Given his team's wretched 2-7 record and the escalating grumbling on the home front, it was beginning to look like only a matter of time before Memphis relieved itself of the Tommy West era. And off a woeful, 56-28 loss Saturday at Tennessee, the local Commercial-Appeal reports West officially became the season's first head-coaching head to roll this morning:

Tommy West has been fired as head coach of the University of Memphis football team, according to a source close to the situation. Memphis athletic director R.C. Johnson told West in a meeting this morning.
[...]
This year has been marked with fan discontent. ... The loss to East Carolina was particularly troubling, as fewer than 5,000 fans attended a nationally televised Tuesday night game.

The writing was on the wall earlier than that -- Commerical Appeal columnists were calling time of death back in September, following another ugly, sparsely attended home loss to Marshall. Losing games is one thing; losing money on ticket sales is a death knell.

This marks the second time West has been canned in a little over a decade, and his trajectory with the Memphis Tigers was eerily similar to his six-year tenure with the Clemson Tigers: Just as he'd done at Clemson, West got off to a rocky start but soon enough turned a struggling program into a reliable bowl team, leading DeAngelo Williams-led outfits to a 17-8 record over 2003-04 and eking out bowl berths in three of the next four years from 2005-08, including last year's trip to the St. Petersburg Bowl -- no minor reward for a program that had only attended two bowl games in its entire history before West's arrival.

But Memphis' rock-bottom effort even in Conference USA play this year -- at 1-4 in C-USA games, the Tigers are two full games back of the rest of the otherwise neck-and-neck division -- has been too bad to save face: With the rout at Tennessee, UM is assured of its third losing in the last four years, and the momentum of the DeAngelo Williams Window has evaporated entirely. West takes the fall.

He's not the only below-the-radar boss getting the axe: ESPN also report this morning that Western Kentucky coach Dave Elson was fired Sunday night, just three-quarters of the way into the Hilltoppers' first season as a I-A program. WKU was enduring the trials of youth -- at 0-9 with a 28-7 loss to I-AA Central Arkansas and ranking dead last nationally in almost every single major defensive category, the Hilltoppers have been unquestionably the worst top-tier team in the country -- but Elson's overall record in Bowling Green (39-41 over seven years) only just fell below .500 two weeks ago. Plus, he enthusiastically risked injury and public humiliation for the sake of the program:

The guy in the suit is probably steering clear of Elson's office this morning -- you know, just in case the sledgehammer is still lying around somewhere.