Tuesday, these were among the headline stories on ESPN.com’s NFL page:

“Eagles make changes at OC after offense’s decline.”

“Bolts fire OC Roman, OL coach after playoff exit.”

The day was hardly unique. Since the NFL regular season ended, those stories, accounts of assistant coaches getting cashiered, have peppered the news. It’s not dissimilar from the end of the college regular season weeks earlier.

For us oldsters who have any connection to Oregon, this tends to take us back.

Especially those of us who once found ourselves in the middle of such machinations.

On New Year’s Eve, 1971, I had the rewrite shift on the sports desk at the Eugene Register-Guard. I was a punk, wet-behind-the-ears reporter with less than two years’ newspaper experience. (As opposed to now being a punk, graybeard scribe who covets an afternoon nap.)

The sports department’s beat writer on University of Oregon football had written a story for the next day detailing how Portland boosters were ramping up pressure on UO athletic director Norv Ritchey to shake up the football staff under head coach Jerry Frei. The story’s information was solid, but based mostly on anonymous sources.

Routinely, the operation of getting the paper’s sports section out daily fell to two people – the deskman and his rewrite person. In this case, the desk guy, Paul Harvey (no, not that Paul Harvey) was uncomfortable that the Oregon story didn’t identify many sources. The Duck beat writer was out of town and unavailable – we were decades from cell phones -- so Harvey asked me to try to get hold of a key figure with the Oregon Club booster group in Portland for verification.

I did that. As I recall, the president of the Oregon Club was chatty. His comments indeed reflected booster unease with assistants more than Frei, who had gone 22-29-2 over five seasons and hadn’t beaten rival Oregon State.

Somehow, the story ended up with my byline on it. I was too naïve to know then that such provocative pieces aren’t supposed to be generated by the kid who comes in at 4 that afternoon for rewrite.

Less than three weeks later, the boosters got to Ritchey. Frei resigned in protest, citing the rumor and innuendo around the program. He fell on his sword rather than fire most of his staff.

It was just beginning to get interesting. As has been noted often through the years, the assistants Frei protected went on, collectively, to preposterous success:

George Seifert would become a 49ers head coach, winning two Super Bowls. John Robinson won a national championship at USC, coached the LA Rams and was named to the College Football Hall of Fame. Bruce Snyder had winning records as head coach at Utah State, Cal and Arizona State. Gunther Cunningham coached the Kansas City Chiefs. In a decades-long tenure as an NFL assistant, John Marshall had two stints as a defensive coordinator.

Ironically (some might say poetically), the assistant regarded by those boosters as worth salvaging, Dick Enright, went 6-16 in two seasons before getting fired as Frei’s successor.

One can only imagine the griddle scorching Ritchey’s backside in those days. Just nine months before Frei’s resignation, Ritchey had gone east to hire basketball coach Dick Harter, a hard-charging martinet not at all averse to screaming at the AD for promises he felt went unkept.

(In fact, when I wrote “Mad Hoops,” in 2020, chronicling the chaotic adventures of Harter’s renowned “Kamikaze Kids” at Oregon in the 1970s, Ritchey told me that when he hired Harter at a kingly salary of $23,000, he had to raise the football coach, Frei, to $24,500.)

As for Frei, I was around him only sparingly. But I’ve never heard anybody utter an untoward word about the man. He went on from Oregon to become an NFL assistant coach and a longtime scout for the Broncos.

Today, we live by different rules. I’m not aware of another coach who sacrificed his own hide in the name of his staff. Now, it’s all about propping up the head coach.

Once, Jerry Frei stood on principle. More than half a century later, far outside the realm of football, might that not be a lesson for government as well?