So the first off-season head has rolled, and it’s not even a manager.

FC Dallas GM Michael Hitchcock was relieved of his duties on Tuesday – a move every bit as surprising as Michael Moore making another movie about establishment greed in America. (They won't actually replace Hitchcock, per se; they'll rearrange duties, hiring a technical director and retaining John Wagner as head of the front office.) 

Word from Pizza Hut Park has long been that Hitchcock was more or less invisible most of this year, his authority having been stripped away.

He was mostly in charge of team administration. Of course, they have a team administrator.  So, uh … well … that presumably left the GM to work with manager Schellas Hyndman on team personnel matters.

But a source inside the team said Hyndman and Hitchcock didn’t really talk that much, that the GM was rarely around practice and such. So it’s been Hyndman running the traps and making the decisions on player acquisition and such.

Well, that must have meant Hitchcock was in charge of peripheral team matters, such as scheduling reserve matches and such.

But, uh, since FC Dallas didn’t have many of those … well … well he probably did something. I just don’t know what it was.

Hitchcock had lost his power at the park because staff moved in and out the door around PHP like it was lunchtime at Arby’s.  The staff never seemed motivated, and customer service complaints were endemic. Attendance was nothing short of embarrassing. Dallas’ average of 12,441 topped just two clubs in MLS, one of which played in a 10,000-seat stadium. (And Dallas would surely have finished dead last but for the 50,000 at the Cotton Bowl double header that got stacked on top of its average.)

Hitchcock sold himself to the Hunts with grand promises of sellouts galore. He promised five the first year, then 10 then 15. I’d have to check, but if Dallas had one legitimate sellout this year, well, that would be one in row, as they say.

I understand that the other candidate for GM at the time, John Alper, told the Hunts that moving to Southlake, then back to the Cotton Bowl for a season and a half, then out to Frisco – in what was practically a brand new market – was a major setback and that it would take hard work over a number of years to reconstruct a fan base that felt taken for granted.

But HSG didn’t want to hear it. So they bought what Hitchcock was selling: He was selling fast action. He lured ‘em in with grand designs of fast profit and short cuts rather than a more plausible slow-and-steady approach, one that would build a core – the same way the staff had painstakingly built a core in the late 1990s. (When Dallas left the Cotton Bowl after the 2002 season for Southlake, it had just average 13,122 over the season – more than it averaged this year.)

Imagine where the club might be today if they had gone with the more industrious plan.