[12/2/04]As Southern Miss takes the field on Saturday at 6:30 p.m. in Hattiesburg, take a long look at Jeff Bower. He’s a college football anomaly. He’s an endangered species.

Bower will soon conclude his 14th season as head coach of the Golden Eagles, the longest tenure of any coach in this state since the great Johnny Vaught, who coached the Rebels for 24 years. Thad “Pie” Van coached Southern Miss for 20 years from 1949-1968. The likelihood, in the day and age of win at all costs, of another coach sticking around for that long is shrinking day-by-day.

The latest to get the ax is Ole Miss coach David Cutcliffe. The Rebels’ coach was fired on Wednesday after his first losing season in his six at the Oxford school.

He’s also the latest in a long list of coaches at colleges around the country to get fired.

On Tuesday, Notre Dame fired Ty Willingham after three seasons. In three seasons, he barely had enough time to get his own recruits in before he faced the chopping block.

Notre Dame officials said, “We simply have not made the progress on the field that we need to make.”

In three seasons with the Irish, Willingham had a 21-15 record.

Last season, Nebraska fired Frank Solich after six seasons for only averaging almost 10 wins a season.

Ten was certainly the magic number last season as Cutcliffe led the Rebels to a 10-win season and a Cotton Bowl victory. In his six seasons at the helm, Cutcliffe recorded a 44-29 record, won four of five bowl games and suffered just one losing season. The Rebels finished this year 4-7.

They also had to replace quarterback Eli Manning, the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft.

In the end, though, 4-7 was just not good enough.

In the college football coaching business not a sport, a cutthroat business winning 10 games a season is becoming the norm. Winning seven or eight games anymore is not quite good enough.

The rare exceptions have defied today’s coaching logic.

Bower lost his first game as Southern Miss head coach, a bowl game against North Carolina State. He won seven games in 1992, then suffered through a miserable 3-7-1 season. Rumblings began throughout the Golden Eagles’ community that he should be fired; Southern Miss officials said no way.

At Ole Miss, Notre Dame or the like, Bower would have easily been shuffled off as a loser and handed his walking papers. Through his first six seasons, Bower went a whopping 32-27 and did not even have the chance to play in a bowl game.

Southern Miss officials stuck with him and over the next eight seasons, he’s recorded a 57-35 record and three bowl victories.

We’ll never know what Cutcliffe could have done if he were given eight more years. Ole Miss didn’t give him that chance.

The next time Bower is on TV, applaud. The next time you see a Bobby Bowden or a Joe Paterno staples at Florida State and Penn State for more than three decades each look hard.

Their like won’t be seen again for a long, long time.

Sean P. Murphy is sports editor of The Vicksburg Post. E-mail him at smurphy@vicksburgpost.com.