Buddy Stephens, the five-time national championship coach who rose to national prominence through Netflix’s “Last Chance U” documentary series, is out as football coach at East Mississippi Community College after 18 seasons.EMCC announced Monday night that associate head coach and offensive coordinator Preston Rice will fill in as interim head coach for the remainder of the season. The school did not mention Stephens or specify a reason for the change in its announcement.The move came days after Stephens publicly criticized EMCC and Mississippi Association of Community Colleges Conference leadership over changes to the league’s football schedule and playoff format.Stephens called the leadership responsible for the changes “idiots” in an interview with The Commercial Dispatch published Thursday, and he accused some conference presidents of structuring the postseason around avoiding the cost of traveling for the National Junior College Athletic Association playoffs.“It was really ‘junkified,’ the way they decided they were going to do it and there wasn’t a lot of real thought,” Stephens told the newspaper, referring to the MACCC’s adding one game to the regular-season schedule to give each team five home and away games, and changing the playoff format to have only the top two seeds from each division play for the state championship rather than the top two teams from each division. “I was very surprised at how it came out because there were actual people who have doctorates that came up with this.”