Greg Schiano and Tennessee: The perfect sports story for our time

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How Greg Schiano was hired and then unhired as the Tennessee football coach is a fascinating and multi-tiered sociological study of post-happy America, all the way down to this particularly cynical note:

The guy who does get hired at Tennessee will regret his choice almost as much as the men who hire him, starting with athletic director John Currie, who is now facing his own alumni revolt, and a once much-desired job is now devalued because of the people who keep having to fill it.

Mentioned in a third-hand way by Mike McQueary in reference to the Jerry Sandusky horror show at Penn State, Schiano was marked without ever been shown to have actually known anything about Sandusky’s predations against children. His history as an unpleasant and undersuccessful boss at Rutgers and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers was commingled with this might-be-hearsay into a firestorm of tone-deafness gone viral, mob psychology gone nuclear, and American sports gone...well, full-on American sports.

And a job promised him by the Tennessee hierarchy was quickly snatched away, because he was mentioned in passing as a possible part of the Sandusky nightmare, in part because Tennessee already had paid off eight female victims who had sued the university over its laxity in pursuing Volunteers athletes who had committed sexual assaults while at school, and in part because fans wanted someone else to be their next coach.

In other words, sexual assault allegations at one school, ignoring sexual assaults at another, a football mob mentality, not enough winning in past jobs and a history of bullying (at least at Tampa Bay) have commingled into a chain-mailed fist that makes Greg Schiano’s name synonymous with...well, way too much for a rational person to digest.

But in a broader karmic way, everybody gets a bit of what they deserve here. Schiano’s coaching history, especially the player revolts at Tampa...Tennessee’s see-no-evil-until-legally-required episodes of sexual assault redress, and in a much larger sense America’s unwillingness to deal more forthrightly with this ugly side of humanity...the school’s general we-know-best tone-deafness...the fan base’s tail-wags-kennel view of the football program...our national skill at seeking what we want no matter what tools we use to get it...all there to see in its repellent glory.

So the next guy to take this high-paying mess will be compared to what horrors could have been, working for a damaged administration on the defensive from both its own customers and the outside world’s shaming mechanisms, knowing that a broad brush tars every moving thing. Here’s hoping this level of challenge is worth it to him, because money alone won’t make this a good job.

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