The sharpest analysis of Joe Biden’s current situation is this line from Canadian journalist Evan Scrimshaw: “A lot of people have never seen a sports team that was very obviously about to fire their coach and it shows.”
Indeed, the Democratic Party is a team in disarray, but one from not just any sport. To really comprehend what Biden is doing right now, you must understand a uniquely American pastime in particular—a sport in which aging coaches get stuck in their ways and frequently set their teams back years, not because they have been given the consent of the masses but because the few people who could tell them to get lost either fail or refuse to have difficult conversations. Joe Biden is now a college football coach at the end of his run.
These likely last days of Biden’s presidency—whether because he steps off the ticket or because he simply loses to Donald Trump—have taken on an eerily similar feel to the one around a football program in a death spiral. A successful college program is like a successful White House in two critical ways: First, the top people know that loose lips sink ships. Second, maintaining the reputation of the guy in charge is paramount. A well-oiled White House leaks only when it is strategic. A strong college football program doesn’t let every fight at practice seep out to the local beat reporters. If the assistant coaches think the head coach has made a series of terrible mistakes, they don’t tell everyone. The head man still needs to recruit, just as the president of the United States still needs to get people to vote for him.
But when a coach’s tenure is irretrievably cooked, message discipline is the first thing to go. LSU’s Ed Orgeron won a national championship in 2019. The next two seasons, the program declined, and by October 2021, people connected to the program had loaded up reporters’ notebooks with stories of Orgeron’s personal life falling apart and the coach making crude sexual remarks to a stranger at a gas station. At precisely the same moment, LSU announced that Orgeron would be fired at season’s end. When it became clear in 2022 that Auburn was jonesing to can underachieving head coach Bryan Harsin, there was seemingly no one in Alabama who wouldn’t gossip about Harsin’s behind-the-scenes failings. Auburn finally got around to firing the coach after some boosters had tried to exile him months earlier.
Political reporters have never regarded the upper ranks of Biden’s White House or his social circle as leaky, a marked departure from the backbiting days of the Trump administration. “As tight as it gets” is one description I’ve heard of Biden’s team. “Insanely battened down the entire time” is another. That has changed rapidly in the aftermath of the big, bad debate. Biden’s mental decline is now a subject that people who know him can’t seem to shut up about, albeit mostly under the cover of anonymity. Gradually, Democratic members of Congress have gotten more comfortable calling for his resignation. The establishment Democrats putting their names to these calls remind me of the Texas A&M booster and regent who called for head coach Kevin Sumlin’s ouster after a brutal loss in 2017’s season opener. “In my view, he should go now,” the Aggie bigwig said. Not three months later, A&M fired Sumlin.
In both a campaign under fire and a college football program losing too many games, the task of fighting gravity falls to public relations staffers. The New York Times reported that Biden’s aides issued prewritten questions to two of his recent radio interviewers, giving Biden a road map to what the reporters would ask. That’s a major journalistic breach on the radio hosts’ part, but it wouldn’t be unusual in college football, in which coaches typically make their own weekly radio appearances. The only tough questions they face on those programs are from disgruntled fans who somehow slip through the call screeners. (Who could forget Clemson’s Dabo Swinney getting into verbal combat with a fan known only as Tyler from Spartanburg?)
Faced with his own inability to either win games or get swing-state polls moving in his direction, the boss chooses to recast his leadership as a morality play. What if Trump is elected and Biden’s catastrophic warnings about a second Trump term come to pass? “As long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” Biden says. The Tennessee Volunteers failed to contend for an SEC championship under coach Butch Jones, but the media reporting on Jones’ shortcomings failed to account for a different title his team did win. “They’ve won the biggest championship,” Jones said in 2016. “That’s the championship of life.” One year later, Tennessee fired the coach of life’s champions.
Biden can’t exactly be fired, given that he’s already “won” the Democrats’ “primaries” of 2024. Plenty of legendary coaches have been effectively impossible to fire too, and their programs have paid varying prices for the coaches’ refusal to give up the ghost. Bobby Bowden made Florida State into a national power in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Bowden was 70 when he won his second national title in 1999. He coached 10 more years after that, gradually declining in his job and letting FSU’s recruiting slip. The school could never bring itself to officially can Bowden, though it eventually found no other option than to nebulously shove him out. “Fired might be a little too strong,” Bowden said afterward. “Pushed out ain’t bad. I was pushed out, no doubt about it. I didn’t want but one more year. Gosh, I’m 80.”
Four years after getting Bowden out, the Seminoles were back on top, with his successor, Jimbo Fisher, leading the program to another title. Bowden’s legacy is lucky that the next guy turned things around so well, taking the wreckage of a 7–6 team and reasonably quickly nursing it back to a 14–0 record. The best thing a coach can do for his legacy is to not just win but pass off a team in good health. The entire state of Nebraska adores former coach Bob Devaney, and only some of that is because Devaney took over a mediocre program and delivered the Cornhuskers their first national titles, in 1970 and ’71. Devaney’s legend is much stronger because he retired with the Huskers still a national contender and passed off the program to his own assistant coach, Tom Osborne, who delivered three more titles himself. (Osborne later became a Republican congressman, furthering the fusion between college ball and electoral politics.)
Biden wants the world to believe that the pundits, not the people, have counted him out. But a leader on the hot seat is a leader on the hot seat. True, some Michigan fans wanted Jim Harbaugh fired amid a disastrous 2020 season, and Harbaugh not only stuck around but became a national champion three seasons later. Harbaugh’s reputation was that of a man who could not beat Ohio State, and he remedied that image by simply beating Ohio State three times in a row. Biden’s reputation is that of a man in irreversible decline, and there is no reversing it. Biden’s decision is to leave behind a program that can win without him or, like Bowden against Clemson, hang on until his orange opponent beats him.
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