Boston College athletic director Gene DeFilippo must be a big Dirty
Harry fan, because there's apparently nothing he loves more than blowing
his coaches' heads off with preposterously large guns after being given
little or no provocation. He terminated
football coach Jeff Jagondzinski, then 20-8 in two seasons at BC,
for having the temerity to interview for an NFL job. And now he's offed
basketball coach Al Skinner for missing the NCAA tournament for...
uh...
one consecutive year. Punks do not feel lucky on The Heights.

It would be one thing if either firing came paired with an obviously
attractive replacement candidate. Schools occasionally push fledgling
coaches out of the nest when Urban Meyer's hanging around in the
Mountain West or John Calipari's looking to blow town before the fuzz
catches up with him. BC had no such candidates. The football coach is
now an elderly guy with zero previous head coaching experience who will
probably retire in the next few years, occasioning another coaching
search that will either land on an old retread no one wants or a guy who
will have some success, sniff a higher-profile job, and get canned like
Jags.

Meanwhile, Tommy Amaker(!) is being mentioned as an attractive
candidate to replace Skinner. Amaker has made one tournament in thirteen
years as a head coach. Boston College blog Eagle in Atlanta dismisses that
possibility but the
rest of the list consists of guys who came up under Skinner and
apparently won't be considered strongly, guys who aren't
coming (BC alum Bruce Pearl most prominently) and the head coaches
at Cornell and Richmond.

Boston College fired a guy who made seven tourneys in ten years after
building BC up from a disaster zone for this? Neither Steve Donahue
(Cornell) or Chris Mooney (Richmond) has any experience at a major
conference level or operated at a relative deficit to his conference
peers, as they would certainly do at Boston College. They're complete
wildcards who would be extraordinarily lucky to have the same level of
success Skinner-BC's most accomplished coach in their history- had only a year ago.

While Skinner was aging and the program had started slipping, an
athletic department with a little patience or loyalty would have given
Skinner another year or two worth of rope. Tom O'Brien's
then-inexplicable decision to jump from a perpetually nine-win BC
program to a basketcase like NC State now looks like a guy who was
either pushed or saw DeFilippo polishing his gun daily and read the
writing on the wall. He's not exactly safe with the Wolfpack, but if he'd
gone 16-21 the last three years at Boston College, the press conference
announcing his firing would look like the final scene in
Scarface.

Word to wildly
successful BC hockey coach Jerry York: wear a vest and try not to
lose to Miami in the Frozen Four.

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