Marty McFly, etc.

Hey guys, Luke here. I've got a real legitimate column for you this time, but I want to get a few quick items out of the way first. Here goes:

I'M A SPORTS BETTING GENIUS
I don't know how many of you noticed this, but since it's my duty to spend at least one item in each column promoting my own genius, my Colts minus 7 and the under pick was a stone cold money-maker on Super Bowl Sunday, and netted me 20 bucks from Viddy, as well as the gratification of having successfully avoided all the "Everyone's jumping on the Colts, you just KNOW the Bears are going to come out to play" nonsense that we heard for the two weeks leading up to the game. I mean, seriously, Viddy, can you, in retrospect, justify putting your money on Rex Grossman? And I'm even a Florida guy.

WE MUST PROTECT THIS HOUSE PLANE
Yesterday I was on a flight from Dallas to Jacksonville and the guy sitting across the aisle from me had the Under Armor symbol tattooed on his hand. I texted RT to this effect, and his response had me laughing all the way past security: "What's the last thing you hear before you get off the plane? CLICK CLACK!" Click clack indeed, RT. Nicely done.

VIDDY'S GOT A SMALL, FLACCID... MEMORY
Nice column last week, Viddy. I haven't seen so much revisionist history since my freshman-year girlfriend decided to rewrite the chapter of our biography called "The Part Where I'm a Crazy Bitch and Deserved What I Got" and replaced it with the chapter called "All You Ever Do Is Hurt Me and I Think All Our Mutual Friends Should Know About It." The truth is, Brett Favre ranked in the top 5 in interceptions again (Borderline Pro Bowler? Yeah, and I'm borderline screwing Scarlett Johannson.), the Cowboys switched horses midstream and honked out of the playoffs in the first game on the back of their "thoroughbred" Tony Romo, SMU gift-wrapped a win to UNT of all teams (To rid the Mustangs of their bowl-eligibility, no less), and I predicted Bobby Petrino would get an NFL head coaching gig several months before he did. It's safe to say I've got a comfortable lead on Mr. Vidrik in the prognostication department.


But I didn't come here to pat myself on the back or squabble with Viddy about who's the smart one (me) or the dumb one (him). I came here to talk about one of the smartest and shrewdest moves of the NFL offseason so far. I'm not talking about Jerry Jones's botched-up Jason Garrett/Wade Phillips thing, or the fact that the Cardinals of all teams managed to seduce both Ken Whisenhunt AND Russ Grimm away from Pittsburgh. I'm talking about San Diego Chargers GM A.J. Smith and owner Dean Spanos waiting until last night to give Marty Schottenheimer the ax. Happy Valentine's Day, Marty! I hope you like unemployment checks!


SCHOTT THROUGH THE HEART

Let me say first that I love Marty Schottenheimer. I love that his teams are always the strongest, the most physical, the most violent, and the nastiest. I love that he has a playbook 4 inches thick with only 20 passing plays. I loved it when he told Eli Manning to shove it up his ass at the 2004 draft, and I loved it when he told his own general manager the same thing in 2005. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if Schottenheimer came up with that weird dance Shawne Merriman does when he gets finished giving opposing QBs swirlies in the locker room and stealing their steroid money. I even started to write a column about how firing Schottenheimer was the dumbest of the very few dumb moves Smith and Spanos have made this decade, and that waiting to do it until all the other head coaching vacancies in the league have been filled serves only to handcuff their coaching search to a pitifew bunch of barely-qualified retreads and coin-flips. And then I realized that while all of those things may be true (and they probably are; as evidenced earlier in this column, I am rarely wrong), the Chargers may be pulling off the coup of the century, and I'll tell you why.

First, what would the Chargers have gained by firing Schottenheimer hours after the Chargers' playoff collapse at home against New England? Well, the right to interview stud assistants Cam Cameron and Wade Phillips before they shipped off to Miami and Dallas, respectively, as well as maybe a shot at some of the other coordinators who've since signed on to new staffs elsewhere. Had San Diego axed Schotty back in January, Marty's successor almost certainly would've come from the duo of Cameron or Phillips, and if not there, at least from the same group of big-name assistants currently filling spots on other teams. The pressure from the San Diego community alone would've been overwhelming, and Smith and Spanos realized that pressing on with a Schottenheimer staff, minus Schottenheimer, would be like taking the wheels off to spite the wagon, and then having to drag the damn thing, minus wheels, down the Oregon Trail.

So they wait til the guys they don't want to hire anyway are gone (I mean, if they wanted to hire them, they would've fired Schotty in January, right?), and then give Marty the boot, successfully covering their own asses with the local community and freeing them to go interview a candidate who would represent a legitimate fresh start for a program which clearly has the talent to win games, but not the ability to see eye-to-eye from the field to the front office. The four leading candidates for the San Diego job are Ron Rivera (the best of all the coordinator candidates, and a guy who would've been hired months ago had he not taken his team, based solely on the strength of his defensive prowess, no less, to that little game we call the Super Bowl), Mike Singletary (yeah, THAT Mike Singletary, another up-and-comer whose personnel mentality can be molded by Smith), Rex Ryan (anybody else seeing the defensive trend here in the candidacy?), and Norv Turner, who satisfies the Reverse Rooney Rule, which mandates that each team, in addition to interviewing a minority candidate, also interview an old white guy who can't seriously be considered an improvement over the old white guy the team just fired.

Now I'm not saying A.J. Smith had this all figured out back in December, but that lame-duck "contract extension" the Chargers offered Schottenheimer after the season ended (which he ballsily declined -- I love Schottenheimer) certainly smacked of something's-up-ness. And when the sand settles in San Diego, the Chargers will have gotten the best of all possible deals for their Tyrannosaur owner/GM combo: the extraction of the proverbial thorn in their side, and a young, impressionable (and certainly talented) coach, who won't try nearly as hard (or as successfully) as Schottenheimer to wrestle decision-making control away from the front office.

In the end, the whole arrangement is like finally breaking up with the girl you've been meaning to dump for a year and just can't convince yourself to leave. The minute you do, you realize you could've been sleeping with hotter, younger, more adventurous girls the whole time, and you're kicking yourself for not doing it sooner. Congrats to Spanos and Smith on all the hot, young ass they're about to get (figuratively). And Marty, we still love you here at TPC. Enjoy whatever crappy broadcast/analyst/talking head gig you get for the next year until you (and Cowher, your protege) both come back in 2008 to remind us what football is really about: the violent desire to dominate the guy across from you on every play.

And also, steroids.