When the Raiders mercifully took Norv Turner out behind the garage and shot him yesterday it made him the seventh NFL coach to get the axe this year. When you throw in Dick Vermeil’s retirement it means that eight of the 32 NFL jobs are currently open. Yikes.

The Bears have one of the hottest candidates in defensive coordinator Ron Rivera. Personally, I don’t think he’s all that hot. He’s got kind of an Edward James Olmos thing going with his complexion and, come to think of it that’s probably not what they mean by “hot coaching candidate” anyway.

Other names being tossed around for open NFL jobs are Bears’ Hall of Fame middle linebacker Mike Singletary, Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz, Steelers’ offensive line coach Russ Grimm and former Cubs manager Jim Essian.

Just checking to see if you’re really reading this.

Most people can agree that of the coaches who got the axe, a few of them deserved it. Dom Capers is a very detail-oriented man, you can tell that just by how dilligently he works to cover the top of his head with his nineteen strands of hair. He is not, apparently, a very good head football coach, and has gotten plenty of mileage out of a ludicrously quick trip to the NFC Championship game in the Panthers’ third season. So he’s out in Houston now, after four years and about 14 offensive coordinators.

Norv Turner was a pock-faced disaster in Washington and might actually have been worse in Oakland. Given the rabid fan base he’s probably lucky to still be alive.

Steve Mariucci had a lousy record in Detroit, but he also had a lousy team, and while nobody argues that firing him was that out of bounds, what all 14 remaining Lions fans want to know is how Matt Millen has kept his job.

Since Vermeil went off on his own, likely to arrange for a clandestine meeting with old buddy Brent Musberger where they can share tears and shirtless hugs, that leaves four guys who got fired and at least some people wonder why.

Those people are of course…dumb.

It is true that Mike Sherman had nothing but winning seasons in Green Bay before this year’s 4-12 disaster cost him his job. It is also true that he never seemed like much of a coach. Just kind of a pear-shaped Nordic doofus standing on the sidelines either in an untucked “bowling” shirt or ugly green sweatshirt depending on the air temperature. He wore a headset that was likely not hooked to anything and held a laminated sheet that people assumed was full of offensive plays and defensive sets, but was really the menu from an Appleton Denny’s. The best description of Sherman ever came from Bill Simmons who wrote, “When you see him on the sidelines he looks like a guy that the real coach said to, “I’ve got to go take a leak, watch the team until I get back.'”

What few people realize is that Sherman used to be the coach and GM of the Packers and that he so mismanaged the salary cap that when he lost his GM powers to Ted Thompson, Thompson told him, “You screwed this thing up so bad that I can’t get you any new players this year. You’re going to have to go with what you’ve got.” He was basically fired that day. But since the Packers already had a stockpile of 44 inch waist khakis, they let him use them for another year.

Sherman did some interesting things during his tenure in Green Bay. Remember when he challenged Warren Sapp to a fight after a game because Sapp had the temerity to knock Packers’ lineman Chad (or was it Kyle, oh who cares?) Clifton on his ass during one of Brett Farvuhruh’s interceptions?

Remember how he fired his defensive coordinator about ten seconds after the Eagles converted that miracle fourth and 24 in the playoffs two years ago?

Under his watch, Brett Farvuhruh pretty much ran the offense, and slowly regressed back to the “aw f@#$ it, I’m going deep” quarterback that Mike Holmgren had turned into, for several years, the best and most dangerous quarterback…maybe ever?

Now that the Bears are good, it behooved them to have Sherman mismanaging the Packers, especially now that Farve’s gone for good. (And it must be true, Dan Patrick said it yesterday, so there.) What if they hire a good coach? Nah, they’ll probably hire Wade Phillips.

You know how the ESPN Sunday Night crew (working their last game together on Saturday, by the way) spends four hours fellating everybody on both teams? A few weeks ago they had an exciting Jets-Saints matchup and our buddy Joe Theismann said that Jim Haslett should be the “coach of the year for all he’s overcome this year.”

See, that’s the kind of crap that makes me wish Joe had gone to Michigan.

Hasn’t it seemed like for his entire run in New Orleans that Haslett’s been on the verge of getting canned? Hasn’t it also seemed like he deserves it?

He just comes across as a big, dumb guy who does big, dumb things at big moments. What’s been the rap on the Saints for the past six years? That they’re talented and can’t win anything important. Isn’t that the ultimate dig at a coach? It’s bascially the media’s way of saying, “If anybody but this dope coached this team, they’d be dangerous.”

It’s possible that the aftermath of the hurricane led to the situation that ultimately cost Haslett his job, but it’s more likely that the truth is that the aftermath of the hurricane led to a situation where Haslett almost got to keep his job. They had every excuse to be lousy this year. No real home games, some played in front of 17 people in Baton Rouge, some in San Antonio and incredibly, one in the Meadowlands against the Giants. The owner seemed preoccupied with his strange fascination of moving to San Antonio full-time. He seemed so preoccupied that not only had he stopped dancing on the field with a very gay umbrella, but you weren’t sure he even knew from week to week if the Saints had won. Plus, with the situation just as unsettled for the 2006, if you thought your coach was anything but a complete dullard, you’d keep him. How are you going to hire a top-notch coach to a place with no clue as to where they’ll play their home games next year? If he couldn’t keep his job through that, well, let’s just say Joe’s declaration of Haslett’s coach of the year candidacy might have been a little off.

Mike Martz got the axe and some of us had forgotten he had a job to lose. He left the Rams after the fifth game with a heart infection and never was allowed to come back. Oh, he tried. He called the coaches’ box during a game one time with a play suggestion and got hung up on, and a few weeks ago he showed up to watch practice and wasn’t allowed in the building. This, from a guy who just four years ago was such a reknowned offensive genius that people thought he might win several Super Bowls in St. Louis.

There’s a telling quote in David Halberstam’s new book on Bill Belichick about the Super Bowl played after the 2001 season. It’s about how Belichick and the Patriots had decided to take Marshall Faulk out of the passing game because it was their belief that he, not Kurt Warner or anybody else made the offense go. So they had somebody hit him hard on every play whether he had the ball or not, and they played sometimes as many as seven defensive backs, daring the Rams to stop trying to throw swing passes to Faulk, but to line him up like a real running back and run him at them. The Rams players were begging Martz to “run the ball” because of all the little DBs running around on the field. What did Martz say? “F#$% it. We’re going to win my way.”

Oops. That was the point. The Patriots felt that while the Rams could run the ball, that Martz wouldn’t want to. So they dared him to do it and he didn’t. That kind of thing causes a recall to be requested on your Offensive Genius license.

Finally, there’s Mike Tice, the Meathead who supposedly saved his job by turning the 2-5 Sex Boat Vikings into a 9-7 team. They won their final game of the season 34-10 over the NFC North champion Bears and that win meant so much that Tice’s firing was announced 42 minutes after the game. Marv Levy (soon to be the 77 year old GM of the Bills) said on the Bears’ Comcast postgame that he could tell by watching the game that Tice already knew he’d been canned.

New Vikings’ owner Zygi Wilf is more than just a guy with a children cartoon character’s name and eyeblack sized eyebrows. OK, maybe that’s all he really is, but whatever the case, he probably was tempted to fire Tice the day he assumed ownership of the team. The only reason Tice had the job in the first place is that he was the lowest paid coach in the NFL and former owner Red McCombs wanted to keep it that way until he sold the team. The Vikings had winning records the past three years and missed the playoffs twice. You all remember it three years ago when they went to Arizona on the final day of the season needing a win to not only put them in the playoffs, but to kick the Packers out, and they lost. Throw in a head coach ticket-scalping scandal, the Sex Cruise and every time Randy Moss ran over a parking attendant or broke out a TD celebration that left Joe Buck crying like a nine year old who didn’t get an XBOX 360, and let’s just say there was probably cause for the firing.

So if you’re Ron Rivera and all of these jobs are open, which one do you want?

Well, you don’t want the Packers job. Not only do you have to wear hideously clashing green and yellow, but Lovie’s going to be kicking your ass while you do it.

The job you want is the Kansas City job, but you’re not going to get that. That’s either going to be current Jets’ coach, and former KC assistant Herm Edwards, or it’ll be offensive coordinator Al Saunders.

The next best job is probably St. Louis, and Lovie seems to be lobbying his old bosses with the Rams on your behalf. I love it when Bears’ fans wring their hands over the potential of losing Chico. He is, by all accounts a very good coach and a very smart man. I’m sure he’ll do fine as a head coach. But this is Lovie’s defense. It won’t run any differently with or without Rivera. They talked a lot last year about how the Bears’ defense was a blending of the Tampa Two that Lovie coached in Tampa Bay and St. Louis and the Eagles’ defenses that Rivera helped design under Jim Johnson. This year, you don’t hear that so much. Because it never was true. Lovie installed his defense, Chico learned how to call it and the difference between this year and last year is the health of Brian Urlacher, Walleye Ogunleye and (for the most part) Mike Brown.

This won’t be Buddy Ryan leaving and the GM’s idiot brother coming in to run a blander version like we saw with the Tobins.

One of the interesting things this offseason will be to see if somebody hires Singletary. Two years ago he was a finalist for the job at Baylor, his alma mater. That seemed like a no-brainer. Bring in your most famous football alum, a very smart man with a deep knowledge of the game, enough connections in the game to assemble a top-notch staff and try to put Baylor football back on a map that it hadn’t been on since…since he played there. So what did they do? They hired Guy Morriss. But hey, they beat Samford this year!

Singeltary’s going to interview for the Lions’ job, and we’re not sure if it’s a real interview or just Matt Millen’s way of keeping the diversity committee off his ass, but I for one, hope it is a real interview and that Singletary doesn’t get the job. You don’t want to be Millen’s next (last) hire. Unless you turn the Lions around quickly, in a year, at the most, two, the new GM is going to be itching to hire “his guy” and chances are that won’t be you.

One last thing about coaches. The coaches of the six NFC playoff teams have interesting backgrounds. Three of them (The Manatee, Chucky Gruden and Joe Gibbs) have won Super Bowls, one of them has coached in a Super Bowl within the last two years (John Fox) and one reached the AFC title game when he was in Jacksonville (Tom Coughlin), and one is Lovie Smith. Something tells me that despite this, Lovie’s not exactly intimidated.