No more college football coaches sacked since sundown, but the day is young. We can use this temporary ceasefire to count the bodies being carried away, in a landscape where patience is spent even quicker than money. [We know that sportswriters as a group are metaphor-mad, with the metaphors changing from paragraph to paragraph, and Mike is no different. The scene of battlefield carnage with which he's begun, where multiple million dollar a year coaches with massive buyouts are compared to dead soldiers, will shift in the next paragraph.]

There goes Alabama's Mike Shula. He went 10-2 in 2005, nursing a sick program back from NCAA probation. That spared him the pain about as long as two Tylenol. The Tide went 6-6 this season. Goodbye. [Coach Schweitzer cures the team of probation only to be struck down himself.]

There's Miami's Larry Coker. His record is 59-15 with a national championship. And while it was easy to dump on his program after the brawl with Florida International, here's a tidbit that rarely gets included in the portrayal of the Hurricanes as Animal House: He graduated 100% of his class last year and played eight graduate students this season, with nine more to get their degrees next month. A lot of good that did him when Miami lost to Virginia. [No one besides Lopresti has portrayed the Hurricanes as Animal House, because everyone knows the Hurricanes are far worse than Animal House. There's a credibility problem here, deepened by Lopresti's faux-naivete about the nature of the degrees the players have earned.]

There's Arizona State's Dirk Koetter. This will be the third straight year the Sun Devils are in a bowl and he is 4-2 against state rival Arizona. The last guy to coach Arizona State to three straight bowls was John Cooper, and Ohio State came knocking at the door. This time, Koetter was shown the door.

There's Darrell Dickey of North Texas. His team won four straight Sun Belt titles from 2001-2004. Then the Mean Green turned meek. Gone.

There's Chris Scelfo. He might have had the toughest coaching job in college football in 2005, trying to regroup a Tulane team made homeless by Hurricane Katrina, playing 11 games in 11 cities. The administration was very understanding when the Green Wave went 2-9. This season, Tulane went 4-8. No more sympathy. [Good move rhetorically to leave the homeless group for last. You want the biggest sob story at the end of the list, for maximum impact.]



The heads are rolling so frequently, this is starting to look like a bowling alley. [At least he's shifted from metaphor to simile. But the simile's a lame one -- heads rolling is a cliche; and drawing your metaphor from another sport has a muddying effect.] The regular season is not completed, and already 10 coaches — more than eight percent of the head-coaching workforce in Division I-A — have been fired. And the motives are nearly always the same.

The administration and the boosters want to be like Ohio State and USC. They want big bowls, big exposure, big dollars. Lusting for something many of them will never have.

"He has put us on a wonderful stage and has done some wonderful work," the Arizona State athletic director said of Koetter as she canned him. "But we're looking for a higher platform."

"He personally has displayed impeccable character," the Alabama athletic director said of Shula. But what is character when you go 0-4 against Auburn? So Alabama, poster child for the frantically unstable, looks for its fifth football coach in seven years. [Lopresti's writing is frantically unstable, staggering from lust to the theater to poster children.]

It is absurd to hear presidents talk of integrity when they swiftly pull the trigger if they are not in the Fiesta Bowl. [Back to the battlefield... or the firing squad...] It is laughable to hear voices in the media decry the hypocrisy of college athletics, and then eagerly rip into an honest man because he only goes 7-5. [Rip into an honest man is John Wayne talk. "Hell, Judge, I don't know much about the law, but I know when someone's rippin' into an honest man..." And "eagerly" does Lopresti no good at all. Instead of the awkwardness of "eagerly rip," you're supposed to come up with one word that captures the idea. It's the same problem Lopresti had above, with "frantically unstable." In this case, "savage" would do.]

But there are seats to fill and bills to pay, boosters to seduce and talk shows to placate. In some ways, college coaches have it even worse than their cousins in the NFL, who are not held accountable for graduation rates, or if the quarterback ends up in a bar fight. [Again, note Lopresti's example of violence -- the relatively innocuous bar fight, rather than the actual shit everyone's been reading about. And of course NFL coaches are held accountable for the disgusting things their players sometimes do.]

"I realize now this is a business," Alabama center Antoine Caldwell of Shula's fate. "A dirty business, unfortunately."

It is a sport drenched with inflated expectation [This is Lopresti's first mixed metaphor, and it's a stinker. Remember another SOS rule: The more metaphors you use, the more you risk producing mixed ones.], which will be the ugly side of any playoff. That'd bring one champion, but even more hysteria from those left out. Show me an eight-team playoff, and I'll show you a world where only eight jobs are safe. [Lopresti's pretty much off the rails here.]

The BCS comes with high casualties. With a playoff system, it'd be a bloodbath. [Structurally, it's nice that Lopresti returns in this conclusion to his original battlefield metaphor. But polemically it makes zero sense for him to scream bloody murder about cash-happy coaches.]