Heh.

What would you think of a BCS Title game between Missouri and West Virginia?

Personally, given the way this season has gone, I say "fine by me".  However, my opinion isn't universal so I'm curious what you CFR readers think?  This Chris Dufresne column is about where I am in terms of dealing with an unusual BCS title game matchup.

It's frustrating to see two teams with questionable non-conference loads slowly grind their way to the top, but it's not like both aren't highly respectable football clubs.  I think maybe we've been a little spoiled by the USC/Texas type matchups where there's some clearly qualified teams playing all season like they're the best then showing it once more in the title game.  Not every season is like that though.

Last year Ohio State and Florida were two very good football teams.  I wouldn't say either was anywhere near an all-time club, a sure-fire runaway blockbuster.  But that's football.  Great teams don't come along every year.  The same goes for this year.  Certainly USC and LSU had that runaway potential, but neither ever got its act together.  In the absence of a truly great team or even a reasonable approximation like what happened in 2006, we just have to wait this out and see who makes the best case at the end of the year.

I really don't know the alternative to this year if we don't want some combination of Missouri or West Virginia.  USC and LSU have flubbed it up over and over.  Ohio State is still marked with last year's Scarlet Letter after the Florida loss.  Those two are about as good as anyone.  Get mad not at the system but the handful of teams good enough to give us a more appealing title game that didn't get it done.

Speaking of teams that didn't get it done: USC coach Pete Carroll is on top of the world after his team's victory over Arizona State and is talking playoffs.

For six years, USC coach Pete Carroll said he never understood how the Bowl Championship Series worked . . . until now.

"It’s about who’s had the most attractive season rather than who had the best team," Carroll said. "It just dawned on me that’s how it works."

Carroll’s opinion might be influenced by the fact USC dismantled Arizona State, 44-24, on Thanksgiving and the Trojans appear to be hitting their stride, albeit 11 games into the season. He might have felt different after the Stanford game.

Carroll said he did not want his comments to be construed as sour grapes because USC is not going to play in the BCS title game. But he believes the Trojans would hold their own if college football held a playoff.

"I would love to be involved with a discussion of who is the best team in the country at the end of the season," Carroll said.

This isn't the NFL, coach.  Narrowly sneaking by the majority of your easier games and building a fat win-loss record doesn't put you in the title game in college football.  Ok, it did once recently (Ohio State 2002), but that team was a severe anomaly.  USC may very well have the best football team in all the land right now, but you gotta prove it weeks one through thirteen, not just weeks twelve and thirteen.

Carroll may have had a gripe in 2002 when his team was in my mind the best in college football, but even then USC won its last eight games by healthy margins and looked completely unstoppable on both sides of the ball.  Last weekend was the first time all year aside from the games against lowly Nebraska and Washington State that USC has even looked above average.  That won't cut it.

Via FanHouse

Al Groh, being an ex-NFL coach, likes to hand out game balls after each game. A fairly popular football tradition that can be found down to the high school level. When the UVA compliance department heard about the handing out of game balls, they decided that it must stop.

"It's not specifically in the rule book that you can't give out a game ball," UVa compliance director Steve Flippen said, "but there are a lot more interpretations than there are rules and that's one of the interpretations of the extra-benefits rule.

"At the end of the year, if a team had a player of the year and awarded him a game ball, that would be OK, but not on a game-by-game basis."

That's right, the seemingly innocuous tradition of giving a player a game ball after a game is an extra-benefit under the interpretation of NCAA rules that cannot be tolerated. Waiting until the end of the year, however, is fine.

So not only did Virginia football stop handing out game balls, they had to take back all the balls already handed out this year.

Wait, you mean they actually have a defensive coordinator?  Bad joke, moving along ...

But seriously, he just left the team.  Coach Mike Leach threw his defense under the bus after Saturday's 49-45 loss to Oklahoma State, questioning their manhood.

Defensively, the entire first half, we got hit in the mouth and acted like someone took our lunch money, and all we wanted to do is have pouty expressions on our face until somebody dobbed our little tears off and made us [expletive] feel better. Then we go out there and try harder once our mommies told us we were OK. Neither one of those things is acceptable.

As is fan protocol, websites were swiftly established demanding the head of defensive coordinator Lyle Setencich.

Mission: accomplished.

Take it away, MGoBlog:

 

In two games Lloyd Carr has gone from a potential mini-Bo, pending the successful resolution of his final season, to a definitive mini-Bump and Michigan is searching for the man on the left again ten games too early. And while I would still give Lloyd Carr a sandwich, I no longer want him mucking around with my football program. This is an opinion now universally held by Michigan fans, and the alternative is too mindboggling to consider. So going forward, the assumptions:

• Carr will retire at the end of the season.
• His assistants will be given nice severance packages and a firm handshake.
• Martin conducts Michigan's first open, national search for a new football coach since 1968 [emphasis mine - CFR].

Carr's retirement seemed like a foregone conclusion in January, but the fact that it's a cold inevitability at this point is awkward.  Even more surreal: that last line.  Read it, re-read it, and read it again.

Martin conducts Michigan's first open, national search for a new football coach since 1968

Michigan is a mountain.  For the first time in almost 40 years, it's will get up and move its craggy construct someplace new.

Shock to the system?  Youbet.  Ohio State quickly shedded the Hayes identity and legacy after he punched that poor Clemson kid.  Not so for Michigan and Bo.  Bo may have stepped down in 1989, but in many ways he never left - until now.  The change from the dynastic cannot be overlooked.

By comparison, people complain about the American Presidency being in only three hands for the last 27 years:  Reagan, Bush and Clinton.  Fatigued of those guys (and maybe that gal and her seemingly inevitable 4-8 year run)?  Michigan's got that setup beat by a decade plus.  Only Penn State and Florida State have similarly unevolved leadership, and yet they both seem more modern, less rooted to that opening act of a very long play.  Neither can trace itself back to a Fielding freaking Yost the way Michigan does.

Mountains aren't meant to be moved.  They are the rock, you go around them.  Michigan's one giant rock, so you know this coaching search will be the very opposite of happenstance.  Besides Lloyd Carr's chances of hand-picking his successor, the biggest loser here is Jim Harbaugh.  Is there a less-welcome big-school alum other than maybe O.J. Simpson?  Pride came before that ill-timed fall, which makes the Les Miles name suddenly, inexplicably appealing (don't do it!).

There is no Lloyd Carr for Lloyd Carr to point to and say "he's next".  That House of Usher just fell, the bloodline ending with Lloyd Carr and no true heirs to the Yost/Schembechler line.  Somehow I doubt this is how Bo would have wanted it, but them's the facts and that mountain will be moved.  College football's Halley's comet has burst through the horizon and we are all witness to it.

Earlier this week I did my best to discern notable "artists and mechanics" from the 2007 crop of college football players and coaches.  The concept was developed by Sun Sports TV's Whit Watson.  It's his baby, so I invited him to respond.

He has now done so, and you can find it at his blog: Artists and Mechanics 2007 (Chapter 1)

Notable excerpts:

While CFR likes to take the theory national, pondering the Artist vs. Mechanic tendencies of, for example, Pete Carroll and Jimmy Clausen, I know where my bread is buttered. Thankfully, so does Brian, and that's why he put up a list of Florida football personalities for me to break down. There was also the tantalizing offer to assign some of my fellow Sun Sports personalities into the "Artist" or "Mechanic" camp.

Create fresh content for two blogs at once, and possibly rip Mike Bianchi in the process? Is today Christmas?

Heh.  We're always happy to deliver presents early.

Randy Shannon: Mechanic. I've met the coach a few times, including our interview for "In My Own Words" this summer, and he strikes me as a by-the-book dude. While he's an exceptional recruiter -- a skill that screams Artist -- his attention to discipline, doing the little things correctly, and hammering the details betrays him as a Mechanic. If you spend some time learning about his background, how he lost several family members under tragic circumstances and escaped the violent streets of Liberty City in Miami as the first member of his family to graduate from college, his Mechanic tendencies start to make sense. When faced with life-or-death choices, as Shannon surely was in his youth, adhering to a self-imposed set of rules can be a powerful tool for survival. Randy Shannon's meticulous nature got him out of the projects and into the head coaching job at Miami. He's the Mechanic's Mechanic. Is that what the Hurricane football program needed? The administration at UM is banking on it.

There certainly has never been a Miami coach quite like Shannon.

Jimbo Fisher, Rick Trickett: I group these two new assistants at Florida State together because, as the post at CFR asks, "are there any Artists among FSU's new coaches?" I would say "yes" to both, simply because the perception of these two men in particular is that of "guru," and gurus are wheelhouse Artists. Both Fisher and Trickett may indeed be inventive and/or process-oriented in the manner of a Mechanic, but that's not why they were hired -- they were hired to make a splashy statement to Florida State fans, boosters, and players that the Seminoles are serious. Their reputation precedes them. They bring cache' and credibility to the FSU football program. They're rock stars in the world of assistant coaches. Thus, Artists.

This was very surprising.  They strike me as the farthest thing from artists (Fisher rarely gets more descriptive about his offense other than to say it's "multiple"), but the exact reason they're in Tallahassee logically is rooted in a demand for artistic freedom lacking under the previous coaches.

Tim Tebow: I thought long and hard about this one, and I'm going with Artist. Anybody who can execute the jump-pass in a critical SEC matchup against LSU cannot be anything else. One of Urban Meyer's biggest concerns about Tebow this year will be keeping him healthy -- not because of any weakness in Florida's offensive line, which happens to be one of the best and most experienced in the Southeastern Conference -- but because Tebow is a linebacker in a quarterback's body. The young man simply likes to hit people. He's all about the experience, which is part of the definition of Artist. He's just a football player, the highest compliment a head coach can bestow. It's interesting that the Gator coaching staff has spent a lot of time working with Tebow on his throwing motion this summer. They're trying to work a little Mechanic into him. But ask yourself this -- if you had to compare the kid to any quarterback in the NFL right now, who's the first guy that comes to mind?

Right. Brett Favre. Not based on skill, yet, but based on sheer love of the game. Tebow and Favre both play football as if they were on an empty sandlot, two-hand touch, gotta be home before it gets dark and Mom yells at us. Artists.

Yeh Tebow was more vexing than one would assume at first glance.  Everyone has both an artists and a mechanic within them, but Tebow's chameleon act strikes me as something rare and perhaps transcendant.  It would explain why he's already a God in Gainesville.

Myron Rolle: Another tough one. His "renaissance man" reputation is well-earned. Rolle is an excellent student, having played his high school football at the Hun School in New Jersey (average SAT score: 1200), where he earned just about every academic honor you can imagine. In fact, he enters the 2007 football season as an athletic sophomore but very nearly an academic senior -- he's three hours shy of completing enough classes to finish his junior year. FSU's bio page calls Rolle "one of the most academically advanced players in college football history," and it's hard to argue otherwise.

But despite all that, despite his dream of becoming a Rhodes scholar and a doctor, despite the fact that he played the lead role in "Fiddler On The Roof" as a high school senior, I'm going with Mechanic, and here's why: do you have any idea how hard it is to maintain that level of academic excellence and play as a starter on a Division I football team? His time management skills have got to be legendary. Spring football, summer workouts, preseason two-a-days, travel to and from games during the season -- and he's still an honor roll guy? That's impressive. It requires exacting attention to detail, self-discipline, and diligence. His days must be scheduled to the minute. Mechanic.

I'm sold.

And today's wild card:

Mike Bianchi: Artist. As I have written here before, I love the fact that Mikey always sides with the righteous underdog in his columns. His favorite quote: "The job of the sports columnist is to watch the battle from the mountaintop and then ride down and bayonet the wounded." Tilting at windmills is a favorite hobby of Artists.

And me? As much as I'd love to think of myself as an Artist, I have to face reality: Mechanic. I'm all about the research. For me, live television is easy once you know you've done the homework. I'm very much a "measure twice, cut once" kind of guy. One of my personal favorite quotes came from the late Ronald Reagan, who liked to say, "trust, but verify." And by the way, it took me three days to write this entry.

Hilarious quote from Bianchi.  I gotta memorize that one.

My sincere thanks once again to Whit Watson for devoting some of his limited time to this exchange.  I love sending praise his way but Whit truly deserves it.  The guy is one of the more capable television personalities and a legitimate thinker who is also gracious with his time.  Be sure and check out his regularly updated blog and also watch him on Sun Sports if you're living in or near Florida.

***
Previously at College Football Resource:

Artists and Mechanics
Artists and Mechanics 2006
Whit's Response: Artists and Mechanics
Artists and Mechanics 2007

New Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh is already making enemies.

Last month he suggested that USC coach Pete Carroll was leaving after this season.  Now he's giving subtle putdowns to the athletic department at dear old alma mater Michigan.

He may or may not be right about these things - but being who he is - he probably shouldn't say them.  I admire the confidence (or is it insanity?) but when you're already in a huge hole as the coach at Stanford ... don't make it worse.

(Via: MGoBlog) 

Maybe Pete Carroll will rip off several more championships in the coming years and render this entry moot, but consider:

After going on one of the more epic (short-term) runs in all of college football history, USC has now lost three of its last 14 games.  By itself that fact tells of a team playing at a high level of football.  But it's also a distinctive separation from USC's celebrated mini-run the last several years.

There were many reasons for USC's success these last few years but two were fairly critical: Pete Carroll ran the defense, Norm Chow ran the offense.  Carroll is simply one of the finest defensive minds anywhere and is the co-Godfather - along with Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin - of the 4-3/cover two/Tampa Two defense so vogue in professional football.  The guy knows how to run a great defense that stops the run, slows offenses down, plays fast and forces turnovers.

In a stroke of genius he hired Norm Chow to be his offensive coordinator in 2001.  I don't mean to lionize the man but he's one of college football's greatest offensive coordinators.  Combined, the two coaches assembled top ten units on both sides of the ball and made playing USC particularly vexing.

The two parted ways after the 2004 championship season and USC's offense went on a tear in 2005.  However, the formula had been changed and what was once an offense directed by an elite coach instead leaned on bright but young coaches who more closely associated with coach Carroll's ideas of how an offense should run.  Gone was a lot of the presnap motion, formation shifts, funky looks and unusual tendencies for a more mundane (yet complicated) pro-style offense.

It worked in 2005 when USC had an overwhelming talent edge with Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart and LenDale White and 10 returning starters to its offense, but things have returned to the mean since.  In fact it appears as if the talent underachieved last year.  While the USC defense was able to return to dominance after a shaky 2005, the offense became more predictable and less able to control the trenches and dictate outcomes in obvious pass and run situations.

USC's offensive coaching hydra was unusual and perhaps telling of the eventual decline.  To this day I have no idea who did what among Lane Kiffin, Steve Sarkisian and Pete Carroll.  I hunch it was Carroll's effort to muddy the waters and shelter from criticism his young co-coordinators.  Kiffin's departure and Sarkisian's ascent clarifies the situation greatly but it is still Pete Carroll's offense and newspaper stories this spring told of an offensive scheme and approach nearly unchanged since last year.

This isn't an intent to slam the USC offense.  They were able to put up 30 points/game last year in spite of possession-eating clock rules, NFL departures, injuries and youth at the tailback position.  However, USC has "lost the initiative" to borrow a thought from my friend HeismanPundit.  They've settled for an offense more reliant upon talent to win the day than before and unlike previous years the talent hasn't delivered as often.  In fact, it took a Steve Smith bailout effort against Washington State from adding a third loss last year.  The bottom line is that a game's outcome more often becomes more reliant upon luck or a great individual performance instead of USC's own approach simply removing chance from the equation.

I mentioned Florida State up above because USC's trajectory might end up quite similar.  Florida State went on a run from 1987 until 1999 that saw them finish no further than fourth in the polls.  But they could only win two national championships during that time, missing out on the opportunity to establish their run as the greatest in college football history.  It was incredibly successful, yes, but not wholesale dominance.

As Pete Carroll and his defense is the constant, the rock for USC, Mickey Andrews and his defense are the rock for Florida State.  Both could be expected to produce at a high level with remarkably similar levels of talent on their sides of the ball.  But the difference-maker for each school would be on offense where these teams could elevate themselves as either almost good enough versus being a champion.

Florida State's "fast break" offense helped them earn their first championship in 1993 under quarterback Charlie Ward and several subsequent flirtations in the following years.  That eventually gave way to Mark Richt's more vertical offense.  That too would help them to a championship in 1999 after several near-titles the previous few years.

With Richt's departure the Florida State offense fell into decline and the team's fate is well evident today.  Mickey Andrews is still around and doing a hell of a job like always, but that great run ended when the decision was made to become more predictable and less aggressive on offense.

All of which takes me to my initial question, is USC going the way of Florida State?  I don't know, but last season's play suggests they've taken a turn away from dominance and innovation and are emphasizing maintenance instead.  Pete Carroll's still around to keep that defense humming (same as Andrews) but the other side of the ball might be hurting.  They may win another championship or two or place high in the polls like always, but that chance to be the undisputed face of an era is slipping away.

Was an opportunity lost when Chow departed in not hiring a coordinator who was more unpredictable?  Kiffin and Sarkisian clearly owed something to Carroll with their initial hirings (Sarkisian was plucked out of an obscure coaching job at a California JUCO and Kiffin is Carroll's Godson, hired away from a low level job with the NFL's Jaguars).  Things may have gotten too incestual much like the Jeff/Bobby Bowden situation at Florida State.

Again, I don't know.  I simply see some similarities (yay alliteration) between the two and scratch my head at that awful question for both: "what might have been?"

Why not?

First item up: coaches' tenure and BCS appearances.

Ok, so this is a little late, but Georgia Sports Blog went to the trouble of determining the BCS conference coaches with the most tenure who have yet to make a BCS bowl game appearance.  Take a look.

Arkansas' Houston Nutt is atop the list, having coached since 1998.  Last year was his best chance but that kind of fell by the wayside.  Nipping at his heels is Clemson's Tommy Bowden whose team had a late collapse of its own.  A particular burr in this saddle is Cal's Jeff Tedford, tied for 7th longest wait.  He's been coaching since 2002 and would have gone to a BCS game in 2004, but Mack Brown happened.

GSB's Paul Westerdawg also lists BCS appearances by conference teams.  The Pac-10 leads the list, of course, with seven teams appearing in a BCS game.  As noted above it should be eight but Texas two-stepped Cal out of the way in 2004.  The Big 10 is tied with the Pac-10 but also has one more institution.

The ACC is particularly woeful with just four of its 12 institutions collecting BCS cash.  The snag, of course, is that Miami is counted with the Big East, having last entered a BCS game before the whole ugly ACC seduction of several Big East powers.

***
Now, for a moment of Heisman talk.  Heisman Pundit's released his "Winter Top 20", a list of the 20 players who will "at least get a whiff of legitimate consideration".

It's good to see West Virginia's Pat White crack the top ten at No. 6.  He doesn't get enough credit for his contribution to the West Virginia offensive machine.  HP's taken some flack for placing John David Booty at No. 1 but it's hard to argue with a winning, good-stat USC quarterback at the moment.  It's a little like center field for the Yankees, what can you do about it?

***
And now, some entertainment from the FanHouse.

---Top 10 cheerleader videos (???).  The Kelly Ripa one's comical.

---Domestic violence charges won't be filed against Cal's Marshawn Lynch.

---Auburn Tigers: 2004 National Champions? Yeh. Freakin'. Right.  Patrick, this is why it's so easy to take jabs at Auburn on here.

---Hippies get in the way of Cal's new stadium.  The bums lost, Lebowski!  Except, this time they won.  Dammit.

---Troy Smith exacts his revenge on Chris Leak.  Not really.

Matt at the excellent blog Statistically Speaking (he hearts pythagoras) has a post up attempting to rank the SEC coaches.  He's quick to single out the two Mississippi coaches, Ed Orgeron and Sylvester Croom, as the league's worst.  Fair enough.  CFR awards bonus points for the clever "1-2-3-4 we lost to Wake Forest by 24" under Orgeron's picture.

After that, it's resume time without any actual rankings.  He reports, we decide.

Matt's invited me to respond, so here goes:

Let it be known before another word is written that I publish these rankings with my own Coaches Corollary in mind.  Be sure and read the entire entry for context and reasoning, but as a shortcut here it is:

1. There are great coaches
2. Great coaches don't stay great

Got it? Good.  Here's the list.

1. Urban Meyer, Florida - Won a national championship in his second year in stunning fashion.  Particularly impressive that the quarterback is a poor fit for his scheme.  Things will continue to be good in Gainesville.  Scheme + Talent = good.
   
2. Nick Saban, Alabama - The bitch is back, and he's at the SEC's equivalent of Park Place.  Recent maneuverings mean he's non grata in the NFL so don't expect any more rumors of job searches in the near future.
3. Phil Fulmer, Tennessee - Disastrous 2005, but recovered nicely after the return of David Cutcliffe rescued his quarterback.  Injuries killed the team this year but the Vols look rejuvenated after several years of stagnation.  Credit, of course, goes to the big man.
4. TIE Tommy Tuberville, Auburn - Has found a little of that Mark Richt 10 magic, netting another 10-win season (11, to be exact).  Offense is on a two year decline from magical 2004 but he continues to make impressive coordinator hires and recruits a lot of hidden gems the other SEC programs miss.
5. TIE Mark Richt, Georgia - Could probably be higher on this list, but has yet to make any real push for the big time.  One of those great but not superlative coaches thus far in his career.  A Corollary case, perhaps.
   
6. Steve Spurrier, South Carolina - Has done well with the Gamecocks and isn't a flight treat, but I don't know, doesn't have that same zest for winning like he used to.  See Corollary above.
   
7. Houston Nutt, Arkansas - His days as a Razorback are probably numbered despite a fabulous season.  Off-season issues hint at poor management decisions and shady broken promises and dealmaking.  Has done well to date given the circumstances.
8. Rich Brooks, Kentucky - Reminds me of a less reliable Dick Tomey.  Rescues programs for a living but not a big time coach.  Terribly sloppy start to his Kentucky career had him marked as the league's worst coach but the Wildcats rebounded this time around.  Maybe there's a little gas left in the tank after all.
9. Bobby Johnson, Vanderbilt - One of America's toughest jobs.  He's not a failure, but isn't much more than an average coach at an impossible situation for average coaches.  Treading water is nice, but that doesn't help in the rankings.
10. Les Miles, LSU - Inherited a great situation and has done little to distinguish himself.  Wins the winnable ones, slams overrated teams (Notre Dame) and loses in frustrating fashion to equals/superiors (Florida, Auburn).
11. Ed Orgeron, Mississippi - Probably could have used some coordinating experience and a year of training in the SEC.  Not quite a disaster but the only people believing in the Rebels are the Rebel faithful themselves.
12. Sylvester Croom, Mississippi State - Inherited a disaster and has marginally improved the program.  Either he's taking the long ... long ... looooong road to Nirvana or things just aren't working out.

There ya go, feel free to constructively disagree.

As reference, here are my SEC coach rankings from June of last year.

Name the year, opponent, final score and outcome of Tom Osborne's Nebraska debut?

Update

Dr. Sak's the big winner!

Nebraska beat UCLA 40-13 in Osborne's 1973 debut. 

Georgia Sports Blog has a good summation of it.

Two quality hires, if you ask me.

• West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez to Alabama OOPS!  See update below.
  
• Miami defensive coordinator Randy Shannon hired as head coach 

The Bear may still be dead, but Alabama fans may finally have someone to rally around with superb credentials who likely won't jump ship (ahem, Franchione) or have an all-time bender in the Panhandle (ahem, Price).

Rodriguez is in that Price mold which strikes me as a good thing.  He's innovative and tough and demands discipline of his players and exudes tremendous confidence on the sidelines.

His hire is also a good thing for the SEC as it continues to move away from its stone age football past thanks to the return of Steve Spurrier to go along with Urban Meyer at Florida and now Rodriguez at Alabama.

As for Shannon, he's been a superb defensive coordinator who has put together some of the fiercest defenses for years on end.  It's not the splashiest hire around, but he's been an elite coordinator and that bodes well for his success as the head man.  Plus, it'll make the Black Coaches Association a little happier this holiday season.  His hire is good for college football and hopefully he'll emerge as one of the nation's finest head men around.

*** 
UPDATE: Um, oops.  Yeah Coach Rodriguez is staying at West Virginia.  Stupid newspapers didn't get it right.  I'm sticking to the message boards next time.

/Snark. 

Oh, and Heisman Pundit disagree with my take on Randy Shannon.  What an awesome afternoon, where's my bottle of Maker's?  Grr...

I just think that when your program has its worst season in 30 years, you don't fix it by hiring as your new head coach one of the coaches responsible for that season. Especially when he's never been a head coach before.

So the coaching carousel is spinning around on its merry warpath.

As noted in the recent Pundit Rondup, the writers are unhappy about Alabama's termination of coach Mike Shula.  They're right, Alabama created its own mess and did Shula a disservice.  But they also don't recognize well enough that coach Shula wasn't capable enough to put Alabama where its fans and administrators want it to be.  His termination was inevitable, but Alabama's sin was not waiting through two more lackluster seasons to finally terminate him but save face with the media.

The one hiring I'm most surprised by is Gene Chizik's departure to Iowa State.  Not long ago he probably was in line for a much bigger job, so this looks like he jumped ship to the first possible BCS conference opportunity as his star began to fade.  He probably waited these last 2-3 years out hoping a particular (unknown) job would open.  It didn't, his rep slid, and thus you find a formerly ga-ga next American Idol coach hanging out in Ames.

More to come this week and beyond as we await the relevance of the strange lukewarm denials by West Virginia's Rich Rodriguez and the suddenly smoke=fire Pete Carroll to the NFL rumors.

Now we know why Nebraska coach Bill Callahan took shots at his former recruit during the offseason.  The kid's good.  Good enough to rain 45 points on Texas' presumably stingy defense.

Freeman, a true freshman, completed 19 of 31 (.613) passes for 269 yards and three touchdowns to help the Kansas State Wildcats defeat Texas on Saturday.  And he did it without the help of a running game (69 total rush yards, 2.8 yards/carry).

So several Texas Tech players were arrested the other day on burglary charges.

Sad, yes.  But more puzzling, the reaction of their coach, Mike Leach.

None of the players has been dismissed or suspended, and Tech coach Mike Leach said he wasn't aware of the allegations until Monday.

"We wait until a guy's guilty," Leach said. "But if we're certain somebody's guilty, we may act sooner."

Methinks he needs to clarify himself.  Or perhaps he did and the quote was taken well out of context, because the media's never done that.  Nahhhhhhh.

The inevitable.

Face saving in East Lansing, as coach Smith gets to finish out the season.

I hunch he's going to have to spend a year in the wilderness (so to speak), letting time smooth out his rough edges with the college football public before he's hired somewhere as a coordinator or assistant.  Perhaps he'll end up on one of the networks or just writing a column.  Or he could just do nothing. 

Michigan State and North Carolina are now the leaders in the race to hire new coaches, it will be interesting to see where they go with the head start.

I'm not a stock market guy or financial analyst by any means, so please be kind if I butcher the following:

After its last-minute home victory last weekend over UCLA, Notre Dame fell a few spots in the rankings in what people in the business of stocks and economics would call a slight market correction.

Apparently, Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis either 1)understands this but is trying to create some kind of exception for his team or 2)doesn't understand this and is heaping an intriguing brand of arrogance and ignorance into the discussion about his team's modest rankings decline.

Now, we've had some silly coaches jump into this rankings debate before (Tuberville, ad nauseum), but I'd never expected a serious guy like Charlie Weis to dive in.  Worse, Weis' efforts fell flat and fans and pundits are enjoying the opportunity to take shots at the Notre Dame coach.

"One of the teams [Tennessee] that jumped us had the same game that we had. They're down, they're playing at home and they win by a field goal," Weis said Tuesday. "Another team [Florida] that jumped us wasn't even playing. They were home eating cheeseburgers and they end up jumping us. That befuddles me."

"Tell me how that works?" Weis said. "Maybe I'm just stupid. Tell me how that works?"

I'll tell you how it works.  Voters sit down after Saturday's games, read up on them, check the scores, and vote.  Not every voter dropped the Irish, not every voter bumped the Gators, but in aggregate that's exactly what happened.  The polls are a collective entity.

They're not unlike say, the U.S. Supreme Court.  There are differences of opinion from every justice (the voters) but at the end of the day a vote is taken and majority opinion rules.  Not every voter disagrees with Weis, but he's treating the whole the same as each of the individual parts.

It's fine to disagree with their findings, but to act ignorant as to how such a conclusion could be reached is... ignorant.

There are flaws that must eventually be addressed with the polls.  Some voters make their choices based on projections, anticipating how a team should be instead of what it is.  Others simply evaluate the teams on their merits and vote for who's best.  Others weigh strength of schedule regardless of team aptitude.  Others look at 'body of work'.  Others like to slot by wins and losses, ignoring that a one loss team is very often superior to an undefeated team at this point in the season but had a more difficult road in getting here.

We have all these different methods in play at the same time and it gives the polls plenty of internal inconsistency. 
Weis should know all that, and by approaching the Irish's rankings slide the way he did smacks of something other than thoughtfulness on the issue.

Personally I viewed the Irish's slide as a bit of a market correction.  Several teams ahead of them had fallen in the polls, but after this weekend a team like Clemson emerged as a possible top 10 squad after their thrashing of Georgia Tech.  If Clemson's moving up, someone else such as Notre Dame very often must move down.

The week before, Florida had been coming off a tough road loss to Auburn and dropped precipitously in the polls (to 10^th in the USA Today/Coaches poll, behind No. 8 Notre Dame) .  Upon reflection this weekend, many voters probably felt they were too harsh and corrected their Gators vote, sneaking them past the Irish, particularly on a weekend when Notre Dame narrowly escaped what should have been a gimme home win against UCLA.

So while Florida was at home eating Cheeseburgers, the voters were correcting their mistakes from the week before.  That's what happens in midseason polling sometimes.

Weis has a right to complain about Tennessee's rise over the Irish.  It's a worthy topic of debate, but his singling out Florida, at least from my perspective, is odd.  Using the market perspective mentioned earlier, it's possible that the marketplace (the voters) simply saw something in Tennessee that gives them warmer feelings than they do about Notre Dame.  Both teams had narrow home victories against opponents not in the top 25, but maybe that SEC bias thing was in effect where Alabama/SEC> UCLA/Pac-10 and thus Notre Dame's win was embarrassing where Tennessee's was seen as reasonable.  I don't know.

But Weis should have looked into it more and come up with a more coherent attack than what was presented on Tuesday. 

Louisiana-Monroe coach Charlie Weatherbie.

Facebook?!

"Fire Chuck Weatherbie.com/Git R Done” is a page on the Facebook Web site created on Oct. 19 by former player Alandee Brown.

As of Wednesday afternoon had 99 members, including a number of former players, one current starter on the team, and one student assistant. There are 138 more invitations to join that have not yet received a response.

The motto posted on the Web page is “If you’re tired of loosing (sic), and broken promises. Well this club is for you.”

Reached by phone on Wednesday, Brown confirmed that he created the page, though he made no further comment on the record.

Everybody hates loosing.

I have a creeping feeling that some of the coaches terminated at the end of this year are going to end up in the broadcast booth or writing online next year.

ESPN already has a veritable army of ex-coaches for its various broadcast and online entities (Holtz, Donnan, Davie, Corso etc.).  Terry Bowden's toiling away on Yahoo! Sports.  John Mackovic's writing for a newspaper in sun baked Palm Springs.

Is there room for more?

Here's an incomplete list of possible departures after this season:

John Bunting (North Carolina), Larry Coker (Miami), John L. Smith (Michigan State), Dennis Franchione (Texas A&M), Dirk Koetter (Arizona State), Rich Brooks (Kentucky), Sylvester Croom (Mississippi State)

That group isn't too interesting, aside from Smith and Franchione.  The Smith thing could actually happen, if a network is looking for vein-popping insanity.  I'll always wonder if, say, ESPN had any interest in Ron Zook after his termination from the Florida Gators.  Sadly, the folks at Illinois went out and hired him, killing that possibility at least for the next few years.

Franchione already goes clickity-clack with his keyboard at his own website, CoachFran.com.  So maybe he'll be a columnist somewhere while sitting on his fat buyout and trying to keep his name alive for future job opportunities.

Here's an interesting little DidYouKnow: USC coach Pete Carroll was writing for some entity, perhaps NFL.com or MSNBC, inbetween the time of his termination from the Patriots and hiring by USC (or so I'm told---any fact checkers out there?). 

I would have included Chuck Amato and Al Groh in the earlier list, but I continue to read plenty about their jobs being safe, at least for this year.  Amato would be great entertainment, no?  I don't think the American public has ever been prepared for several minutes to several hours of the experience that is hearing Amato's raspy voice doing short analysis or even an entire game.

Perhaps the best gift to a broadcast booth would be someone who gets to choose his own time and date of departure: Florida State coach Bobby Bowden.  Imagine what he would be like aiding ESPN or some other network---his genial nature, grandfatherly ways and country charm, mixed with a million dadgummits along the way.  Too good to be true, alas.