Bud Foster Wants A Job, Any Job

Bud Foster's presence on the sideline at Virginia Tech has gotten progressively more inexplicable every year he turns in a top 10 defense, as he's done each of the past five years. Foster and punt blocks are the whole program at Virginia Tech, after all, and Tech has ascended to the top of an admittedly short mountain in the ACC.

It's a persistent mystery that no one's willing to take a chance on him. Imagine Bud Foster freed of the Bryan Stinespring shackles, free to chose an offensive coordinator with verve and moxie and the ability to recruit a quarterback capable of completing more than half of his passes. Sounds pretty good. Someone should totally try that, yet no one has.

And it's not like Foster's not trying to find himself a head job:

Foster interviewed at Clemson and Virginia when those jobs were last open. He has said that he tried unsuccessfully to get the jobs at North Carolina State and Illinois when Tom O'Brien and Ron Zook landed those jobs.

Al Groh was an NFL head coach and an alum, so that hire makes sense on the surface. Tom O'Brien was a successful coach at a peer institution. But someone gave a who-dat wide receivers coach named "Dabo" the Clemson job over Bud Foster. This explains much about the state of Clemson football over the past 20 years. And Ron Zook. Ron Zook. That is all. Ron Zook.

Stymied in his attempts to get a job in the BCS, Foster is stooping lower. In the aftermath of the season's first firing, Foster has taken the unusual step of talking about the job opening at Memphis directly:

"That might be a job I might be interested in," Foster said Tuesday night when asked for his take on the opening, adding later, "I think there's a lot of things that are attractive about it."

Memphis, for its part, is looking at luminaries like Terry Bowden, though the Memphis Commercial-Appeal's list of hot coordinators does contain a number of logical choices like Florida DC Charlie Strong -- another defensive coordinator fated to be the subject of "why won't anyone hire this guy?" stories -- Oklahoma State co-OC Gunter Brewer and itinerant Auburn offense resurrection genius Gus Malzahn. They have not contacted Bud Foster.

Well, no more, Memphis: In Soviet Russia, Bud Foster contacts you.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.