New Detroit Lions Head Coach – Barack Obama
Obama taking over the Presidency is like whomever becomes the next General Manager of the Detroit Lions.
On the plus side, you inherit a winless team with dishearthened fans who will treat even the slightest improvement like Indiana Jones finding the Holy Grail – Starving fans who will drool for the White Castle you provide as if Wolfgang Puck himself conjured it.
On the minus, the team you get is in a tremendous pit – you have 20 holes to fill on the roster and only 7 draft picks and a few million in salary to stop the gaps. You know going into the first season that you cannot in any way cure every ill in less than 24 months and may not be able to cure some of those problems period.
On the plus side, the job is still a position of respect and power with an organization that, dating back, has a long history of success and pride despite recent failures.
On the minus side, if you pull a 2-14 in the first season you’ll catch heat for stuff that was broken long before you arrived. It’s like moving into a frat house before the Pinto and Flounder’s breakage walk-thru.
On the plus side, you are given freedom to make whatever wholesale modifications are needed even if the team has never gone that direction in the past and there is no proof your moves will actual better the situation – because people want to trust the mystique of the New Guy.
On the minus, if you try wholesale changes and they rapidly turn south you’ll be the butt of late-night television jokes that mock the very characteristics that formerly were considered ‘endearing’, ‘quirky’ or ‘eccentric’.
It’s a good gig – if you can bring home even a marginal winner. And if you cannot – it will bring you down faster than a sack of rocks in the river.
I think the Onion said it best:
Dateline – Washington DC – November 5th, 2008
Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job
African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, “It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can’t catch a break.”
http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/black_man_given_nations