Wisconsin fired Paul Chryst on Sunday, fired him five games into the 2022 college football season, fired him with a career record of 67-26. Just sent him packing, humiliated the former Wisconsin quarterback, as if his previous seven seasons — all ending in bowl games, the Badgers winning six of those — hadn’t happened.
This is where college football has gone. Into the dumpster, into the land of toxic make-believe.
Into the SEC.
Trees aren’t even shedding leaves yet, and already five Power 5 schools have shed their head football coach. Wisconsin on Sunday joined Nebraska (Scott Frost), Arizona State (Herm Edwards), Georgia Tech (Geoff Collins) and Colorado (Karl Dorrell), firings that will cost those schools more than $50 million in buyouts. All five are public schools. The money comes from somewhere, a shell game of shady boosters in the background writing checks, money diverted from more noble potential causes. Cleaning up a landfill, for example...
[University coaches?] Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, Georgia’s Kirby Smart, Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher and Alabama’s Nick Saban have contracts in the $100 million range…
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You know, toting up all the money pathetic states like Alabama give their coaches, blah blah. It’s like NFL concussion stories. Blah.
October 4th, 2022 at 4:30PM
One of the socially well-connected fundraisers for Wisconsin sports once acknowledged that the easiest money he could raise was to clean out the underachieving football coach and athletic director, this was early in the Donna Shalala era. The current run of bowl games and division titles started shortly thereafter.
That gaudy 67-26 was a gaudier 52-16 two seasons ago. A coach is only as good as his latest recruiting class, or so my sources closer to Madison tell me.
October 5th, 2022 at 2:15PM
Stephen: I had a friend at GW who left a tenured position there for the principled reason that she wanted to teach not at an expensive private school for rich people, but at an affordable public school for everyone else. So off she went to a good state school, but one constantly corrupted by football…
I always wondered if it bothered her at all – this part of the equation – that you left behind privilege and all that, but you took on the ongoing obscenity of football and all it symbolizes in that world.
October 5th, 2022 at 7:35PM
UD: Have you followed up with that friend? The what-came-after might be a good story.
The state flagship unis almost all bundle game day with their academics, even before the Big Ten and Pacific Whatever got into their current SEC envy.
Meanwhile, at Northern Illinois, the scholarship athletes rate nutrition coaches, whilst the run of the neighborhood students have a food pantry that the student affairs information telescreen calls attention to every so often.
October 5th, 2022 at 9:09PM
We fell out of touch, and a few years ago, at only 62 years old, she died of a stroke. What I know from others is that she was very happy with her move, very involved in the local community, much-respected. For all I know the school’s typically icky football program didn’t bother her at all.