Just a few weeks after saying that Marty Schottenheimer would finish out the final year of his contract with the San Diego Chargers, team president Dean Spanos fired the coach citing a need to “change this untenable situation.” I had guessed (along with pretty much anyone who follows football) that Marty would be given his walking papers at the end of the season and was surprised when he was given the reprieve.

Schottenheimer had signaled an unwillingness to extend his coaching contract for the final option year, and now he has been on the receiving end of a painful vote of no confidence. This can’t be a happy time for a coach who just guided his team to a 14-2 season.

Although I assumed that this would happen, I still think that Spanos made the wrong choice. Unless he has a brilliant replacement coach lined up, he is gambling a proven winner on the unknown. That doesn’t sound like a great strategy to continued success. Marty is a proven loser in the playoffs, it’s true, but he’s also one of the few coaches who has been a winner almost everywhere he has gone.

I can’t help but be curious about who will take Marty’s place. Whoever it is will be playing the Broncos twice a year and I can’t help but hope that he doesn’t manage the team quite as well as Schottenheimer did.

Read the story.

And, speaking of losing a job, it’s fun to watch the Edwards campaign writhing around so early in the game. Hiring a blogger like Amanda Marcotte, who was guaranteed to alienate religious and moderate voters, is really its own rewards. Whoever made the original hire made a blunder that probably cost Edwards any chance of success in his second run at the presidency--at very least, it made success a whole hell of a lot harder than it needed to be.

There is a certain amount of honor in her quitting, though. Her continued presence could only have made the damage even worse.

Fun, huh?

Check out the story at Cadillac Tight. He has all the good links, too.