Jim Pobursky got a raw deal.

At least in my opinion he did.

Hired as the interim head football coach at Birmingham Seaholm last spring in the wake of the death of recently-hired sideline general Nick Deane, who passed away of a sudden heart attack last May, Pobursky did an excellent job of rallying his troops and leading the Maples back into the playoffs following an extremely uncustomary six-year postseason absence.

His reward?

In a nutshell, he was fired.

Personally, I don't really get it. Coach PO should have been applauded, a freaking parade should have been held in his honor considering the gridiron obsessed Seaholm community and the hard times the program had fallen on from the mid-2000s until just a few months ago.

However, that's not what happened.

Instead, Pobursky was asked to re-apply for the job, since technically he was hired as an 'interim' coach back in May. And, if that wasn't bad enough, the powers that be at Seaholm opened up the job search and courted other candidates.

At the end of the process, Pobursky was for all intents and purposes dismissed in favor of Jim DeWald, a very good coach in his own right, but one that has only won three games over the last three years in his previous job at Bloomfield Hills Andover.

Now this is nothing against DeWald, someone who I'm sure is going to do a super job on the sidelines with the Maples. He showed his merits with the head phones on back when he was at Pontiac Northern.

This is about a coach in Pobursky that under very difficult circumstances got the Seaholm ship back pointed in the right direction and was basically thrown under the bus for reasons I can't quite get my head around.

Nonetheless, COACH PO will ALWAYS be remembered for what he did on the corner of Cranbrook and Lincoln during that glorious autumn of 2011, laying the foundation for the success I'm pretty certain will once again become a staple of Maples football for the considerable future under his successor.

Hoosierscott@aol.com