A little more than a week ago, Temple coach Matt Rhule watched a winless Connecticut team push a ranked Michigan to the brink of a loss. On Monday, he watched as Connecticut's coach in that game, Paul Pasqualoni, became the second Football Bowl Subdivision coach to be fired in the past two days.
"When you start firing coaches in September, a lot of times it's done for the public or other reasons," Rhule said Monday. "They showed just a week ago they were responding to the coach. It seems awfully early to me, and it's sad when it happens."
Pasqualoni and former USC coach Lane Kiffin, who was fired in the wee hours of Sunday morning after a 62-41 loss at Arizona State, entered the season with somewhat shaky standing in their jobs. But they weren't so shaky that one would have predicted they would be fired in September.
Pasqualoni's four games this season at UConn and Kiffin's five games with USC represent the fewest games coached by someone dismissed in-season during the BCS era.
"That has certainly changed," Iowa State coach Paul Rhoads said. "Everything in our profession seems to be moved up, whether recruiting commitments, or panic buttons or coaches getting fired. I don't know the catalyst for all that, I just know it's very apparent."
SMU coach June Jones traces the phenomena to the spread of sports radio nearly two decades ago, then through the explosion of coaching salaries and in recent years the advent of social media as catalysts for increased scrutiny and shortened tenures of college coaches. Of the 23 head coaches who started in their jobs in the 2010 season, only 10 remain in those same positions.
Like Rhule, Jones coached against Pasqualoni in the American Athletic Conference, and he said he was surprised to learn of Pasqualoni's dismissal Monday after two-plus seasons with Connecticut. "To not be given the chance to build the program, in this day and age, it's kind of shocking to me," Jones said. "I don't understand the dynamics of that whole situation up there, but I know Paul is a great football coach. Sometimes life isn't fair."
Coaches seem resigned to lessened job security in the face of heightened salaries and heightened pressure to win.
"Just makes me thankful every day when I walk into an office that there's a chair there," said Baylor coach Art Briles. "Just the nature of the business we're in. It's disturbing to me, and that's just a personal point of view."
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