The N.F.L. has apparently gotten early holiday shopping fever. Because instead of following the wisdom of the ages — which says there is not much point in firing your head coach until the season ends because A) your season is already lost and B) almost everyone you want to interview is employed by another N.F.L. team and can’t talk to you early anyway — teams are festively dumping their coaches because apparently they expect some Black Friday-like deal on their next one. So if you see Bill Cowher propped on a bargain table at Wal-Mart, please alert the Jaguars, Chiefs and Dolphins.
On Monday, Kansas City and Miami followed Jacksonville’s lead and sacked Todd Haley and Tony Sparano. Neither was a surprising move, considering Sparano has had his house up for sale since October and the Chiefs have spent most of their energies this season actively dousing their fans’ high expectations. Sparano’s departure comes with some ill feelings because as Greg Cote writes in The Miami Herald, everybody else involved with the Dolphins shares in the blame for the team’s collapse.
In Kansas City, however, the anger is more acute. Part of that is because, as Jason Cole writes on Yahoo.com, Haley and General Manager Scott Pioli had an antagonistic relationship that poisoned their work. As Sam Mellinger writes in the Kansas City Star, Pioli is hardly blameless for this considering that he hired Haley and has yet to prove he is anything other than a poser who lived off the glow of Bill Belichick’s star. Don Banks points out on SI.com that Haley was hired in a wave of young coaches getting head jobs and none of them have worked out terribly well. Josh McDaniels already got the boot from Denver and Raheem Morris is thinking twice about answering his phone these days in Tampa Bay.
(You might have noticed there was also an N.F.L. game Monday night, but more likely you overlooked it entirely because it featured Seattle beating St. Louis, providing more evidence that “Monday Night Football” has just about hit the bottom rung of possible N.F.L. entertainment. Go ahead and blame Jon Gruden, just for the fun of it.)
But if you think the N.F.L. has more than its share of ridiculousness, it has nothing on the N.B.A., which has turned into a running punch line as it attempts to trade Chris Paul from its league-operated team, the Hornets, to any team but the Lakers or anywhere else that Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert is grumpy about today. As John Reid describes in The New Orleans Times-Picayune, this has become nothing less than a fiasco. With trades apparently now scuttled to both the Lakers and Clippers, Bill Plaschke writes in The Los Angeles Times that Commissioner David Stern has far overstepped his bounds, wrecked his credibility and managed to alienate an entire city. It was quite a week’s work.
In other N.B.A. corners, the Magic and Dwight Howard are hinting they might kiss and make up, writes Josh Robbins in the Orlando Sentinel, instead of trying to hash out a trade that Stern might squash.
Hockey doesn’t have much in the warm-and-fuzzy department. In college hockey news, Boston University center Corey Trivino has been thrown off the team after he was arrested and charged with indecent assault and battery for allegedly breaking into the room of a female student and groping her. The N.H.L. is continuing to do its best deny-deny-deny act on fighting, with the obvious contradiction pointed out by Jeff Z. Klein in The Times that the league has decided head injuries are worrisome enough to move toward banning hits to the head, except when they are intentionally inflicted by someone’s fists. All this while the league’s most valuable head, Sidney Crosby’s, goes back on the shelf indefinitely while he continues to deal with concussion aftereffects.
All of that might make you wary of heading back out holiday shopping, which seems like a head injury waiting to happen. But you never know when you’ll run into an N.F.L. general manager prowling the aisles.
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