Sherrone Moore woke up yesterday thinking about third-down packages for the Citrus Bowl and went to bed having been fired by Michigan and arrested. That’s a character arc usually reserved for Netflix documentaries or the uncle who insists on carving the Christmas turkey after six bourbons. But this plot twist came courtesy of Moore’s alleged affair with a Michigan staffer — a violation that sent the university into crisis mode and Wolverine fans into the five stages of grief in under 20 minutes.
But Moore isn’t the first coach to detour into the swamp of “unsavoury actions.” And let’s be honest, being the head coach of a college football blueblood isn’t just a job — it’s a statewide superstition. At schools like Michigan, Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, or LSU, the head coach isn’t just the face of the program; he is the program.
In the NFL, the quarterback is the franchise.
In college, the quarterback is temporary. The head coach is forever — or at least until he loses to Purdue or gets caught doing… well, this.
College head coaches are often treated with more reverence than the state’s governor and are expected to behave better than the local pastor — which is saying something, especially in the American South, where churches and football stadiums compete for who can pack more people into the same amount of guilt.
But here’s the real question no one touches with a 10-foot pole:
What if the problem isn’t that college coaches influence young athletes… but that young athletes are influencing the coaches?
Think about it: these coaches spend their entire adult lives surrounded by 19-year-old elite athletes who radiate bravado like it’s an energy source. Testosterone in the weight room. Swagger at practice. That absolute, unearned confidence only a 20-year-old who can bench-press a truck and eat 7,000 calories a day can possess.
It’s entirely possible some coaches eventually inhale enough of that “frat-house fog” to regress a little themselves.
At some point, you have to wonder whether the nonstop exposure to locker-room swagger just scrambles the adult brain. Coaches go in thinking they’re CEOs of a multimillion-dollar enterprise and come out acting like the world’s oldest pledge brothers. It’s like secondhand immaturity — you hang around enough 19-year-old gladiators and suddenly you’re making decisions with the impulse control of a freshman on his first night out.
Maybe the solution is simple: before a rising coach gets a massive college job, send him to the NFL for two seasons of dealing with 34-year-old linemen who complain about their mortgage rates. A little real-world adulthood might save a whole lot of scandals.
