Monday afternoon was like seeing the end result of a slow-motion car crash.

Since the beginning of the season, Western Athletics Director Wood Selig had been pledging his allegiance to Head Coach David Elson and the progress of the Football Bowl Subdivision transition.

On Monday, it all came to a brakes-screeching, horn-blowing, expletive-laced collision with a ton of injuries.

No one can excuse 17 straight losses, especially when five of this season’s nine losses were by 20 points or more, and only one was in single digits.

At the same time, no one can blame Elson for his plight. For the past three seasons, he’s been stuck in a transition period. He’s dealt with numerous transfers, staff changes and money games, and the Toppers have played against seven Bowl Championship Series opponents in which the average margin of defeat was 43 points.

This announcement T-boned most of the media and fanbase.

In the past two seasons, Selig has repeatedly said that he and President Gary Ransdell expect this program to compete by 2012 and beyond. In Monday’s press conference, Selig said he’s in the process of trying to rearrange some future schedules involving both non-conference and conference games.

Selig couldn’t look past the facts. The team has gotten progressively worse in Elson’s seven-year tenure as head coach.

The Toppers’ development has declined every season under Elson — with the suspect exception of a 7-5 2007 season — and is bottoming out at 0-9 so far this season.

Elson showed he couldn’t win at the Football Championship Subdivision level. That was the first red flag. He was given a clean slate in the transition, and the situation never got any better.

But coming off a season where a team wins a national championship, like the Toppers did in 2002, there is nowhere to go but down — just ask Tubby Smith.

Elson had to deal with a ton of different obstacles most young coaches — or any head coach — never have to deal with, and a lot of that had to do with the people around him.

Elson’s coaching staff is still an FCS staff with holdovers from the FCS days and a number of new coaches with very little experience at a high level.

The talent that was recruited for FCS play in 2005 and 2006 wasn’t ready for the transition. The FBS talent brought in over the last three seasons is way too young to compete right away.

Yes, Elson was given the FBS-level contract, the FBS-level facilities upgrades and the votes of confidence that an FBS head coach gets. But the talent simply isn’t there or isn’t ready, and in a time where support from fans and boosters is already fading fast, it doesn’t add up to a new contract or even a retention.

Neither Selig or Elson could avoid what happened Monday. A tenure of 14 years on staff doesn’t mean much when the results aren’t there on the schedule.

Transitions are tough on everyone, because they mean an ‘out with the old, in with the new’ mentality. David Elson found that out on Monday.