There seems to be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about the decision to retain A.J. Smith and Norv Turner as the guidance counselors of the San Diego Chargers. Apparently, this is considered daft by people paid to make such judgments.

Well, in response, let us offer a slightly more nuanced suggestion.

Shut up, you dullards, and enjoy the reinvention of football by the people least qualified to make those assessments -- the owners.

Frankly, when you look at the baffling whirlwind of decisions made on the real Black Monday and Dark Pewter Tuesday, you are seeing owners rethinking how they think about their most powerful tool -- the GTFO Card.

The first two moves in the wake of the regular season, the firings of Raheem Morris in Tampa Bay and Steve Spagnuolo and Billy Devaney in St. Louis were purely predictable, foreseen by anyone higher on the cognition scale than a dancing monkey.

But then came the fun, and the reason why Smith and Turner are the sign of good things to come.

In Indianapolis, Jim Irsay fired president Bill Polian and his son and the team's general manager, Chris Polian, while retaining head coach Jim Caldwell. In Chicago, general manager Jerry Angelo got the hot lead mouthwash and offensive coordinator Mike Martz quit (or was detached from his office, you be the judge), while head coach Lovie Smith kept his gig. And Norv and A.J. cheated the reaper again. Rex Ryan cried and survived.

Best of all, Jerry Jones conducted an office-wide search to see who was at fault in the ongoing deconstruction of the Dallas Cowboys and in a vote of 1-0 with the rest of the planet ineligible to cast a ballot, came up with, "I don't know, but it's not me, and that's an order."

Now it doesn't matter whether these moves are sound or stupid. We don't care much either way. Hell, if they all backfire, all the better. Let chaos reign.

But credit must be given the business majors who inherited their way to the top and are now the smartest men in football. They are thinking outside the box with these ideas -- some outside the box the solar system came in, we grant you, but we should not discourage creative thinking. I mean, it seems stupid to you, but only because you've come to believe the general-manager-eats-the-coach-and-beats-the-pink-slip paradigm they teach in Sports Management 101.

Now the firings seem to come almost at random, and the non-firings seem to defy logic. The owners in each sport are coming in various stages to the realization that paying too much money for a business means that nobody who gets a check should get too comfortable with it.

As a result, caprice rules the day, and the outraged shrieks of people who knew what was coming and predicted it with such metaphysical certitude are coming to realize that the mind of the mega-millionaire is not an orderly thing.

Take Jones, for example. His explanation for not firing himself was so perfectly pretzelian that it should be taught in schools -- schools where welding is a major.

"The facts are that I've spent 22 years doing this exactly the same way," Jones said Tuesday on KRLD-FM -- because all great ideas start that way in a radio interview. "I've made a lot of changes from year to year as time goes along, but frankly, I know that when we do not have the kind of success, when we don't have expectations lived up to, the one that should get the most heat is the one that ultimately makes the decisions, period, with the Dallas Cowboys. And that's me."

In short, what he said was, "I know people think this is stupid, but I'm willing to take their heat, mostly because they keep giving me vast sums of money for being me. The turnips."

In Jones' mind, adding a general manager to the payroll would clutter the decision-making process, not improve it. This is the logic that once worked for the late Al Davis, but not in the last quarter-century or so.

"The thing you've got to realize is that when you have an owner that is full-time as the owner, then you create a situation where you have as much turnover at GM as you do at the coaching level, and I think that just deters from the mix."

In short, competing opinions are bad, as the Leader family of North Korea, Great, Dear and Too Soon To Tell will vouch.

Now you may think that's stark-staring nuts. Wrong. It's perfect. It's the only way we know that rich folks are as bat-guano loony as the rest of us. And that realization is way more important than not winning important football games. Or honoring the traditions that made the NFL a festival of institutional in-breeding.

So shut the hell up about Norv Turner and A.J. Smith. You don't know what you're talking about. And of course, neither do the people you're complaining about, but if competence mattered, the Bidwills would be running a general store outside St. Louis instead of the Arizona Cardinals.

And they didn't fire anyone Tuesday, so take that."