Butch Davis Out; High Profile Coaches Reeling

Nobody is fresh as Marvin Austin.

Obviously the timing of the decision to fire Butch Davis was questionable at best, but not many people are surprised that Davis did end up getting fired. Most people thought that if a decision was made to let go of Davis, that it would have come at the end of the season, not eight days before North Carolina was set to open its summer camp. The decision to fire Davis was a judgment call. Although there is absolutely no proof that he knew of any wrongdoing, Davis must take the fall because he was the man in charge. He should have done a better job of monitoring his program. At the end of the day, all of the transgressions proved to be too much for Davis to keep his job.

In another surprising move, UNC athletics director Dick Baddour resigned. Talk about a scandal reaching the heights of an athletic department.

All this goes to show to that as much as winning football games, and recruiting the best players, coaching at the biggest stage of the NCAA now requires a strong ability to self-monitor one's own program and to surround yourself with people you can trust. Davis is now the third really big name to go down because of scandals involving agents and boosters. Pete Carroll saw the writing on the wall and ditched USC before he could suffer the consequences brought about by Reggie Bush and former assistant coach Todd McNair. The scandal also cost former athletics director Mike Garrett his job.

Tressel, who deserved to be fired more than either Carroll or Davis based on circumstantial evidence, placed his bets on Terrelle Pryor, Dan Herron, Mike Adams, Devier Posey, and Solomon Thomas. He ended up on the wrong side of the bet. While Pryor was a tremendous talent for the Buckeyes and continued Ohio State's domination of the Big Ten, would Tressel recruit him again knowing what he knows now?

Then there's the Davis scandal. He was done in by a rogue assistant coach he trusted in John Blake, a guy making $240,000 per year and yet acted as a runner for an agent so that he could turn over a few more bucks. Then there are all the players Davis recruited who seemed to be entitled and selfish. It was found that Greg Little had accumulated 91 parking tickets while a student-athlete at North Carolina, and even then there were people trying to pay those off for him. You had a guy like Marvin Austin tweeting things like, "Jus got to DC an I'm feelin a shopn spee....nobody gon be fresh as ME!!!!" I hope Austin purposely misspelled what he wrote, and how stupid do you have to be to post something like that?

Coaches always talk about recruiting high-character guys and not just four- and five-star guys that act like prima donnas. Coaches also need to make sure that they get good, honest people on their staffs. I doubt that either Carroll, Tressel, or Davis thought they were signing their letters of resignation when they were signing guys like Pryor, Austin, and Bush. If coaches like them can go down, it should serve as a warning to all college football coaches that it can happen to them, starting with the kids they bring in on signing day. In truth, it'll be only about another season before we find out who's next to go.