Junior Seau’s May 2 suicide prompted another round of media hand-wringing over the future of football. Less than a week after Seau’s death, journalists Malcolm Gladwell and Buzz Bissinger—the latter author of the famous “Friday Night Lights” book that spawned a feature film and television series—took to microphones in New York to argue for an outright ban on college football.

The Big East faces renegotiation of its television contract—a pittance compared to the SEC and Big 10—and loss of its “automatic qualified” status if and when the BCS moves to a more open playoff format in 2014. The Big East, long subsidized by its guaranteed BCS berth, faces a post-2014 world as the country’s seventh-best college football conference—one with no strong identity or iconic program.

While we tend to think of the NFL as the dominant sports business, the colleges have always driven American football. The game was invented at the college level in the 19th century. The NFL did not attain true legitimacy until roughly the mid-1950s. When the NFL took its two major steps into adulthood—adopting a national television contract and merging with the upstart American Football League.

There isn’t a single university, including Arkansas and Weber State, that doesn’t know that hiring a coach is essentially an at-will agreement for both sides. The contract isn’t meant to guarantee specific performance. It functions more like an insurance policy. That’s why contracts generally have buyout clauses and bonuses if the coach is still employed at certain future dates.

Thanks to Arkansas law—and Petrino’s apparent inability to buy a disposable cell phone to stay in touch with certain female friends—we now know quite a bit more about the events leading to Petrino’s firing than perhaps Jeff Long and Arkansas officials would like. Yet all this transparency serves an important purpose. And it’s not upholding the “public’s right to know.” That’s a self-serving media invention. No, the real benefit here is to future universities that might consider hiring Petrino.

It would be inaccurate to look at Bobby Petrino’s firing as a case of “ethics and morals” trumping wins. Judging by his Tuesday evening press conference, Arkansas athletic director Jeff Long was not engaged in moral grandstanding or some Roger Goodell-like effort to show everyone that he was in charge. Long made a calculated long-term decision that he believed was in the best interest of the Razorbacks football program.

Jeff Long, the vice chancellor and athletics director at Arkansas, clearly heeded the lessons of Penn State. When coach Bobby Petrino informed Long on the afternoon of April 5 that he had previously misled the university about the circumstances of his April 1 motorcycle accident, Long moved within hours to place Petrino on paid administrative leave and held a late-night press conference to inform the press.

The issue is not so black-and-white. In the context of a single classroom, the professor is responsible for teaching a limited, single subject. The role of a football coach like Mike London or Mark Richt is much broader. We commonly hear coaches are responsible for “molding young men,” not just teaching them the mechanics of the spread offense. When players get into trouble, administrators and the press don’t blame the chemistry or physics professors. They hold the coaches responsible.

Last month, I reported on the relationship between several SEC athletic departments and U-Diligence, a company run by a former Department of Defense anti-narcotics contractor that specializes in “monitoring” social media usage by student-athletes. Recently, there has been signs of blowback against this type of activity.

The recent wave of realignment has forced all the conferences to look at every aspect of their in-conference, non-conference and postseason scheduling. SEC leaders have begun talks to add a ninth conference game—over the strenuous objections of the coaches—while officials from all BCS conferences discuss how to best structure the postseason going forward.