http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/the-heads-are-rolling-west-elson-are-09-s-fir?urn=ncaaf-201130
The Heads are Rolling: West, Elson are '09's first coaching casualties
The Heads are Rolling: West, Elson are '09's first coaching casualties
Given his team's wretched 2-7 record and the escalating grumbling on the home front, it was beginning to look like only a matter of time before Memphis relieved itself of the Tommy West era. And off a woeful, 56-28 loss Saturday at [Tennessee]e|place , the local Commercial-Appeal reports West officially became the season's first head-coaching head to roll this morning:
Tommy West has been fired as head coach of the University of Memphis football team, according to a source close to the situation. Memphis athletic director R.C. Johnson told West in a meeting this morning.
[...]
This year has been marked with fan discontent. ... The loss to East [Carolina]e|OOD was particularly troubling, as fewer than 5,000 fans attended a nationally televised Tuesday night game.
The writing was on the wall earlier than that -- Commerical Appeal columnists were calling time of death back in September, following another ugly, sparsely attended home loss to Marshall. Losing games is one thing; losing money on ticket sales is a death knell.
This marks the second time West has been canned in a little over a decade, and his trajectory with the Memphis Tigers was eerily similar to his six-year tenure with the Clemson Tigers: Just as he'd done at Clemson, West got off to a rocky start but soon enough turned a struggling program into a reliable bowl team, leading DeAngelo Williams-led outfits to a 17-8 record over 2003-04 and eking out bowl berths in three of the next four years from 2005-08, including last year's trip to the St. Petersburg Bowl -- no minor reward for a program that had only attended two bowl games in its entire history before West's arrival.
But Memphis' rock-bottom effort even in Conference USA play this year -- at 1-4 in C-USA games, the Tigers are two full games back of the rest of the otherwise neck-and-neck division -- has been too bad to save face: With the rout at [Tennessee]e|place , UM is assured of its third losing in the last four years, and the momentum of the DeAngelo Williams Window has evaporated entirely. West takes the fall.
He's not the only below-the-radar boss getting the axe: ESPN also report this morning that Western Kentucky coach Dave Elson was fired Sunday night , just three-quarters of the way into the Hilltoppers' first season as a I-A program. WKU was enduring the trials of youth -- at 0-9 with a 28-7 loss to I-AA Central Arkansas and ranking dead last nationally in almost every single major defensive category, the Hilltoppers have been unquestionably the worst top-tier team in the country -- but Elson's overall record in Bowling Green (39-41 over seven years) only just fell below .500 two weeks ago. Plus, he enthusiastically risked injury and public humiliation for the sake of the program:
The guy in the suit is probably steering clear of Elson's office this morning -- you know, just in case the sledgehammer is still lying around somewhere.
