I understand how passionate some fans and entire cities are about their teams. For some people, a surprising amount of their weekly happiness genuinely depends on whether their team wins or loses. You spend the entire week looking forward to Sunday, your team plays terribly, and suddenly your mood is ruined.
When things start going badly, the easiest person to blame is usually the coach. Fire the coach. Fire the coordinator. Fire the GM. Get him out of here. We’ve all heard it. Social media makes it even easier. A team can lose one ugly game and within minutes thousands of people are demanding somebody lose their job.
But we need to stop casually calling for people’s jobs—or at the very least, understand what we’re actually asking for when we do it.
Imagine It Happened at Your Job
Imagine you had a bad quarter at work. Maybe you made some mistakes, missed a few targets or simply didn’t perform as well as everyone expected. Now imagine opening Twitter and seeing one million people mentioning your name and demanding that your employer fire you.
How would you feel? You still have a mortgage or rent to pay. You have bills to cover. Maybe you have a car payment. You might have children and a family depending on you. You have a career you’ve spent years, perhaps decades, building.
It probably wouldn’t feel great having a million strangers actively rooting for all of that to disappear. Yet in sports, we’ve somehow normalized doing exactly that.
When you call for a coach to be fired, you aren’t simply asking your favorite team to change its strategy. You are quite literally asking for another human being to lose their livelihood. And because professional sports figures are famous, we sometimes forget that part.
The Salary Doesn’t Remove the Human Being
The obvious response is that NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and major college coaches aren’t exactly struggling financially. Many of them make millions of dollars, and some have contracts guaranteeing them significant money even after they’re fired.
That’s true. But making a lot of money doesn’t suddenly mean your career doesn’t matter to you.
Imagine spending 20 or 30 years climbing through a profession. You move around the country. You work ridiculous hours. You miss time with your family. You start at the bottom, slowly earn more responsibility and eventually reach one of the highest positions available in your profession. Then imagine millions of strangers celebrating when you lose it.
The money might make the financial consequences considerably easier than they would be for the average person, but losing your job can still mean losing something you’ve dedicated most of your adult life to building.
And not everyone working in professional sports is making superstar money anyway. Assistant coaches, position coaches, scouts, analysts and countless staff members can be affected when an organization decides to clean house. When a head coach gets fired, sometimes an entire staff gets turned over with him.
Those are real people too.
Criticism Is Part of Sports
None of this means we should stop criticizing coaches. That would be ridiculous.
Professional sports are competitive, results-driven businesses. Coaches are paid to win games. General managers are paid to build good rosters. Coordinators are paid to construct successful offenses and defenses. When they repeatedly fail to do those things, criticism is completely fair.
If a coach makes a terrible fourth-down decision, talk about it. If an offensive coordinator has one of the worst offenses in football, question the scheme. If a general manager repeatedly wastes draft picks and hands out terrible contracts, criticize the roster construction.
That’s sports. Fans spend money on tickets, jerseys, subscriptions and countless other things connected to their teams. They invest enormous amounts of time and emotion into following them. Nobody should expect fans to watch their team repeatedly fail and respond with nothing more than a smile.
But there is an important distinction between criticizing someone’s ability to do their job and personally rooting for them to lose it.
“This Isn’t Working” Is Different From “Fire Him!”
Sometimes a coaching change genuinely is the best decision for an organization, and there shouldn’t be anything wrong with saying that.
If a team has spent several years going backward and there is little evidence things are improving, you can reasonably say, “I don’t think this is working anymore. The organization probably needs a different coach.” That’s analysis. You’re looking at the results, evaluating the direction of the team and reaching a conclusion about what might improve it.
That’s very different from spending every Sunday screaming “FIRE THIS GUY!”, flooding his social media accounts, insulting him personally and celebrating when the news finally arrives that he’s unemployed.
The outcome you’re discussing might technically be the same, but the mentality behind it isn’t. One is evaluating what might be best for a sports organization. The other can turn another person’s misfortune into entertainment.
Coaches Aren’t Trying to Lose
This is another thing that gets forgotten when emotions take over: your coach probably wants to win even more than you do.
Think about it. You might spend three hours watching the game. The coaching staff has spent the entire week preparing for it. They have watched hours of film, constructed a game plan, held practices, attended meetings, studied tendencies and spent most of their waking hours thinking about how to win that game.
Then the plan doesn’t work. Maybe the play call was terrible. Maybe they made the wrong adjustment. Maybe they got completely outcoached. Criticize it.
But understand that the person you’re furious with probably isn’t sitting there thinking, “I can’t wait to ruin everyone’s Sunday.” They failed. People fail. Sometimes repeatedly. And sometimes repeated failure means someone eventually has to be replaced.
Failure doesn’t automatically make someone a bad person deserving of humiliation.
Social Media Has Made This Worse
Sports criticism existed long before Twitter, Instagram or TikTok, but social media completely changed the scale of it. Decades ago, an angry fan might complain to his friends, call a radio station or yell at the television. Now that same thought can be sent directly toward the person being criticized.
Thousands of people can tag a coach, player or executive within minutes. Their family members can see it. Their children can see it. Their spouses can see it.
Once enough people join in, something that would sound insane in a normal workplace suddenly starts feeling completely ordinary. Imagine thousands of strangers tagging your employer every day demanding that you be fired.
Outside sports, we’d probably recognize how bizarre that is immediately. Inside sports, we call it Tuesday.
Players Deserve the Same Perspective
This doesn’t only apply to coaches. Fans do it to players too.
A player signs a big contract and struggles, and suddenly people aren’t simply criticizing his performance—they’re attacking the person. Again, criticism is fair. If someone signs a massive contract and doesn’t perform anywhere close to expectations, that’s relevant when discussing the team. Salary caps exist. Contracts affect roster construction. Performance matters.
But the player didn’t force the organization to offer him the contract, and he probably isn’t intentionally playing badly.
We can say “that contract has been terrible for the team” without turning it into “this guy is worthless.” Those are two completely different statements.
We Can Be Better Sports Fans
Sports are emotional. That’s one of the reasons we love them. Winning wouldn’t feel nearly as good if losing didn’t hurt.
Fans are going to get angry. We’re going to question decisions. We’re going to complain about play calls, trades, contracts, draft picks and coaching decisions. I’m not asking anyone to stop doing that.
I’m asking us to remember what we’re actually saying.
Before posting “FIRE HIM NOW,” imagine a million strangers saying the same thing about you after your worst day at work. Imagine your family reading it. Imagine your children seeing people celebrating the possibility that their mom or dad might lose the career they’ve spent decades building.
Maybe after considering all of that, you still believe the team needs a new coach. That’s okay, because there is nothing wrong with believing someone isn’t the right person for a particular job.
There is something uncomfortable, however, about taking pleasure in watching another human being lose it.
Criticize the Performance, Remember the Person
Sports wouldn’t be sports without criticism. Part of being a fan is having opinions. We debate which players are better, question coaching decisions and argue about what our teams should do next. That’s part of the fun.
But we don’t have to lose our humanity while doing it.
A coach can be bad at his job without being a bad person. A player can fail to live up to his contract without deserving personal attacks. A general manager can make terrible decisions without millions of people needing to celebrate when he’s fired.
Sometimes teams need change. Sometimes coaches need to go. Sometimes organizations simply need someone else leading them. We can acknowledge all of those things while remembering that behind every headset, contract and job title is an actual person with a family, responsibilities, ambitions and a life outside the stadium.
So criticize the performance. Question the decisions. Debate whether someone remains the right person for the job. Just think twice before actively rooting for another person to lose their livelihood.
Because if a million people were calling for your job tomorrow, you’d probably hope they remembered there was a human being on the other side too.
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