagine sadistically entertaining scenarios in which the coach might get the axe. Maybe they’ll get kicked off the bus like Lane Kiffin; maybe rich donors will try to plant salacious rumors to push him out, like Bryan Harsin. Recently, there have been fake AI press conferences 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’s Billy Napier has escaped, and, honestly, the jury’s still plenty out on that one.
Once we’ve got our teeth in you, you’re unlikely to make it out alive. It is as part of college football as the coin toss.
At a certain level, coaches understand this, not least of all DeBoer, who, in replacing Nick Saban, surely knew there wouldn’t 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’t imagine doing anything else.
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.
Sure: As Don Draper said, that’s what the money is for. Ohio State’s Ryan Day just won a national championship and makes more than $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 in football revenue last year, revenue it’s hard to argue Day isn’t at least partly personally responsible for, and that’s not even accounting for NIL, collectives and whatever other under- or over-the-table cash that’s flowing in.
And you know all those donors who run schools like Ohio State? Ten million is the interest their grandchildren accumulate on trusts they don’t even know they have, just extra cash that just casually sloshes up on the beach.
If Day — or any coach in college football with a considerably lower salary than his (UCLA’s DeShaun Foster makes less than your average baseball utility infielder) — starts struggling on the field, those donors will wrangle up a buyout to get him the hell out of town without so much as blinking. (Something Day, of course, understands vividly; he went from “guy they’re going to shoot into the sun” to “guy who just won them a championship” in roughly the amount of time you spend on hold with Delta.)
Oh, and while all this is happening: Every loss is your personal failing — every disappointment, every aggrievement, every time college football isn’t exactly as pleasant as your team’s fans want to be, it’s all something you own, individually. It will hang around your neck, or, more accurately, be a big blinking sign over your head, everywhere you go.
I mean, what kind of job is this?
You will work 365 days a year, scouting, recruiting, retaining, watching tape, wrangling hundreds of college kids, desperately trying to get them all to do the same thing at the same time for the same reason. Oh, and don’t think leaving the office is any sort of escape: When you get home, you’ll be stuck in the den, texting athletic teenagers from across the country, while your family is in the other room eating all its meals without you. You will have zero job security, with your entire life liable to be upended on a moment’s notice, merely one subpar season away from selling your house, finding a new city to live and moving your kids to yet another new school.
And it will be like this the rest of your life.
Success is no buffer to normal existence or something that will protect you or your family, either. I live in Athens, Ga., home of Kirby Smart, the highest-paid coach in college football. Smart and I have children who are roughly the same age, and who both play youth baseball here. At an all-star tournament a couple of years ago, organizers actually had to hire security for a game involving Smart’s son, a nice kid, because parents of players on the opposing team were verbally harassing him.
And this is Kirby Smart! Perhaps the most popular, successful, richest and theoretically comfortable coach in all of college football! Coaching for his beloved alma mater! Well, for now anyway.
Coaches can feel like the true power brokers of college football. They are the ones out front of every program, their highest paid employees, their public faces, the ones interviewed at halftime, increasingly the only person involved with a team who speaks to the press at all. They also seem tough, certainly love to talk tough, like all coaches, like they’re in charge, like the buck stops here.
But it doesn’t. No coach is ever as powerful as they seem, or as they act. They are just men, employees, temporary cogs, prone to the whims of forces larger than them, like the rest of us, adulating in the attention when things are going well and the first people we turn our knives out for when they aren’t.
Kalen DeBoer has won national championships, has reached the College Football Playoff, has won the Walter Camp National Coach of the Year Award. He has elevated himself to the very top of his profession, reached heights that most of us will ever know. He is, by any objective measure, a smashing success.
Then Saturday came. And a lot of good it all did him.
I know college football coaches make a lot of money. I am not sure you could pay me enough.
(Photo: Melina Myers / Imagn Images)