BY the end of this week, we’ll be a lot closer to knowing what the managerial outlook is in both Tyrone and Derry.
While the Oak Leaf job is vacant and the subject of rampant chatter on background channels, the next few days will determine whether Brian Dooher and Feargal Logan stay on for a fifth season in Tyrone.
There’s no definitive clue either way, with the balance of feeling being that they will want to stay on.
Just for argument’s sake, though, let’s say they do decide to pack up the tent.
What then?
Dooher and Logan are remarkable.
Brian Dooher was this year appointed as the Chief Veterinary Officer for Northern Ireland, having been the Deputy Chief for a number of years.
Feargal Logan runs his own solicitor’s practice.
How those two have managed to balance their professional roles with their footballing commitments is an extraordinary feat of human resilience.
Inter-county management is not a second job.
It’s a first job.
It is an all-encompassing, 40, 50, 60-hour a week gig, wholly incompatible with real life.
Plus, as is widely established in the inner sanctum, Tyrone are one of very few counties – if not the only county – that does not pay their management team.
They also do not hire outside managers.
Both of those things might have to change soon, whether it’s this year or next or the year after.
Whenever Dooher and Logan go, they will not be easily replaced.
Because nobody in inter-county football is.
In the book ‘The Paradox Of Choice: Why More Is Less’, author Barry Schwartz examines how a culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction.
He writes about the theory presented by social scientist Alex Michalos around how people assess satisfaction based on three gaps.
The gap between what one has and what one wants;
The gap between what one has and thinks others like oneself have;
And the gap between what one has and what one had in the past.
Every inter-county player, from London to Mayo, Limerick to Antrim, will want Jim Gavin to be their manager.
What also happens is that when they do stumble upon a good set-up and then it breaks up for whatever reason, they struggle to adjust to whatever comes behind.
The problem all these counties have is that the pool of inter-county managers is getting ever shallower.
There are hundreds of men that would love a cut at it.
But when it comes to directing a group of 30-plus highly educated, intelligent, self-motivated footballers, very few are capable and even fewer have the time.
One of the reasons Malachy O’Rourke’s phone rings every time a county needs a new manager is because he is such a big fish in such a small pond.
People look at him and see a man who managed Monaghan very successfully for seven years that has now retired from teaching, achieved everything he could have wanted to with Glen, and is still young enough to have a good go at it.
He’s a shark splashing about in a puddle.
And he’s just about the only one.
When Derry supporters desperately claw through the list of potential managers, he is the only one that fits the profile they’re looking for.
Outside of outlandish suggestions like James Horan, Jim Gavin, Eamonn Fitzmaurice, all of whom are eliminated by lack of interest in managing outside their native county and being geographically infeasible, there are only four managerial tickets in Ulster with a track record of winning All-Irelands.
One is Kieran McGeeney.
Another is Jim McGuinness.
The third is the Dooher-Logan combo.
And the fourth is the new Offaly manager, Mickey Harte.
External candidates that might have considered it, of whom The Irish News has spoken to several, are looking at the whole situation in Derry and saying no thanks.
There’s nobody internally that is either available or capable with a ready-made management team to go and win an All-Ireland.
Because inter-county management is a very niche game now.
The day jobs that Brian Dooher and Feargal Logan are able to operate alongside managing Tyrone make them exceptionally rare beings.
Unless you’re willing and able to do this thing full-time and find somebody that will effectively pay you to do that, then you need not apply.
The satisfaction the Armagh players feel right now must be off-the-scale.
They had to fight hard to keep hold of their manager.
Some of them wrestled with their own club committees over the vote on his future last winter.
They had the good sense to recognise not only what they had but that whatever else was out there would struggle to close the gap to the existing setup.
A good thing is getting harder and harder to find.