Oops!

Editor's note: What follows is the official TPC retraction and apology for predictions contained in last week's column. We humbly ask your forgiveness.


I WAS OFFICIALLY WAY WRONG

Somewhere in Dallas, Jerry Jones is breathing (and by "breathing," I obviously mean "struggling to inhale, with the help of a cornucopia of specially-designed medical equipment, through a fully rhinoplastied nasal cavity made entirely out of silicone and the spines of unborn babies") a huge sigh of relief. He's breathing deep and relaxing, because for exactly one week, his hiring of Wade Phillips was the least inspired, most ho-hum and painfully banal coaching hire of the year. And now the brilliant folks over at the San Diego Chargers, who just last week I extolled for being the wizards behind a masterful execution of coach-firing strategy, have proven themselves to be even less inspired, more doltish and d'oh!-worthy than Jones and the Cowboys, not wizards at all, but crotchety old men behind a green curtain, and the Tin Man they've decided to appoint as their new head coach is none other than Cowboys cast-off Norv Turner.

Yes, folks, Norv Turner is the new answer to the trivia question "Which of the following coaching hires of 2006 yielded the least in terms of fan enthusiasm, player anticipation, and overall results in the short term for which the coach was employed?". Come to think of it, he might be the only possible answer in the multiple choice version of that question, the easiest $100 question in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire history. And yeah, I know that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was a passe reference like 5 years ago, so shut up. The real question is, how does San Diego even begin to justify this to their fans? The good people of San Diego should take a break from surfing and twirling their hair to stand up and walk out of the city in protest (just don't walk towards Tijuana; I've heard terrible stories about what goes on down there).

What's worst is the squandered opportunity this all represents. The Chargers were poised to make a bold and brilliant hire. Rex Ryan was right there. Mike Singletary was offering himself to them. So they went with a guy who's 58-82-1 in his head coaching career, with 1 playoff win to his name. Here's some trivia for you, courtesy of the Elias Sports Bureau. Among head coaches who have coached three or more teams, only three have entered their third stint with a worse winning percentage than Turner: Marion Campbell (Falcons, 1987), Mike McCormack (Seahawks, 1982), and Roy Andrews (Cleveland Bulldogs, 1927). You want to know why you've never heard of them?

Because they never should've been hired a SECOND time, let alone a THIRD.

Because their coaching resumes, put together, couldn't get them a job parking cars outside the Hall of Fame.

Because the majority of NFL owners and General Managers aren't so monumentally dense as to hire a coach who has done nothing short of prove, elsewhere, that he's fundamentally incapable of winning.


Really, San Diego? Really, A.J. Smith and Dean Spanos? I keep waiting for the ESPN ticker to run across the bottom of whatever painfully boring college basketball game I'm half-watching at the time and say, "Haha just kidding. They really hired Ron Rivera."

Oh wait, they did hire Ron Rivera. As a linebackers coach. Talk about getting the shaft. This guy interviews for nine head coaching vacancies (every vacancy in the last two years, save for the Oakland Raiders' vacancy this year, for which no coach, not even Norv Turner, is bad enough), and doesn't get any of them, an oddity that has to be contributed at least partially to the fact that teams would have had to wait a month to hire him because he's helping take his team to the Super Bowl. And then his own team doesn't re-hire him as a coordinator. If I were this guy, I'd be locked up in a room somewhere muttering curse words, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. If I were Ron Rivera, I'd be too busy trying to invent a time machine to even bother coaching Shawne Merriman and the rest of San Diego's steroid-fueled linebackers.

So this is my official apology, to the loyal readership of Two-Point Conversion (Yeah, that means you, mom; thanks for reading): I'm sorry I got duped by Smith and Spanos. I thought they had something great cooking. Literally any of the potential hires other than Turner would've corroborated my suspicion, and you wouldn't have to be reading this right now.

There, I apologized to my fans. San Diego, it's your turn now.