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We may be looking at more coaching turnover in the NFL than we’ve seen in a long time. The Giants, Falcons, Redskins, Bears, Cardinals, Raiders, and Bills all seem extremely likely to let their coaches go. Change wouldn’t be shocking with the Steelers, Jets, Packers, Broncos, Chargers, and Browns. As teams can still go south during the remainder of the season, there will certainly be more teams added to the lists. The Buffalo Bills have been one of the most ineptly coached teams in the NFL under Gregg Williams and he is all but gone. Worth noting that Williams was selected over Marvin Lewis because Lewis “didn’t interview well” during the Bills’ process. You think the Bills folks would like to have that one back after watching the Bengals go from 2-14 to 7-5 and co-leader of the AFC North in Lewis’ first year?

College coaches are being fired with more rapidity than ever before. With these guys pulling down some healthy lucre and football responsible for the bulk of the revenue generation for most athletic departments, the impatience is understandable. The enormous change that a good coach can encourage in a football program even before he has a chance to raise the level of talent is remarkable. A couple of teams that are improbably going to bowl games are proof positive of that. Navy was 3-30 in 2000, 2001, and 2002 combined. At the end of last season, his first as Navy coach, Paul Johnson’s club began to understand his option-oriented system. They showed improvement in tight losses to Notre Dame and Wake Forest before closing the season with a blowout win over Army. The Middies covered those three games by a combined 86½ points, though they were blanked by Connecticut 38-0 in between the ND and Wake games. This season the improvement continued and the Midshipmen have gone from 3-30 to a remarkable 7-4, covering 8 of their 9 lined games. Navy will be playing in the Houston Bowl.

Tulsa made some similar strides under new coach Steve Kragthrope (former Buffalo Bills assistant), going from 2-21 the past two years to 8-4 and a berth in the Humanitarian Bowl in their first year under the new coach. While the Houston and Humanitarian Bowls are certainly not plums, one can understand the rampant enthusiasm in Annapolis and Tulsa, where there has been so little football success in recent years. Those kinds of turnarounds make administrators elsewhere pretty impatient.

Another way to judge the value of a coach is to see what happens to his program when he goes elsewhere. Georgia Southern won two 1-AA national championships under Paul Johnson, but the Eagles slipped to 7-4 this season, including a disappointing 5-3 in the Southern Conference, where they used to dominate. Tulsa’s Kragthorpe was the quarterback coach in Buffalo, and Drew Bledsoe’s performance is down considerably this season. Clearly these two men were valuable cogs in their old locales and their presence is missed.

We’ve frequently written about the issue of the SEC never having had a black coach and even went so far to suggest (with tongue planted firmly in cheek) that the rest of the league pay off Vanderbilt to take a black coach to get the media off their back. We never expected the first African-American coach in the league to come from in the SEC West, an area known for powerful redneck boosters, and the hiring of Sylvester Croom at Mississippi State was a welcome surprise. While Mississippi State is down, and has a bunch of bad kids who showed zero heart in the past couple of years, look for Croom to have success before too long. He will have a huge recruiting advantage in the SEC, where roughly 70% of football players are African American and the sight of white starters on the defensive side of the ball is a rarity. A lot of black kids will want to help Croom succeed. This was a bold stroke by the Mississippi State administration, one that will give them a significant competitive advantage that would not be there with a white coach.

Anyone notice that Tyrone Willingham, who has been given a free pass by the media for Notre Dame’s disappointing season, received a free pass from the media when he ran a fake punt with a 57-7 lead at Stanford? Can you imagine if Bobby Stoops did the same? What happened while Willingham was the coach at Stanford to inspire the venom toward the folks in Palo Alto that leads to such a classless act?

A big move in the boxing world last week was largely overlooked. ESPN has announced that they will no longer be paying rights fees to boxing promoters to televise fights. If there is a sport with little future, it’s boxing. So huge in the 70’s and 80’s, barely a blip on the English-speaking radar screen now. We had another huge winning NFL weekend with our newsletter The Max, going 4-0 with all four covers being outright dog wins. Our customers who put our “money line underdog” article from last week’s Max into use on those four NFL games collected a 56-1 ticket. Our NFL selections in The Max are now 59-32-5 (64.8%) against the spread since October of 2002. Subscribe for the rest of the season and you’ll get every NFL playoff and college bowl game written up for you, each week’s Midweek Phone Play (five straight winners), as well as handicapping articles, late week email updates, free basketball info, and a bunch more stuff. It is only $67 through the Super Bowl. Call me to order at 1-770-649-1078 and we’ll email you this week’s issue while we’re still on the phone.

On many campuses across the country conservative student groups have held “Affirmative Action Bake Sales” where the pricing of the goods sold is done by race. For example, a piece of pumpkin bread will be sold for $1.00 to white students, but Asian students are forced to pay $1.50 and black students $0.50. Obviously it symbolizes what these students feel is the injustice of applying differing standards to college applicants based on their race.

Texas A&M Athletic Director Bill Byrne opined the following in a release on A&M’s official athletics web site www.aggieathletics.com.

Free speech is not an issue for me, and differing political beliefs are not an issue for me, because I believe that reasonable people can disagree. But I’m disappointed over the national attention that Texas A&M University received recently because of a few individuals and their idea of a protest.

The Texas A&M Bake Sale plays right into the hands of those who recruit against us, in both athletics and in the general student population. They will use something like this to suggest that Texas A&M does not have a welcoming environment.

We all know that is not true. Unfortunately, a few individuals represented 45,000 students and an entire community in precisely the wrong light. My hope is that those of you who have a chance to influence public opinion will speak out against anything like this that discredits Texas A&M University. It causes me to redouble my efforts to do exactly that.

Maybe in his next release the vapid Byrne can let people know what other major political and social issues shouldn’t be debated on campus. It will also be interesting to see if he comments on the arrest of freshman A&M football player Tate Pittman last week on indecent exposure charges. It is the second time that Pittman has been arrested on indecent exposure charges this fall and he was charged with a DWI in August. If Byrne is silent on the matter, perhaps we can extrapolate that he sees protesting affirmative action an action more offensive than driving up to a woman, flashing your goods, and asking if the lucky gal would like to watch some self-pleasurization.

If you want to check out some daily hoops analysis you can call our hotline at 1-770-618-8700 for basketball previews. There is no charge for that 24-hour voice mail broadcast. The card is a short one in college football this weekend, but there may be some value in the game out in Oahu. The thinking here is that Dan Hawkins of Boise State and Hawaii coach June Jones are simply too smart to get involved in a shootout. Both have defenses that are capable and neither wants to give the other’s QB a chance to go hog wild (inadvertent Hawaiian luau reference). Time of possession will be valued a bit more than the conventional wisdom suggests heading into this game. Consider using under 72 in the Broncos-Rainbows matchup. Boise has only played in two games that have reached 72 total points this year, Hawaii has played in four. Grit you teeth and play the under.

It is money burner vs. money burner when the Raiders (2-9-1 against the spread this year) travel to Pittsburgh to take on the Steelers (11-17-2 to the number since the start of last season). After falling to the Bengals to essentially fall out of the race in the mediocre AFC North Division we can’t be certain we’ll get much of an effort from the Steelers. But after Bill Callahan sealed his fate in Oakland by referring to his Raiders as “the dumbest team in America” following their 22-8 self-immolation (kept three Bronco scoring drives alive with penalties, lost three fumbles) against visiting Denver last week. The Silver and Black were already on the verge of checking out on the season and several players, most pointedly Charles Woodson, were highly critical of Callahan for his comments. Callahan was right, of course, but a pro coach can’t say that about his team in the free agency era and expect it not to influence the club’s effort. The Raiders are merely playing out the string. This Steelers outfit doesn’t inspire confidence, but we’ll have to lay points as Oakland lays down.

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Kevin O’Neill is the director of content for www.consumerbet.com. His 24-hour free telephone selection hotline can be accessed by calling 1-770-618-8700.

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