There are only three undefeated teams left in the top (as in moneyed) level of college football, which suggests that the word "elite" is being replaced by "last one standing." The middle shall hold because everyone is heading for it.

This forms a tight braid with the other central truth about the sport, which is every fan base announcing loudly that someone must pay for their outsized expectations for teams who clearly don't deserve it. A year ago, this led to a flurry of coach firings that began in Week 3 (UCLA) and powered almost weekly into January.

But all those contract settlements resulted in a new level financial conservatism among athletic directors and other quarter-choking real estate speculators that decided that paying for people who don't work (fired coaches) is almost as bad as paying for people who do all the work (players). And "conservatism" in this case meant waiting an extra four weeks to start detaching heads from "head coaching."

A week ago, it was Maryland's Mike Locksley, who had been on the metaphorical hot seat (a tired meme a hundred years ago) for at least a couple of weeks. And that's all it took to break the seal of shame, because Sunday the industry kicked out two more head coaches and a high-profile offensive coordinator. In other words, children, goats needed scaping, and all it took was one brave administrator who dared to burn a bunch of money that the schools are telling Congress they don't actually have.

First, North Carolina State decoupled from longtime boss Dave Doeren after a galling loss at Stanford (which sounds to most college fans like a redundancy). A few hours later, Baylor released Dave Aranda from the obligation of turning up for work after the even more infuriating choice of losing to Kansas. And finally, at least for the moment, Oregon's Dan Lanning saw the inadequacies on his own team and concluded after extensive analysis that offensive coordinator Drew Mehringer was the issue.

Now, we would not normally be so frivolous about people losing jobs, insofar as most of them are simply cases of a guilty party picking someone below him to fall on the company sword. But in the current climate, where the industry is going to lawmakers to make coaches' contracts more durable by no longer paying players who won the right to be paid in court, frivolity seems oddly more appropriate than usual. Not because it means they deserved it, but because it reminded us that the athletic directors have remarkably few skills in moments of crisis, to wit:

• Listening to the biggest donor and waiting for instructions.
• Taking those instructions and firing the head coach.
• Begging the biggest donor to cover the buyout and pony up more money for the replacement.
• Repeat as necessary.

It seems to be relatively easy work, and only involves as much degrading behavior as the donor or donors require. Coaches have come to expect unemployment as one of the costs of employment, even while turnips like Wisconsin-Green Bay basketball coach/radio static creator Doug Gottlieb shriek that coaches are more important than players and therefore have a greater right to administrative protections. The two seem to be only incompletely aligned, but as with the baseball owners preparing for a lockout to protect themselves from themselves, the only system that matters is the one that defends the money and its holders, even in the face of insufficient proof of their claims.

But none of that antiseptic finger pointing saves Doeren, or Aranda, or even Mehringer. It's just what gets done when the carping from the suites gets too loud, before everyone shifts their gazes to other jobs that in their minds need vacating. We expect more in the days and weeks to come, because it is that time of year. The impacted coaches, and those who follow them, are probably being told they should be grateful for the extra month they got before the threshers started swinging.