Gene DeFilippo Has An Itchy Trigger Finger

Boston College athletic director Gene DeFilippo must be a big Dirty Harry fan, because there's apparently nothing he loves more than blowing his coaches' heads off with preposterously large guns after being given little or no provocation. He terminated football coach Jeff Jagondzinski, then 20-8 in two seasons at BC, for having the temerity to interview for an NFL job. And now he's offed basketball coach Al Skinner for missing the NCAA tournament for... uh... one consecutive year. Punks do not feel lucky on The Heights.

It would be one thing if either firing came paired with an obviously attractive replacement candidate. Schools occasionally push fledgling coaches out of the nest when Urban Meyer's hanging around in the Mountain West or John Calipari's looking to blow town before the fuzz catches up with him. BC had no such candidates. The football coach is now an elderly guy with zero previous head coaching experience who will probably retire in the next few years, occasioning another coaching search that will either land on an old retread no one wants or a guy who will have some success, sniff a higher-profile job, and get canned like Jags.

Meanwhile, Tommy Amaker(!) is being mentioned as an attractive candidate to replace Skinner. Amaker has made one tournament in thirteen years as a head coach. Boston College blog Eagle in Atlanta dismisses that possibility but the rest of the list consists of guys who came up under Skinner and apparently won't be considered strongly, guys who aren't coming (BC alum Bruce Pearl most prominently) and the head coaches at Cornell and Richmond.

Boston College fired a guy who made seven tourneys in ten years after building BC up from a disaster zone for this? Neither Steve Donahue (Cornell) or Chris Mooney (Richmond) has any experience at a major conference level or operated at a relative deficit to his conference peers, as they would certainly do at Boston College. They're complete wildcards who would be extraordinarily lucky to have the same level of success Skinner-BC's most accomplished coach in their history- had only a year ago.

While Skinner was aging and the program had started slipping, an athletic department with a little patience or loyalty would have given Skinner another year or two worth of rope. Tom O'Brien's then-inexplicable decision to jump from a perpetually nine-win BC program to a basketcase like NC State now looks like a guy who was either pushed or saw DeFilippo polishing his gun daily and read the writing on the wall. He's not exactly safe with the Wolfpack, but if he'd gone 16-21 the last three years at Boston College, the press conference announcing his firing would look like the final scene in Scarface.

Word to wildly successful BC hockey coach Jerry York: wear a vest and try not to lose to Miami in the Frozen Four.

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