In a surprise to no one who knows that losing to your arch-rival six consecutive times in college football means the coach is going to get canned, Chan Gailey got the ax as the head coach at Georgia Tech yesterday.
Some less-informed commentators, looking on the surface at Gailey’s winning record of 44-32 and six consecutive bowl appearances, have started to make the Georgia Tech fan base out to be rabid, delusional fools pining for the glory days of 1990 and submarining a good coach.
Um, what? Yeah, all that was nice, but he lost to Georgia six straight times, routinely lost games he should not have, always lost five games a year, even with superior teams, and basically denenergized and demoralized what was already a fairly laid-back and low-wattage fan base. At Saturday’s Georgia-Georgia Tech game, the visitors’ red outnumbered the home team’s yellow. The school simply could not bring him back.
Look, the expectations are not really that unreasonable. Nobody’s expecting BCS bowls every year and national titles. Here is all you have to do to have a long, productive career as the head coach at the Georgia Institute of Technology:
Go to a bowl game 80 percent of the time (nobody’s really going to miss that Humanitarian Bowl once in a while)
Win nine or ten games 20 percent of the time
Don’t drop games to lower-ranked teams while providing false hope by beating higher-ranked ones
Get into a BCS Bowl once every decade
Stay off probation
Having an interesting team that might fill up Bobby Dodd Stadium once in a while
Beat Georgia like two times out of five
That’s it. Seriously, if you just win 8 or 9 games every year, you’re fine. Nobody’s expecting a powerhouse. If you’re a guy like Houston Nutt, who has tired of unrealistic expectations, this is the job for you. All you have to do is not suck the life out of the fans and boosters, and you’re a superstar. Atlanta’s a nice place to live, you’re in a BCS conference and have a shot to maybe win it all if you do things right, and you can just live your life.
You know, if that’s enough for you. Otherwise, there are a whole bunch of openings from schools with fans expecting to compete for national titles every year no matter what, and if you don’t, you have a nice little payday in three years. Good luck with that.
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