Cavalcade of Whimsy: Coaches Getting Fired, Alabama Historic Loss, Greg Schiano

This could be Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Hemingway and Monty Python all wrapped up in one column, and it would still have no shot of kicking it all off with half the swag of this …

“Right after I got here, I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles and ketchup. I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”

One doinked field goal attempt, an illegal substitution penalty, a friendly clock at the end of the first half, a Butt Pick Six, another interception for a score, and go ahead and throw in the horrible injury to an all-timer of a starting quarterback that shouldn’t have been in the game a few weeks earlier … that’s what it took to finally kill this Alabama thing.

At least for this year.

Even with no wins over any teams ranked in the College Football Playoff top 25.

Even with the 98th best strength of schedule according to the NCAA model.

Even with two losses, and three worthy 11-1 Power Five programs to choose from for one, maybe two spots, there’s still this thought in the minds of many that somehow, someway, the Crimson Tide are still in the running for the national championship.

And here’s the punchline. I guarantee you with 1000% certainty that the Ed, Ryan and Dabo would all rather have Oklahoma, Utah or Baylor to face than a Bama team with the talent that could absolutely win two games in the mini-tournament.

But the Tide are out – they have to be, or the College Football Playoff system has to delete its account.

So now Alabama is just another amazing SEC team that had a fantastic season with absolutely nothing to show for it.

Now it gets to know how LSU, and Texas A&M when it had Johnny Manziel, and Ole Miss when it was doing its thing under Hugh Freeze, and Georgia other than the 2017 season, and Florida, and everyone else feel around this time of year.

By all reasonable and normal standards, going 10-2 is terrific. But when you’re that one missed kick, those few mental errors, and that one quarterback loss away from being 11-1 and – let’s be honest here – probably in the show again, it’s devastating.

How absolutely historic was that loss to Auburn? Try this out.

That defeat made it Alabama’s first two-loss regular season since 2010. To take this eight-year run even further, this is the first time Bama has lost its second game before its bowl season, with six SEC championships along the way.

What did Auburn just do? Before the the loss in the Iron Bowl, Alabama was 114-8 over the last nine seasons in games before losing its second game in year, if it did lose twice.

To take this even further, since Nick Saban got Bama rocking in 2008, over the last 12 years, Alabama is 147-10 in games before losing its second game in a season.

How hard is this to do? Clemson is on a run of five straight years without losing two games in the regular season. Oklahoma is on a three-year run. Ohio State has only gone two years doing that.

And now, this is just the third time since 2008 that Bama is playing in a bowl game with no national championship implications, so …

“The thing is, Bob, it’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.”

There’s going to be no more interesting bowl team to handicap than Alabama.

It’s not going to the College Football Playoff, and now, for the first time since 2013, it’s last game of the season will be utterly meaningless.

How did Bama do after suffering the Kick Six against Auburn six years ago? Trevor Knight looked like Aaron Rodgers in Oklahoma’s Sugar Bowl win over the Tide.

That was the only bowl game since 2010 for Bama that didn’t have national championship implications.

That 9-3 2010 team showed up in the Capital One Bowl and annihilated Michigan State 49-7, but the 2008 team that got Tebowed in the SEC Championship – after a 12-0 start – didn’t show up against Utah in the 2008 Sugar Bowl.

Which leads to this big problem …

NEXT: Thanks for playing, everyone. It’s been a slice.

BTW, Jake Butt's career NFL stats so far: 8 catches, 85 yards.

Maybe I missed it - I sort of live in a college football haze/bubble - but I just had Chick-fil-A, so the famine didn't seem to show up quite yet.

I don't have a cough or the sniffles, so there doesn't seem to be a whole bunch of pestilence ...

So if I've got this right, Leonard Fournette and Christian McCaffrey skipped their respective bowl games back in 2016, and life still exists and the world hasn't ended?

(Feel free to insert your own joke here about other aspects of 2016.)

We're all past having a problem with top players sitting out bowl games aren't we?

Get ready for a mass exodus of NFL prospects to blow off meaningless bowl games to prepare for the next level - and not risk injury - like we've never seen before.

And it starts with Alabama.

It's not an exaggeration that if the Tide got into the College Football Playoff along with Ohio State, LSU and Clemson, that might be close to 20% of the NFL Draft among those four teams, and definitely that much if you want to throw in Georgia and Oklahoma.

By a rough estimate, and not counting Tua Tagovailoa, Alabama might have at least ten players skipping whatever exhibition game it's going to ...

And it's okay.

The games will still be interesting no matter what. The guys who play in these things are going to give it a push, and sometimes, they might be the better option than NFL talents playing not to get hurt.

There will still be things to bet on and reasons to pay attention to the TV rather than make polite chit-chat at whatever soulless holiday gathering you're forced to be at.

Coaches will leave for other teams, some teams aren't going to be all that interested or sharp, and lots and lots and LOTS of players are going to make the correct business decision. That's the deal now.

And remember, it's not just about the money, it's about actually wanting to have a real pro career, too.

So let's do this. 16 players sat out last bowl season to get ready for the NFL.

I'm going to set the number this time around at 28.5.

NEXT: When your life revolves around college kickers ...

"Never work with animals or children."

No one's really crying all that much for multi-millionaire head coaches who get canned, and then are able to go latch on immediately somewhere else as a highly-paid assistant.

Yes, they have to move their families all around the country, and they're almost never able to settle in at once place, but that's baked into the cake for anyone who chooses this profession.

With all of that said, sometimes, being a major college football head coach suuuuuuuuuucks.

Barry Odom could not be more Missouri.

Great guy, great family, wants to run a program the right way - whatever that means in today's day and age - and he's one of the best defensive minds in football.

His teams improved each year in his first three seasons, and then came 2019, with unfair NCAA sanctions forced on the school to put a cloud over a season that had no carrot at the end of the stick.

QB Kelly Bryant was terrific right up until he got banged up, the second half of the season had four road games in the final six - to go along with a home game against Florida - the offense fell flat, and, all things considered, the year ended with a respectable 6-6 record.

Fired.

Matt Luke could not be more Ole Miss.

Great guy, great family, needed to run the program the right way after the Hugh Freeze era, and he was able to adapt to his personnel on the fly to run offensive coordinator Rich Rodriguez's offense to bust out a devastating ground game.

He had to deal with the aftermath of the NCAA issue and everything that happened under Freeze, this was going to be a bit of a rebuilding year anyway, and out of his eight losses, all of them were against bowl bound teams including LSU, Alabama, Auburn, and Memphis.

All he needed was for WR Elijah Moore to not do his whizzing dog thing, and Ole Miss probably nails the extra point. If the Rebels win in overtime, they finish 5-7, knock rival Mississippi State out of a bowl and to the same 5-7 record, and everyone's happy.

Moore did his thing, kicker gacked the extra point, program now not going in the right direction.

Fired.

You actually could get more USC than Clay Helton, but he's been with the program since 2010.

Great guy, great family, wants to run a program the right way - whatever that means in today's day and age - and he's one of the best offensive minds in football.

He won a Pac-12 title, won a Rose Bowl, and took his team to an 8-4 season - handing Utah its only loss - despite being down to what once was a fourth-string quarterback. With a bowl win he'll have a nice nine-win campaign with a LOADED team coming back in 2020.