The Detroit Tigers did not fire general manager Brad Ausmus.
They just decided not to renew his contract.
Also out: Nebraska athletic director Shawn Eichorst.
Nebraska’s football team is currently 1-2.
Archive for the ‘Firings’ Category
Tiger, tiger, burning bright…
Friday, September 22nd, 2017…until morale improves.
Friday, September 15th, 2017Two games into the season, the Cincinnati Bengals (currently 0-2) have fired Ken Zampese, their offensive coordinator.
Smells like desperation, doesn’t it?
Hookers, no blow (yet) watch.
Friday, July 21st, 2017Hugh Freeze, the football coach at Ole Miss, resigned “effective immediately” last night.
If he resigned, why am I spinning this as a firing? ESPN:
Clarion-Ledger:
“Moral turpitude” is another of those phrases that I love. But I digress: what happened here?
From what I’ve been able to put together reading the press coverage, Houston Nutt, the former Ole Miss coach, is suing the university. As part of the discovery in his lawsuit, his attorney was able to get six days worth of Freeze’s phone records from his university issued cellphone. Freeze was allowed to redact his personal calls from the records, but did not redact what’s being described as a “one minute” call to a 313 area code number “associated with websites that advertise a female escort business based in Tampa, Florida”.
Freeze’s initial explanation was that it was a wrong number call. That’s plausible to me, given how short the call was. But apparently the university dug deeper into Freeze’s phone records:
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So that’s $12.15 million down the drain. Why? Because a highly paid football coach wasn’t smart enough to use a burner phone for his calls to escort services.
Obits and firings: April 14, 2017.
Friday, April 14th, 2017Dan Rooney, of Pittsburgh Steelers fame, and former ambassador to Ireland.
As Lawrence noted in a comment yesterday, it looks like Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam’s death is being considered a suicide. I didn’t want to say so at the time, but that’s what I was afraid of.
Some wisdom from other, better people:
@Popehat "That means nothing."
It doesn't take much to hide depression, especially when hiding it seems of paramount importance.— Angela Kershner (@AngieNK) April 13, 2017
/3 I've written about it before. about what it feels like, about how to seek help, and how to help others. https://t.co/Xz2YLNPTN6
— ReaccomodatedPopehat (@Popehat) April 13, 2017
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
Firings after the jump.
Obits and firings: March 10, 2017.
Friday, March 10th, 2017Sweet Angel Divine, aka “Mother Divine”, passed away a week ago Saturday.
Mrs. Divine was the widow of Father Divine:
One of the best things in the St. Clair McKelway collection Reporting at Wit’s End is his profile (with A. J. Liebling) of Father Divine at, more or less, the height of his empire. “Who Is This King of Glory?” might be available online, too, but when I went to the New Yorker website, it looked like you needed a subscription to read it there. In any case, I commend the McKelway/Liebling profile to your attention.
Scot McCloughan out as general manager of the Redskins.
And the Brockster out as quarterback in Houston. Speculation (both in the sports media and from people I know in Cleveland) is that the Browns aren’t going to keep him, either.
Edited to add: Well. The Browns have cut Bobby ThreeSticks now. And nobody thinks His Brockness is going to be asked to hang around. So who’s quarterbacking come fall? The season is closer than you think…,
artfirings.com
Wednesday, March 1st, 2017Can’t get no sleeves for my records, can’t get no lasers for my shoes…
Wednesday, February 1st, 2017The St. Louis Blues, who are a professional hockey team in the NHL, fired Hitchcock.
Actually, that would be Ken Hitchcock.
(Subject line hattip. You know, for a while I thought many of the songs on Brothers In Arms were massively overplayed. I’m starting to come around to the idea that it may be a classic now.)
Obit watch and norts spews: January 23, 2017.
Monday, January 23rd, 2017Your Miguel Ferrer roundup: NYT. A/V Club.
Obligatory: he was one of the best things about “Crossing Jordan”, the “Quincy” of the 2000 era except that it sucked.
And yesterday was a bad day for baseball: Kansas City Royals pitcher Yordano Ventura and former infielder Andy Marte were both killed in separate car crashes in the Dominican Republic. More from the NYT.
Also for the record: Ryan Grigson out as general manager of the Colts, though they are apparently keeping Chuck Pagano as coach.
And no, PeyPey is not being considered.
Firings watch.
Monday, January 9th, 2017You may remember Gregg Williams as the former defensive coordinator for the LA Rams, who started looking for a new job after Jeff Fisher got fired. Or you may remember him before that as a defensive assistant for the Tennessee Titans. Or you may remember him before that as “the guy who got indefinitely suspended by the NFL as part of Bountygate”.
And the University of California at Berkeley fired head football coach Sonny Dykes. I think I speak for many people when I say, “UC-Berkeley has a football team? Isn’t that just an expression of toxic masculinity?”
Dykes was 19-30 over four seasons.
Firings watch.
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2017Chan Gailey was not fired as offensive coordinator of the New York Jets.
He retired. And this seems like a legit retirement: His Channess is 65, and supposedly told the team of his plans at the start of this past season.
However, the Jets did fire five assistant coaches.
Tracy Claeys out as head coach of the University of Minnesota. This is interesting: the team was 9-4 this season, he was 11-8 overall, and won both of the bowl games his team played in during his tenure.
So why fire him? It looks like this is more fallout from the sexual assault issue, which you may remember from mid-December. If you don’t remember it, briefly: ten players were suspended from the team for an alleged sexual assault. The other members of the team sided with the suspended players, “boycotted all team activities for two days”, and threatened not to participate in the Holiday Bowl. Claeys publically supported the players and their actions:
He later sort of walked back that cat and promised he’d give $50,000 “to help support victims of sexual assault”. But it still left him kind of crosswise with the administration, and I guess they decided that this was something up with which they would not put.
Blood in the streets!
Monday, January 2nd, 2017This used to be the “Bloody Monday” thread, where I covered all the firings after the last day of the NFL regular season. But we’ve reached the point now where teams aren’t waiting for Monday to start firing people.
For example, general manager Trent Baalke and head coach Chip Kelly are both out in San Francisco. The official announcement came after the game, but there was widespread “speculation” that they were both out: Baalke actually appeared on San Francisco radio before the games and confirmed his firing.
San Francisco was 2-14 this year.
(On a side note, is it just me, or are San Francisco’s newspapers mostly really bad? On a second side note, Gregg Easterbrook would be totally insufferable, if he’d been writing TMQ this year.)
Speaking of bad teams, San Diego fired head coach Mike McCoy, which is a good start. Now if they’d just fire the entire rest of the team.
McCoy was 28-38 in four years with the team, and 5-11 this year. You may recall that San Diego gave hapless the Cleveland Browns their only win this season.
This is not a firing, but worth noting: Gary Kubiak is out as head coach in Denver. This seems to be tied to his personal health issues, which I’m really not comfortable discussing or speculating on. I hope he comes back at some point.
There’s speculation that Sean Payton may be moving to the Rams, which should be interesting. Do the Saints want to keep him? If so, why? It seems to me that since their one Super Bowl win, the Saints have been a giant ball of disappointment: almost as if the football gods were out to get them for Bountygate. Is Payton a good coach? Can he do something with the Rams? Or did he just get lucky once?
I’ll try to post updates here if anybody else gets axed today.
Edited to add: more from the “not quite a firing, but” department: Lane Kiffin will be leaving Alabama before the national championship game. It’s not quite a firing because he’d already signed on as head coach of Florida Atlantic, but the general expectation seemed to be that he’d at least hang around for the title game. However, there were complaints about the Lanester showing up late for events: it kind of sounds like Bama got tired of his (stuff) and suggested he leave now.
There are rumors that Jim Irsay may clean house in Indianapolis, but nothing definite yet. Chuck Pagano just held a press conference and said he hadn’t talked to Irsay, and that he expected to be back; I’m sure Irsay is filled with joy at hearing this.
From the firings beat.
Wednesday, December 28th, 2016Missed this one on Monday: Bob Diaco out as head coach of the University of Connecticut football team. 11-26 over three seasons, and had his contract extended in May.
Bob Bradley, who is American, was fired yesterday as the manager of Swansea City, which is apparently an English Premier League soccer club with American owners. I gather he was the first American to manage a Premier League club, and lasted 11 games before being fired, but I don’t follow soccer at all, so this mostly just baffles and confuses me.
Obit watches, firings, ocelots, and other stuff: December 27, 2016.
Tuesday, December 27th, 2016I think I’m going to wait until tomorrow to try to pull together the Carrie Fisher obits. Not that it was entirely unexpected (though I think we were all hoping for the best for her), but I feel better letting things sit for a day.
By way of Lawrence: Richard “Watership Down” Adams. A couple of pithy quotes:
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“If I saw a rabbit in my garden I’d shoot it,” he once said.
By way of my beloved sister-in-law: Vera Rubin, noted female astronomer.
Rex and Rob Ryan both OUT in Buffalo.
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Babou (either one), call your office, please.
Meanwhile, the BBC reports that the cheetah is “rapidly heading towards extinction”. While sad, this comes as no great shock to us…because, as we all know, cheetahs never win.
This is kind of cool, at least to me: a homebrew short-range transmitter that sends out time signals on the WWVB 60 KHz frequency. Why would you want to do this, other than for the challenge?
Well, that was fast.
Sunday, December 18th, 2016The Jacksonville Jaguars have already fired head coach Gus Bradley.
But at least they let him take the plane home.
He was 14-48 overall with Jacksonville:
By season, the Jaguars were 4-12, 3-13, 5-11 and 2-12 under Bradley.
Your NFL loser update: week 15, 2016
Sunday, December 18th, 2016NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Cleveland
That takes care of one of the two games I was most concerned about. Still to come:
- San Diego in Cleveland
- at Pittsburgh
I’m worried a little about the San Diego game, but I’m pretty confident in Pittsburgh’s ability to beat the Browns at home.
In semi-related news, ESPN is claiming that Rex Ryan is going to be shown the door in Buffalo. It sounds like this isn’t going to happen until Bloody Monday, though.
In other news, the Texans benched their starting quarterback, Brock Osweiler (seriosuly) in favor of Beat PunchBeef Tom Savage (also seriously). Also also seriously, Savage actually engineered a comeback for the Texans, who ended up winning 21-20 over Jacksonville. Granted, Jacksonville is 2-12. so it isn’t like the Texans were playing the first team here, but Brock turned the ball over twice and put Jacksonville up 13-0 before he was benched.
(Isn’t “Brock” one of the most preppy names you can think of? “Hi, Brock, it’s Biff. I was going down to the club with Muffy and Buffy, and wanted to know if you’d like to join us. Maybe we could play doubles and have some white wine spritzers after? Sure, that would be swell, Brock. See you there.” On the other hand, “Tom Savage” strikes me as the kind of name a quarterback should have. It’d also be a great name for a series of children’s books: “Tom Savage and the Improbable Comeback”, “Tom Savage and the New Offensive Coordinator”. “Tom Savage and the Contract Negotiation”…)