You are fired! College football coaches versus AFGE

You are fired! College football coaches versus AFGE

College football coaches being fired

You’re fired! Have you ever heard those words? I have – once. I had just gotten a job waiting tables while at Georgia during segregated times. My white classmates would come into the restaurant and leave me big tips. It was fun but short lived. The white employees were allowed to take their meal in the dining area while the black ones had to eat in the kitchen. I protested and was told to eat in the kitchen or lose my job. So when I took my tray and sat down in the dining room, I was immediately canned. I learned my lesson and from that point on I either worked for the federal government or as a tenured professor. Apparently, job security was important to me.

Today it seems like a whole lot of college football coaches are getting fired while federal government employees are just starting to get scared that they might be fired as well.

Maybe its just me and my memory but didn’t it used to be that athletic directors waited until the end of the season to fire their coaches? No more. With the season barely halfway over Arkansas, UCLA, Oklahoma State, Stanford, Virginia Tech, Florida, Penn State and most recently LSU have fired their coaches. No matter the high buyouts – Penn State’s Franklin’s is $49 million and LSU’s Kelly’s is $54 million– these coaches were fired. The buyouts still don’t reach Jimbo Fisher’s astounding $77 million from Texas A&M but big money seems not to matter anymore. What is interesting is that in every case, the fired coach was replaced by someone already on the staff. Obviously, you cannot bring anyone new into a program at midstream but elevating someone already there doesn’t make sense to me – although Tim Skipper at UCLA produced three unlikely wins after taking charge. Some schools like Wisconsin and Florida State appear to be waiting until the end of the season to fire their coaches. Others are likely Boston College, Nevada, Michigan State, North Carolina and maybe NC State, Kentucky and Mississippi State.

One name being mentioned for big time programs is Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman who replaced Brian Kelly when Kelly bolted for the big bucks at LSU. Freeman has the best job in college football. It may not be the highest paying but it is the one with the most job security. Notre Dame is a legacy national brand. It can recruit five star athletes from all of the country. It has its own TV contract and most importantly it is not in a conference. Kelly goes to LSU where he has to beat Alabama, Texas A&M, Florida, Tennessee, Ole Miss , Texas, Oklahoma and my Georgia Bulldogs. Freeman has usually only a couple of tough games on the schedule and then plays Navy and Boston College. This year Notre Dame loses to Miami and Texas A&M but still will make the college playoffs if they win out – as they likely will. However, job security comes at a cost. Freeman is only the 26^th highest paid college football coach with a base salary of $7.5 million. Bonuses push it to $9 million. The highest paid coach is Georgia’s Kirby Smart at $13 million – and I wonder how do you spend $13 million in Athens, GA? Ryan Day of my Ohio State Buckeyes is second with $12.5 million. I am sure that Freeman has a price. The question is what would it take to get him to leave the most secure job in college football?

Government workers cry uncle

Although it must have been painful, the country’s largest federal employees union has asked the senate democrats to throw in the towel and agree to the continuing resolution proposed by the republicans. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents 800,000 federal government workers, called on Chuck Schumer and the democrats to vote for the House-passed spending bill to reopen the government. On the republican senate side some are urging John Thune to evoke the nuclear option and kill the filibuster. Thune had previously said that he would not do this, but the pressure is mounting. Of course killing the filibuster also kills any reason for any majority to compromise with the minority. So much for the senate being the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”

The union president said “It’s time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today,” No half measures, and no gamesmanship. Put every single federal worker back on the job with full back pay today. It’s long past time for our leaders to put aside partisan politics and embrace responsible government.” To put this into perspective I think this union has endorsed every democrat nominee for president since its inception. But now that federal workers have started to miss paychecks, they are pleading with the senate democrats to fold and pass the CR.

There is also the threat (gasp!) of federal workers facing for the first time, unemployment. Normally federal employment means job security. But Trump has threatened that security with layoffs and permanent firings. This is unheard of and may be another motivating factor in the labor union’s plea to Schumer, et al. In the private sector, layoffs are a way of life with announcements being made every day. In fact Amazon just announced that it was laying off 30,000 employees. Consider out of about 2.2 million federal employees who began fiscal year 2023 only 12,804 (0.6%) were terminated. Not surprisingly, the average federal civil servant has worked for the government for 11.8 years, more than four times longer than the average job tenure for private sector employees. The median annual salary of federal employees is about $100,000 or more than 60% higher than the median for full-time private sector workers.

Workers in manufacturing were five times more likely to lose their jobs last year than federal workers. Workers in construction were 10 times more likely to lose their jobs. No wonder the federal workers are now scared. Heaven’s forbid that they get fired! But the stubbornness of the senate democrats is imperiling federal workers job security so fold Chuck fold!