Fire him ... now!

Kevin Sherrington of the Dallas Morning News writes in his column that he can't remember a time when he's seen so many coaches "on the hot seat" and in danger of losing their jobs. In an excerpt from the article:

"Commenting on how quickly the job heats up these days, [Texas A&M coach Dennis] Franchione said Tuesday that 'we live in a little bit of a microwave society,' as good a description as any for the phenomenon."

That 'phenomenon' certainly has a lot to do with the growth of sports media technology. Sports billboards, chat rooms and blogs are now a 24-hour a day obsession for many fans, including influential fans who can get coaches hired or fired. As Sherrington notes, it's no idle threat for any of them to e-mail the university president. Any university president who gets enough of those e-mails is tempted to pull the trigger on a coach or athletic director (case in point: the recent sacking of Nebraska athletic director Steve Pederson. NU chancellor Harvey Perlman received roughly 300 to 400 e-mails a day in the past few weeks).

Add on top of that the omnipresent "firecoach________.com" websites. Ole Miss was so worried about the growing heat for football coach Ed Orgeron that it apparently bought the doman rights to fireorgeron.com; when you visit that site now you're redirected to the university's main athletic page. Still, that can't prevent sites like coacheshotseat.com from putting Orgeron and others on its list of endangered coaches. (Houston Nutt of Arkansas currently has the hottest of hot seats according to the site; Orgeron ranks 8th. Believe it or not there is a site to fire Urban Meyer, despite his winning a national championship at Florida last year).

All of these guys are big boys and are getting handsomely paid for their work. But just as new technology has shortened the news cycle in journalism, it appears it is also helping shorten the shelf life of coaches.