If You Win Big, You
Get Paid Big: Baylor’s head coach Art Briles is the latest to understand
this, after the Bears gave him a ten-year extension that will keep him in Waco,
TX through the 2023 season, fresh off of a nationally-televised beat down of
Oklahoma. As a private institution, Baylor isn’t required to release financial
details of the new contract – and they haven’t – but you know it’s big. Briles
is a hot property, and they’ve locked him away nicely.
The Bears, perennial underachievers in the Big XII for years
and years before Briles arrived, have become one of the real national powers in
college football over the past few years, ever since a quarterback by the name
of Robert Griffin III started wowing people en route to the 2011 Heisman
Trophy. Nick Florence last year and Bryce Petty this year have continued the
explosion of points and big plays.
Under Briles’ calm tutelage – you ever see the guy anything
but ice-cool calm? – Baylor has become a place good players want to go, rather
than a backwoods destination for kids who’ve been given no other good
scholarship offers. You don’t think homesick-for-Texas RB Lache Seastrunk
would’ve chosen Baylor over Texas, Texas A&M and Texas Tech when
transferring five years ago? Not a chance. But the improved level of
competitiveness the school is showing means they’re going to continue to get
blue-chip players coming in.
Averaging 61 points a game, Baylor’s offense is flat-out fun
to watch, and their defense is coming along nicely, too. Importantly for the
school’s coffers, the team is so good that Floyd Casey Stadium is routinely
sold out now, and the famous tarp is coming off because so many people want to
watch the game. Briles is the architect of all that and more. He’s
single-handedly turned this program’s fortunes around. Yeah, no wonder he got
paid.
Northern Illinois QB
Jordan Lynch Is A Gun: The Huskies signal caller is the most exciting
player I’ve seen on a college field this year outside of Johnny Manziel. I
wrote earlier in the week that, in a perfect world, Lynch would be a Heisman Trophy
candidate, but, unfortunately, this just isn’t a perfect world. The Huskies
play in the Mid-American Conference, and strength of schedule is a real killer,
and keeps Lynch from being a serious contender.
Still, it doesn’t stop Lynch from putting up video game-type
numbers and wowing us on a weekly basis – in a similar vein to Johnny Football,
the Huskies signal-caller is flat-out fun to watch. He’s the sort of guy that
gets the turnstiles clicking over, because he’s guaranteed gridiron
entertainment. The sad thing in Lynch’s case is that he’s barely noticed on a
national level. He deserves more recognition from ESPN and others. Hopefully
Wednesday night’s ESPN2 broadcast will start that.
By anyone’s standards, he’s had a whale of a season, and
continued on his merry way on Wednesday night against arguably the best MAC
opposition he’s faced all year, Ball State. He was a lazy 26-32 for 345 yards
and two touchdowns throwing the football, and backed that up with 123 yards and
two more scores on twenty carries in the ground game. NIU will win the MAC at
this rate, and are looking good for an at-large BCS Bowl invite. That would
raise Lynch’s profile, too.
Winning at Mid-Major
Schools Gets Coaches Noticed: Reports out of Los Angeles during the week
say that the University of Southern California’s favoured candidate for its
vacant head coaching job is Kevin Sumlin, currently in charge of Texas A&M
University.
Sumlin, charismatic and a winner – two things that are very
much valued in Southern California, where the Trojans have a giant profile die
to their history of success and the lack of an NFL franchise in the city – is
definitely the sort of guy I could see in charge and having success at USC.
He’s proven to be very good at his craft, both at Houston, where his offenses
were statistically amongst the best in the nation and definitely amongst the
most exciting, and then at College Station, where he has shown an ability to
continue to coach his team even as the glare from the Johnny Manziel spotlight
continues to shine brightly. The ability to manage big-time players at the same
time as building and maintaining a solid football program is undoubtedly what
brought Sumlin to the attention of USC’s Athletic Director Pat Haden and the
school’s regents.
If you believe another Los Angeles Times report, Sumlin, if
he is indeed named as the new USC head coach in December, is going to see a
nice bump in his salary, from where it sits at the moment, at a little over $3
million/season, to somewhere in the neighbourhood of $6 million per year.
That’s insane money – and that salary will come with an insane pressure to win
and win big. Oh, and quickly. USC want to be back winning Pac-12 and National
Championships, like, yesterday!
But Sumlin is a proven winner. If anyone can do it, it’s
him. He has absolutely the right mentality. This USC fan would love to see him
in cardinal and gold next year. Not that the other candidates thrown up in the
LA press – Vanderbilt’s James Franklin, Boise State’s Chris Petersen, ESPN’s
Jon Gruden and Denver’s Jack Del Rio – would be bad choices. After the Lane Kiffin debacle, you can bet
your bottom dollar that the appointment of the next coach will come only after
exhaustive and thorough due diligence.
No Big 10 School Will
Beat Ohio State in 2013: That’s almost a guarantee from your humble scribe.
Why? Because the Buckeyes are that good. But also because the rest of their
conference is that bad. Urban Meyer’s
men carried on their merry way Saturday in Champaign, stacking up sixty points
on a hapless Illinois team in a 60-35 victory, thanks largely to RB Carlos Hyde
who just went nuts on the Illini, rushing for 247 yards on 24 carries and four
touchdowns. QB Braxton Miller ran for a score and passed for two more – one to
Hyde.
It was a slick performance today that should send shockwaves
through the Big Ten. Each week, the Buckeyes come out and do what they need to
do: score big and look unstoppable. With the weakness of the Big Ten,
absolutely stacking on the points and yards is the only way that the voters are
going to sit up, take notice and say, “Wow, look at Ohio State! Those guys are
really killing it!” If your conference is bad, winning just isn’t enough. You
have to thoroughly dominate or you’re penalised regardless of whether you get
the W. Right or wrong, that’s the reality of college football in 2013.
Based on that body of work (their defense and offense
stacked on points) there simply doesn’t appear to be any hope of seeing the Buckeyes
lose before they get to a BCS Bowl. I doubt Michigan will come close, and I don’t
know that Michigan State – the Buckeyes’ likely Big Ten Championship Game
opponent – will, either. Wouldn’t Stanford vs. Ohio State be an awesome New
Years Day Rose Bowl Game match-up?
Mack Brown Will Be
Under Pressure Again This Week: 38-13 was the final score in the Oklahoma
State vs. Texas game, favouring Mike Gundy’s Cowboys, and it’s the worst home
loss that a Mack Brown-coached Longhorn team has suffered in Austin.
A stat like that is about the last thing that the veteran
coach, under pressure early in the year after being gashed in two consecutive
games before the ‘Horns went on an improbable six-game winning run. Just when
things were quieting down, as far as Brown being on the hot seat, it’s bound to
reignite this week. Losing badly on the road is one thing. Doing it at home in
front of the school’s regents and others…that’s not good.
So, the Texas streak is over, as is the chance that Texas
had of being the Big XII Champion and getting to a BCS Bowl. That honour will
presumably now be fought out between Oklahoma State and Baylor, and all the
Texas focus turns to whether Mack Brown will be around when the Longhorns take
the field in 2014.
My thought on firing coaches is this: you don’t get rid of a
guy like Mack Brown – a legend, no matter how you look at it – without knowing
that you’ve got a pretty good guy waiting in the wings. Or, at least, you go
and fire your current coach knowing that you can land a good replacement. The popular
theory is that Nick Saban would take the job and be very nicely compensated for
it. But Saban seems happy at Alabama.
Do you, if you’re Texas, take a massive risk by pulling the
trigger on Brown for anything less than an iron-clad guarantee that Saban would
come? Is there a better guy out there than Brown, other than Saban? You don’t want
to trade down, and how many really good coaches are out there looking to move?
Particularly in this environment, with Baylor and, to a lesser extent Texas
Tech, snapping up some of those blue-chip recruits that used to go to Texas
because the Longhorns were the best team in the state.
Clearly, the administrators at Texas have some thinking to do.
Duke’s Resurgence Is
Complete: Crazy world where Duke is working on a win streak of six wins in
football. More than that, they’re on top in the chaotic ACC Coastal Division.
David Cutcliffe must surely be in the top three for Coach of the Year. He’s
built up a solid program and their signature win of the season came today against
the Miami-FL Hurricanes.
It’s one of the feel-good stories of the season: after many
long years in the cellar of the ACC, everything about the Duke program is
looking up. Like Art Briles with Baylor, Cutcliffe has made Duke a destination
for athletes to come and play football. He’s started right at the bottom and is
building a program with the right sort of culture. With every win, people are
going to take more and more notice of what’s going on, and the more eyeballs on
the program the better.
Duke’s sudden return to ACC prominence is proof positive
that a coach can come in when the program is at rock bottom and steadily build
to the point where winning seasons become the norm rather than the exception.
I think it’s also a good lesson for trigger-happy athletic
directors who want to fire their coaches too quickly. If your team was bad for
years, it’s likely going to take years to recover so firing your coach after
one or two seasons pretty much defeats the purpose of hiring them at all. Duke’s
administrators have been patient, allowing Cutcliffe to do things his way and
on his schedule, and look where it’s got the program.
So Is USC’s:
Gutsy win for the Men of Troy tonight at home against Stanford. It’s a win that’s
thrown the Pac-12 wide open, and will be making people in Eugene, Oregon
absolutely delirious with excitement because the Ducks are back in the hunt for
at least a conference championship.
All because USC’s defense played like men possessed in the
last quarter, forcing two turnovers, allowing the offense to make their own
share of big plays – I’m looking at you, Marqise Lee and Nelson Agholor – to give
kicker Andre Heidari the chance to convert on a 47-yard field goal with 19
seconds left in regulation, which, thankfully, never looked like missing, to
give the Trojans a famous and improbable 17-20 win.
It was quite a scene after the final play of the game, with
USC fans filling the field, and interim head coach Ed Orgeron walking up into
the stands to conduct the Spirit of Troy Marching Band. By far and away, this
was the best win of a season that started off horrendously and has gotten
better with every passing week of late. The Trojans are on a definite roll at the
right time for their annual cross-town matchup against UCLA in two weeks’ time
after a trip out to Colorado next Saturday.
If Orgeron wasn’t right amongst the top candidates – Kevin Sumlin
is chief amongst them if you believe the rumours – for the vacant USC head
coaching role, he certainly will be now. At the very least, he has done more
than enough to earn a place on the coaching staff for 2014.
The Trojans played
with an incredible spirit and an exuberance that hasn’t been around since Pete
Carroll’s USC squads were beating up people and going to Rose Bowl Games (and
winning them) on an almost yearly basis. That same swagger and air of
confidence and the belief that they can beat anyone anywhere has made a welcome
return to campus. All because Orgeron made football fun again for the Trojans.
Look what playing fun football gets you. You get to win big games and alter the
course of the Pac-12 and National Championship races.
Metaphorically, it seems that the program has come out of
the tunnel and here’s hoping that there’s long days of bright light ahead.
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