WVU’s woulda-coulda-shoulda offensive coordinator was fired by the Hamilton Tiger-Cats Monday.

Yesterday, they fired head coach Charlie Taaffe, who seemed confused, resigned, perplexed and more depressed than enraged. He had clearly lost the faith of his players, who weren’t good enough in any case. Taaffe was replaced with offensive co-ordinator Marcel Bellefeuille on an interim basis.

If the shakeup and all the bungling and failure that preceded it were the stuff of fate or bad luck or some great cycle of football life, it would be enough to point a few fingers and pass on a few regrets and wish the Ticats better luck next year.

They’re not. What has happened to the franchise is a disaster of the organization’s own making, a straightforward connect-the-dots pattern in which bad decisions compound bad decisions and lead to bad outcomes.

But how do you really feel?

Taaffe, you’ll remember, was quite interested in joining old pal Bill Stewart as WVU’s O.C., only the Ticats didn’t want to be besmirched in such a way. Taaffe was basically bullied into staying on and the dopey team president called the multiple media outlets reporting the situation liars.

That was a delightful irony because the dopey team president said a reporter called and apologized for misreporting the story. That was the lie.

I’ve long assumed he was referring to me. I called that day to get in touch with someone with the Tiger-Cats and in explaining my wish I had to explain what was going on with this disputed story. At no time did I say I was sorry or that I apologized for, you know, being right. I was then told the president would call me back. He never did.  He instead floated a bogus line about an apology.

I often think about this and I have to thank my bosses at the Daily Mail and the colleagues I was with at the University of Louisville that night from preventing me from firing back a day later. I still have the blog I wanted to post and I’m quite sure it would have caused an international incident.

As it was, Taaffe was interested. He was. You don’t end up in WVU’s neighborhood when you coach a team in Canada. The hiring was at least proposed and WVU was doing the required background check. Then the Tiger-Cats, whose futility is documented, realized how bad it would look and decided to blame the media. Nevermind everyone was reporting the story the same or that Taaffe had left the CFL as a head coach for an O.C. position at the University of Maryland a few years earlier.

So there were meetings and someone presumably taught the dopey team president the word “tampering” and things cooled off. The best part, though, is that there was at least one more communication between WVU and Taaffe afterward, but by that time Stewart had already found and fallen for Jeff Mullen.

Part of me wants to feel bad for Taaffe, but another part is glad he’s out of that mess.