The Falcons Couldn’t Even Wait For Black Monday

Black Monday used to be a sacred thing in the NFL, the traditional day for coaches who couldn't fix the poor choices of their bosses to be fired by those same bosses. But like everything else, it is a tradition often honored in the breach, and already the revolution against the ritual employment slaughter has begun in England, where both Enzo Maresca at Chelsea and Ruben Amorim at Manchester United have decided to force their own firings in the first five days of the new year to get that sweet, sweet severance pay from the people they flipped off in press conferences. Now that's panache.

That's the cutting edge of coach firings, even more than the new college football tradition of hiring someone for huge amounts of cash, turning on him, and paying him every dime as he drives off laughing at the drunken-sailors-on-leave who brought him in because he knows that they're going to do the same thing again in two more years, probably in hopes of hiring Lane Kiffin.