I endorsed Ron Turner's hiring as Illinois football coach eight years ago, so it pains me now to have to recommend his firing.
Like everything else, this is about me.
I need my college degree to be worth something again. I need more professional prestige than the Fighting Illini are providing. I need to quit having conversations like the following.
"Where did you go to school?" somebody asks.
"Avondale," I say.
"Sounds like some exclusive private school out East?"
"No, it's public and Northwest."
"Oregon? Washington state? Somewhere out there?"
"Uh-uh. Northwest Side of Chicago. Logan Square."
"I didn't know there was a college around there."
"College? Avondale is my grammar school."
That's what it has come to. I'm reluctant to tell people where I went to college, or high school for that matter.
Schurz High, at Milwaukee and Addison, home of the mighty-mighty Bulldogs, compiled a 2-6 record that made them less than mighty-mighty this football season.
Illinois, down in Champaign-Urbana, sports a football program that is 3-17 in its last 20, owns a 13-game Big Ten losing streak and was crushed 45-0 last weekend at Minnesota, of all places.
This not only makes for awkward saloon small talk, it totally devalues the worth of my diplomas. If Avondale punks out in sports, I'm going to have to move down the educational chain and tell people I went to Logan Nursery School.
I mean, just imagine if I went into a job interview this morning and some creepy editor - pretty much a redundancy - perused my resume.
"So," he might proceed to say, "why do you consider yourself qualified to work for this newspaper?"
"Well," I'd say, "I ranked in the top 10 percent of my high-school class and have a journalism degree from the University of Illinois."
"Don't both those schools have horrible football teams?"
"Sort of, but Illinois is one of the country's premier state universities."
"Yeah, right. They just lost by 45 to Minnesota. Sorry, we can't use you."
A good guess is the unemployment rate among Illinois grads soon will be double the national average. Let's face it, all anybody knows about or cares about higher education is how any given university does in football and basketball.
No wonder Florida fired Ron Zook on Monday. Alums everywhere are judged less by their grade-point averages than by the school's won-loss records.
"It says here you flunked out of Oklahoma in the first semester of the year the Sooners won the national championship, is that correct?"
"Yes, sir, it is."
"Great, can you start Monday?"
It's easy to see why I'm worried about all those French-major former classmates of mine who are out there looking for work.
Heck, they'll be lucky if our alma mater doesn't lose its accreditation by season's end and our diplomas don't wind up being worth less than the paper on which a linebacker's transcripts are altered.
Unless Turner is fired, and the Fighting Illini start winning some football games, and all our degrees improve in value ... Oh, what the heck, did I mention I have a degree in recess from Avondale?
