AUBURN | Defensive line coach Jeremy Garrett left for the Jacksonville Jaguars after just one year at Auburn.

Longtime Georgia assistant coach Bryan McClendon, one of the nation’s best recruiters, left for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb left Alabama after less than a month to join the Seattle Seahawks.

There is a growing wave of college coaches leaving for the NFL and it’s not necessarily for the money or the prestige, it’s for a better lifestyle.

And if college football doesn’t do something about its dysfunctional calendar, the wave is only going to grow bigger.

Short of a few weeks in July and maybe a week in February, there’s no real time off for a college football coach. It’s often a 12-hour a day job seven days a week.

And it’s the stretch from the end of the regular season through the first Wednesday of February that’s become almost untenable.

For Auburn’s coaches, they had to prepare for a bowl game while recruiting high school players, evaluating and recruiting transfer portal prospects and often re-recruiting their own players to keep them out of the portal.

It’s insane for the NCAA to pack that overwhelming amount of work and stress into such a short period on top of it being the holiday season, which should be an important time to spend with family.

This has to change and it should start this year with an adjustment to the recruiting calendar. The easiest fix would be moving the early signing period out of December.

It needs to be at the end of June or the first week in July. The calendar is already set up perfectly to place it there.

Recruits can officially visit schools from the end of May through June and most schools have double-digit commitments by then, some more than 20.

It would also benefit the recruits that could put the recruiting process behind them before the start of their senior seasons.

Let them sign in the summer and give them a waiver if their school’s head coach leaves before they enroll. It’s a win, win for coaches and players and it’s an easy and straightforward solution.

It’s not going to be quite so easy with the transfer crunch in December and January.

The NCAA’s incompetence and the courts have opened the door for unlimited transfers, and the period has to correspond with the end of season and around a University calendar to make sense.

But perhaps the future will bring some solutions.

For instance, if student athletes become employees — and it sure seems to be headed in that direction — then those players could form a union. That union could negotiate a contract with conferences or a governing body, which would certainly include compensation for players but could also include restrictions on transferring.

It’s a negotiation. Each side will have priorities. There will be compromises.

That would certainly decrease the volume of transfers.

But for now, the best the NCAA can potentially do is shorten the period of time the portal is open. A thirty-day window after the season seems excessive and there’s no reason it couldn’t be 15 days like the spring period or perhaps even less.

We are in the midst of one of the most volatile periods in the history of college athletics. It takes strong leadership to navigate through all the changes.

I just described the complete opposite of what the NCAA is providing at the moment but perhaps this one time, they can make some common-sense changes to the calendar and give these coaches a holiday break.

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In today’s musical journey, we go back 47 years to the day a cover song gave a group its first No. 1 single in 13 years and became the original songwriter’s only No. 1 hit despite a successful 60-year career as a recording artist. On Feb. 19, 1977, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s cover of "Blinded By The Light” rose to the top of the Billboard 100. The song was originally written and recorded by Bruce Springsteen for his debut album, 1973’s Greeting from Asbury Park, N.J. The song featured autobiographical lines such as “Madman drummers, bummers, and Indians in the summers with a teenage diplomat,” which refers to drummer Vini Lopez, who was first known as Mad Man, Springsteen’s little league baseball team, the Indians, and Springsteen himself. Springsteen’s version included the line, “cut loose like a deuce,” which was changed to, “revved up like a deuce,” by Mann. According to Mann, the line sounds like, “revved up like a douche,” due to a faulty tape head during the recording. Springsteen had 12 Top 10 hits including 1984’s “Born in the USA,” which peaked at No. 9, 1984’s “Dancing In The Dark,” which peaked at No. 2 and 1985’s “Glory Days,” which peaked at No. 5.

Manfred Sepse Lubowitz was born in South Africa in 1940. He performed as a jazz pianist in Johannesburg before emigrating to the UK in 1961 due to his opposition to apartheid. He started out writing for Jazz News under the pen name Manfred Manne, before shortening it to Mann. He formed his first band with drummer Mike Hugg in 1962 called the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers. They had a breakout hit, “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” in 1963, which rose to the top of the charts in the U.S., UK, Canada and Sweden, and is Mann’s only other No. 1 single. The band went through a couple of name changes before becoming Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in 1971 without Hugg. They covered several other Springsteen songs and produced their own over the next 16 years but their highest-charting single in this period was 1984’s “Runner,” which peaked at No. 22. They broke up in 1987 before reforming as mainly a touring band in 1991. They are still active today. Overall, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band has published 17 albums and had more than 1.6 million in record sales.