It's enough that you ask a head football coach to win and recruit blue chip players.  It's enough to ask him to make a bowl game every year and possibly compete for a national title.  Pile on fund raisers, time with key alums and rubber chicken circuit dinners and you've got a man who has a stress level higher than anything you can imagine.

Pile on asshat parents whose sole mission in life is to promote their precious snowflake so he can play on Sunday and you've got a coach on his way out the door.

Surely, you remember Mitch Mustain and his mommy greasing the skids for Houston Nutt at Arkansas.  Now, can we have a round of applause for Cullen Harper and his daddy?

It's rare that a coach who has been at a university for ten years "resigns" after six games and a 3-3 record as Tommy Bowden did.  Most coaches don't quit and it seems more spin than reality that Tommy Bowden would. While Bowden certainly looked like a candidate for the unemployment line at season's end, his leaving now doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  Unless you read between the lines.

For a college football player to say his coach "got what he deserved" by losing his job is ludicrous.  But it does say something about how Tommy Bowden ran his team.  For the kid's father to say "it was karma" after his son was benched pretty much sums up who is running the team.

We can only surmise that after Bowden made the decision to bench Harper, he and his daddy made a beeline to the AD's office and threatened a mutiny.  Confronted with going back on his word and starting Harper and firing his offensive coordinator, Rob Spence, Bowden either refused to change his mind or just flat out quit. 

Tommy Bowden is a lot of things, but Tommy Tuberville isn't one of them.

To hear these kids talk about their coach with the total lack of respect they did and then to hear parents pile it on makes you wonder who is really running the Clemson football program.  Sure, there are boosters and contributors, but they actually do something.  Parents guard their kids and make sure they get developed so that they will play on Sunday, giving the parent a cushy retirement.  For these young men to be as disrespectful as they appear to be is alarming.  Especially when the guy has been a head coach for ten years.

It's hard for me to believe that Tommy Bowden couldn't earn any respect from them. 

In the final analysis, Bowden's inability to get Clemson over the hump, the bitching of pampered players and Bowden's refusal to fire his staff in mid-season led to his leaving Clemson.  All qualities of a good man who perhaps was done in by his own sense of decency.

Memo to Dabo Sweeny: Watch you back.  And make sure you introduce yourself to Cullen Harper's dad.  I'm sure he has a few plays drawn up for you to study.