What happens when you are the coach of an NFL team and you can’t control your players? Or your team decides to give up on you and the season? Or let’s say you choose to kick off in overtime, eventually leading to your team’s loss.

I’ll tell you what happens. You get canned.

As the NFL playoff picture begins to become more and more clear, so does the laundry list of crap coaches that need to begin cleaning out their offices and shopping their r‚sum‚s to some college and high school teams.

Some teams lack talent — that is understood. Others have hard schedules or have had to play with an abundance of injuries, this is also understood.

Then there are teams that should be better but just can’t put all the pieces together. Given that the NFL is entering Week 14, this is a problem and this is when the blame goes on the coach.

Whether firing a coach is truly the answer to improving a sports franchise has been forever debated. The words “nature of the business” are often used when discussing this topic.

If a team is loaded with talent and can’t win, it could be anything from conflicting egos among players to the fact that some players and teams are just overrated. But it’s the players who make the big money, so most times it’s the coach that has to suffer.

The bottom line is, there are good coaches that take mediocre teams and make them great. Coaches like Dick Vermeil, Brian Billick, Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick have proven what a good coach can be capable of. Guys like this make it hard for a coach on the hot seat to defend himself.

But when it comes to firing a coach, you can’t just look at a bad team with a bad record and say “fire the coach.” You must look at why a team is losing and do the best job of determining whether a new coach could make changes.

As someone who enjoys wearing purple and yellow and driving three hours north to watch pro football games, I must say the first coach who needs to be fired, immediately, is Minnesota Vikings head coach Mike Tice.

In his first season with the team, Tice’s Vikings lead the league in penalties and giveaways, both signs that this team is undisciplined.

There were problems on the sideline last year with such players as Randy Moss and Daunte Culpepper, one of the areas Tice was supposedly going to fix this season.

But the friction between Moss and Culpepper and others on the team is as disruptive as ever. The amount of sideline yelling witnessed this season has provided more drama than the recent “Days of Our Lives” storylines (my mom makes me watch it).

The Vikings defense isn’t the best, but it’s not as bad as the Kansas City Chiefs’ defense and they have won six games to the Vikings’ three. With the offensive weapons the Vikings have and the potential this young defense has shown, Tice should have them winning more games.

Give him the boot.

In Arizona, the Cardinals have a coaching problem as well. It seems that after starting the season with a respectable 4-2, the Cardinals have given up on the season. This was highlighted by a 49-0 debacle in Kansas City last week.

Even though the Cardinals have never, ever been anything close to a good franchise, and the team wasted a big-money contract on Jake Plummer, coach Dave McGinnis needs to go.

The wins this team had early in the year aren’t that impressive, and losing a good new running back in Marcel Shipp to injury has hurt them, but Arizona has gone from a possible playoff contender to the worst team in the league.

Arizona is a beautiful state that players should want to play in, so what this team needs is a good coach to bring in good players and take this franchise to a winning level.

There are other coaches whose jobs will most likely be in jeopardy when the season ends. The Detroit Lions’ coach, Marty Mornhinweg, will be famous for opting to kick off in an overtime loss to the Bears a few weeks ago.

But I’m going to have to put Mornhinweg on the bubble of coaches that need to be terminated immediately. I like what he has done putting Joey Harrington into the starting lineup his rookie season.

As long as Mornhinweg does things like putting in athletic backup quarterback Mike McMahon on random plays as a receiver or runner like he did on Thanksgiving, he should get a chance to prove himself next year.

I must be feeling nice today because I don’t think Cincinnati Bengals coach Dick Le Beau should be fired just yet.

The president of the Bengals, Mike Brown, is doing a horrible job of bringing in personnel because he isn’t a football-savvy guy. When that team is run correctly someday, it can be a contender.

It’s sad that one or two bad seasons in the NFL will lead to a coach losing his job. If that was the case in college football or at least at Iowa State, many would be asking “Dan McCarney who?”.

Kyle Moss

is a senior in journalism

and mass communication from Urbandale.