College Football Gears Up for Coaches Entering the Season of Self

It happens every year around this time: College athletics administrators look at their football programs and decide a change is in the offing.

Just since Thanksgiving, Illinois fired Ron Zook, Kansas let Turner Gill go, Dennis Erickson is done at Arizona State, Larry Porter was fired at Memphis and UAB pink-slipped Neil Callaway. Those openings are added to the list of schools that were already planning to hire new coaches for 2012, including Akron, Florida Atlantic, Mississippi, North Carolina, Penn State and Tulane.

But perhaps no situation is stranger than UCLA. The Bruins fired Rick Neuheisel Monday, but he'll still coach the team in the Pac-12 championship game on Friday night at Oregon.

If the Bruins lose—and hey, they are 31-point underdogs—they will be 6-7 and ineligible for a bowl appearance, meaning that, as they say, will be that. Should they pull off the monumental upset, though, UCLA would be heading to the Rose Bowl for a date with the Big Ten champion—with an interim coach likely at the helm.

So why do I call it the season of self? Because every year at this time, coaches who have gone into the living rooms of potential recruits to talk about how loyal they are to their players and their employers will throw those players and employers under the bus in a heartbeat in order to climb another rung up the coaching ladder.

Brian Kelly has done it twice in the last decade, ditching Central Michigan before its bowl game to head to Cincinnati and then leaving the Bearcats in a lurch before the school's first-ever appearance in a BCS bowl because Notre Dame came calling.

Rich Rodriguez famously spurned West Virginia before a BCS bowl game to take the Michigan job, a move that—to put it kindly—didn't work out so well.

I understand the logistics of it; this is an important time in recruiting and schools want to get head coaches in place as quickly as possible in order to not lose any ground on the recruiting trail.

But it also exposes many coaches for being just what they are, ambitious career climbers with no real loyalty to anything other than their own wallets and an ego-driven need for more prestige.

I'm not usually one to revel in someone's failure. But watching Randy Edsall go 2-10 at Maryland this season after he didn't bother to tell his Connecticut players he was leaving until they were on the plane home from the Fiesta Bowl last January reassures me that what goes around does, in fact, come around.

Smaller, less-prestigious programs accept their status as career stepping stones for up-and-coming coaches but that doesn't help the entire process pass the smell test.

There is something so deeply disingenuous about these coaches, leaders of young men, who talk about loyalty and having each other's back and all that other rah-rah stuff who will then turn and walk away from those same young men at the drop of a hat if they perceive they've got a better opportunity.

It would be great if there were a way to rearrange recruiting dates so that coaches would still be able to honor those responsibilities and seek newer, better jobs without having to abandon teams during the bowl season.

But there is no individual or body assigned to look at the game from a broader perspective; indeed, it's every man for himself. The same reason we have conference free-agency going on across the country is why we have coaches abruptly pulling up stakes and leaving before their job in the current season is finished.

It's part of an ongoing college football tradition, after all, talking the talk without every having to bother with walking the walk.