George Seifert and Barry Switzer are Super Bowl-winning football coaches. Seifert twice, in fact.

Bob Lemon managed the New York Yankees to a World Series championship. Bill Guthridge twice guided North Carolina men’s basketball to the final four. Frank Solich steered Nebraska to a national title game in college football.

I’ve dusted off those relics of sports management because none of them will be chiseled into anyone’s Mount Rushmore of leadership. Their common denominator is that each grabbed the baton from a guy with hall of fame credentials and — for a time, at least — achieved a modicum of success.

Athletes occasionally exhibit this phenomenon, as well. They’re called “system guys.” Think of Scott Mitchell and Matt Cassel stepping in for the injured Dan Marino and Tom Brady, respectively, and playing their way into enormous, ill-advised contracts from other teams.

Tim Whitehead will be remembered as a system guy after his dismissal Tuesday as hockey coach at the University of Maine.

Maybe that’s fair. Perhaps it isn’t.

History will show that Whitehead was a good steward of the powerful program he inherited from the larger-than-life Shawn Walsh, who succumbed to kidney cancer in 2001 after guiding the Black Bears to a pair of national championships.

Whitehead shepherded Maine to title-game appearances in two of his first three campaigns. Each was a one-goal loss.

The Black Bears averaged 25 wins through Whitehead’s first six years, with two additional appearances in the Frozen Four. They dipped to a combined six games below .500 over the next six seasons, needing a miraculous climb in the final month just to make the eight-team Hockey East playoffs in his 2012-13 swan song.

What’s interesting about Whitehead’s departure is that many of his detractors wanted him gone three, four, even five years ago, at which time he had been a relatively successful keeper of the flame.

It begged the questions, how might the perception have been different had Maine not given up the tying goal in the final minute of regulation against Minnesota in 2002, or been on the other end of the 1-0 verdict versus Denver in 2004?

Yet some even ascribed those near-misses to Whitehead, saying he was out-coached or citing him as a poor game manager. Rarely, if ever, was there effusive praise for the manner in which Whitehead rallied those teams and the Maine hockey community after the demise of Walsh, who for all his human foibles was a beloved figure.

Don’t get me wrong. Whitehead had to go. Three losing seasons wouldn’t fly with Alabama football boosters, and they shouldn’t sit well with Maine hockey enthusiasts.

Alfond Arena ticket sales hit their lowest number since 1991-92 — the year before Walsh’s magical 42-1-2 outfit — and why not? Two victories on home ice all season are an unacceptable result, no matter how many freshmen Whitehead was sending out for regular shifts.

Just don’t expect miracles from Jack Capuano, Jim Montgomery, Scott Pellerin, Bob Corkum or whoever is pacing the Black Bears’ bench next winter and beyond. The college hockey world is a different one than they lived in as players under Walsh.

Parity is the rule. Quinnipiac is in the Frozen Four, for pity’s sake. So is Yale, which improbably knocked out Minnesota.

Ditto, UMass Lowell, where Whitehead cut his head coaching teeth. Up until the 2011-12, the River Hawks had gone 16 years without an NCAA tournament appearance.

When Whitehead took over the coach’s office at Maine as Walsh’s handpicked successor, handicapping Maine’s competition in Hockey East was simple as seven letters: UNH, BU and BC. Merrimack and Providence are now legit. Vermont and UMass Amherst are gaining.

That closeness of competition puts more weight than ever on recruiting and in-game strategy.

The former took a hit when longtime recruiting coordinator Grant Standbrook left the program in 2008. Whitehead’s detractors say it is no coincidence that the Black Bears began their nosedive that year. As for the latter, well, it’s tough to dispute that falls on Whitehead.

It’s a bottom-line business, and I’m a bottom-line dude, so I have no qualms whatsoever about Tim Whitehead, the coach, being fired. Tim Whitehead, the man, being shown the door makes me a tad queasy.

Walsh’s death and the second national title in 1999 have painted over the memories of what a dark disaster his in-between years were. Fistfuls of games were forfeited due to academic eligibility issues, symptoms of a staggering lack of institutional control. The coach was suspended when any of his peers without a ring surely would have been cut loose.

From all indications, Whitehead has run a spotless, exemplary program. Players liked him. Members of the media who knew him better than I raved about a great guy he was, and is.

I just worry about a sports world in which a teacher of all the right life lessons is job hunting. Yet that same world worships at the altar of Rick Pitino and Bill Belichick, two men who have shown notoriously questionable character in their lives away from coaching.

But they win, and so they prosper. Someday each will retire, and a caretaker will be given the keys to the kingdoms, and systems, they have built.

As Tim Whitehead can confirm today, those will be among the most thankless, no-win situations in the galaxy.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is [email protected].