I couldn’t believe this, but it’s true. Only 22 Football Bowl Subdivision coaches have been at their current school longer than Dana Holgorsen has been at West Virginia. Twenty-three schools had new coaches for the 2013 bah 2011 season. Four of them remain. Take a guess at the identity of the other three.

Anyhow, coaching is a volatile and demanding industry, and it slow to forgive and slower to forget. We’re still wading through the wake of the Bob Stoops retirement, and I was struck by two things.

The first was the reaction. People were surprised, but people were also curious, and they wondered if Stoops was healthy or in trouble. That’s a bit of an indictment on the profession. Men test their bodies and the rules, and sometimes one or the other will cost them.

The other reaction was that Stoops is 56. Stoops is young. But he’d been a head coach for 18 years and a college coach for 32 years. That’s a long time, and we’re made to believe it added up for Stoops. He’s accomplished and content, and he was ready and willing to call it so he could live his life. (Aside: Stoops is a different cat. He insists his assistant get out of the office and spend time at home. And he suffers no fools. The media, the fanatics, the critics, the SEC … he’d beyond that now.)

I don’t know that this is the beginning of a trend and that we’re going to see good coaches retire early. I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say this is a young man’s business. I do know we’re seeing schools hire younger coaches. (And that’s likely a product of preparedness, because people get into the profession earlier as either former players, graduate assistants, analysts, quality control coaches and the like.)

It’s interesting, because we’re seeing the NCAA pay more attention to the welfare of student-athletes and monitoring the time they devote to the sport. It’s times like these and stories like this one that make you wonder about similarly safeguarding the coaches, and there are a few reasons to believe it’s underway already.