Boston College looked mean and cranky when it fired its football coach for sniffing around the head-coach vacancy at the New York Jets.
The Boston Globe editorial page called the school “peevish” — a term it normally reserves for Republicans.
I was actually very sympathetic to the college’s position, in part because I am so familiar with mean and cranky and peevish editors that such behavior doesn’t really bother me.
But really, outside of the college president and, perhaps, Jesus, who is more important to Boston College than the football coach? That, in part, is why Jeff Jagodzinski was signed to a five-year contract. In this economic climate, a five-year sinecure is pretty good, even if it sort of means you’re not supposed to go looking for another job after two years.
I’m pretty special here at Banker & Tradesman, but I’m on a 24-hour contract. Every day, the editor looks up at me and says, “You still here?” I’d feel justified in applying for the coaching job with the Jets.
One of the dirty little secrets of the management-recruiter, “headhunter” profession is that once a candidate agrees to consider a new job, he or she will be gone in a year, whether or not they get that first job. Once the notion crawls into your little pea-brain that there may be fame and fortune awaiting you just over the mountain, you’re a goner.
The American job market is a fuzzy place, where most of us pretend we live in a Libertarian jungle with “employment at will,” where the boss can fire us when and where he chooses — and we are free to wander the Earth, looking for the perfect job.
Of course, now there is an army of trial lawyers and ACLU types poised to tell the boss that we are too old or too female or too black or too handicapped to get fired. And there are those lucky few football coaches with signed contracts, pledging their loyalty and first-born child to a boss, who promises to keep them on board for a while.
Those of you hired as part of the herd don’t usually get contracts and signing bonuses and warnings about not looking for another job. That kind of treatment is reserved for special folks, like football coaches and newspaper columnists.
It’s an acknowledgement of what management science guru Elliott Jaques wrote in the Harvard Business Review many years ago: “No one holds groups accountable for their work. Who ever heard of promoting a group — or firing one?”
Romantic Ideal
Football coaches in particular live in a special kind of fantasy world, in which they are credited with all manner of success on the field, even if the performers are college kids. Additionally, as Boston College hinted at in their dismissal announcement, coaches are presumed to be in love with whatever college they are at.
How did Boston College athletic director Gene DeFilippo put it? “We will find somebody who really wants to be at Boston College…”
Well, OK. That’s probably a little bit dreamy, but Boston College has the right to create incentives designed to attract and retain their own true love. But if DeFilippo wanders over to the college’s economics department and asks for an opinion, the faculty might bring up the magic of the marketplace and the likelihood that even the most loyal Boston College employee might escape to the National Football League and consort with the Devil.
The old wisdom from economist Adam Smith remains true today: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
No one understands the value of discouraging market forces from messing up a good deal than the athletic director of a top-tier college sports program. The athletes don’t get paid; they aren’t allowed to accept as much as a cup of coffee as an enticement to attend one college or another. And, if for some reason, they transfer to a different school, they have to sit out a year, as punishment for embarrassing the adults.
The coaches? They just shrug and go off to the Jets.
