Southern California, Lincoln Riley can’t be taken seriously
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No matter what walk of life you’re from or what job you have, we should all aspire to have friends and co-workers as loyal as Lincoln Riley is to defensive coordinator Alex Grinch. Despite very little evidence that Grinch is helping Riley win games – and in some cases could be blamed for losing them – Riley has seemingly accepted that his defense will stink regardless which program he coaches or what personnel he has.
Even after last year’s back-to-back defensive meltdowns against Utah in the Pac 12 championship game and Tulane in the Cotton Bowl, Riley kept Grinch in place, just as he had done at Oklahoma despite defenses that got exposed too frequently to think the Sooners had a real chance to win national titles.
Now here we are in Year 2 at Southern California, and there’s just no way to take the Trojans seriously as long as Grinch is running the defense. How can you after giving up 193 rushing yards and 564 overall while barely hanging on to a 48-41 win at Colorado?
Sure, a win’s a win. Congratulations on squeaking by a program that went 1-11 last season. That’s not why USC went all-in to hire you, Lincoln. You’re supposed to be a championship coach. But being a championship coach requires making tough decisions, and the fact that Grinch is still your defensive coordinator indicates you might not have what it takes to make them.
Grinch might be a great defensive mind. And USC’s defensive issues may not be completely a Grinch problem. Perhaps USC isn’t physical enough in practice because Riley is worried about injuries. Maybe the strength and conditioning philosophy emphasizes speed over brute force. But at some point when your defense is consistently this bad, you’ve got to change something. That’s what leaders do. That’s how championship programs operate.
Despite the Trojans getting to 5-0, the clock is ticking on their time with Caleb Williams, a Heisman Trophy winner and generational talent who will almost certainly be in the NFL next year. He should be leading USC to championships. If he doesn’t even make the College Football Playoff with the Trojans, everyone will know where to point the finger.
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And you can’t call it second-guessing when fans have been screaming for defensive changes since last year. That’s why USC, despite still being very much in the mix for the title, is No. 1 in the Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which fan bases are feeling the most angst about the state of their favorite program.
Four more in misery
LSU
Giving someone a $95 million contract to coach football does not come with a patience clause. The responsibility of leading LSU football does not get you a pat on the back because you tried hard and entertained everyone for a few hours. Brian Kelly took the LSU job because he wanted to win a national championship. LSU hired Kelly because it views its job as a place where you can do that with a baseline level of competence, and his track record at Notre Dame more than cleared that bar. But through 19 games, is either side really getting what they expected?
Ranked No. 5 in the preseason, LSU fell out of the College Football Playoff race Saturday with a 55-49 loss at Ole Miss. And its fan base has every right to be furious with the way this is going so far. Last year, LSU wasn’t supposed to be very good but managed to get a couple good wins and finished 10-4. It seemed to be setting up for a real run in Year 2, when the great coaches typically show how great they are. But LSU’s defense has been atrocious, both against Florida State in the opener (a 45-24 loss) and in allowing 706 yards to an Ole Miss offense that struggled to do anything a week ago against Alabama. That’s a level of unseriousness LSU could have gotten for a lot less than $9.5 million a year.
Florida
Life in America changed a lot between 1987 and 2017. Think about six U.S. presidents, all the wars, the economic recessions, the rise of the Internet and the ability to go from rotary phones to computers that fit in our pockets. And yet in all of that time, the Florida Gators never lost a football game to Kentucky. Even though Florida was often great during that span and Kentucky was usually bad, it’s difficult to to conceive of 31 consecutive wins in any annual sports rivalry.
But now it seems like we’ve gotten to the point where Kentucky wins this game and everyone just … shrugs. That’s a problem for Florida, and specifically for coach Billy Napier, who fell to 0-2 against the Wildcats after a 33-14 loss in Lexington. You can’t normalize this if you’re the Gators, but the reality is Kentucky has won four of the last six meetings in this series. That means Kentucky, for now, is just a better program than Florida. Maybe that’s hard to swallow for fans who watched Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer win national championships, but it’s true. And Napier, who is 9-9 at Florida since dominating the Sun Belt conference at Louisiana-Lafayette, hasn’t demonstrated anything yet to soothe concerns that he’s in over his head at this level.
Florida isn’t the SEC’s easiest or best job, but it’s one where even Will Muschamp and Jim McElwain won 10 games within their first two seasons. Florida fans turned quickly on those guys, too. So if Napier is really building something, he needs to show it soon or else he won’t even get that much benefit of the doubt.
Central Florida
Whenever a program gets the call-up to a power conference, it’s a year-long celebration. You dream of the new rivals you’re going to have, the postseason opportunities that didn’t exist before and the recruits that will suddenly be interested in playing for your team. You don’t think about the losses to come, even though there are a lot of data points to suggest it’s a difficult transition.
UCF’s Big 12 home baptism came Saturday when it blew a 35-7 lead in fewer than 23 minutes against Baylor. For all kinds of reasons, that’s a bad thing for coach Gus Malzahn to put on his résumé. UCF was at home. UCF was playing a struggling opponent that had lost six in a row against FBS competition. UCF was in control all the way until it gave up a touchdown with 9:38 remaining, then had a fumble returned for a score with 6:02 left that cut the lead to 35-33. After that, things got predictably crazy. Baylor took the lead 36-35, UCF mounted a frenzied drive, then missed a 59-yarder for the win.
Even if UCF was still a member of the American and playing this as a non-conference game, it would be a hard loss to accept. But when you’re in a league where wins are going to be more difficult to get, especially these first few years, you can’t let one slip away when you had a four-touchdown lead. For UCF fans, the delusion that they’d seamlessly fit right into the Big 12 as a competitive force should now be over. You made it to the promised land, but it’s going to come with a lot of competitive pain.
North Carolina State
It was a bit of a surprise when quarterback Devin Leary wanted a change of scenery after last season, but the Wolfpack followed it up with some pleasant news when they landed Brennan Armstrong, who was in a similar situation after starting three seasons at Virginia. What seems to be clear, though, is that Armstrong’s 2021 season when he completed 65 percent of his passes and threw for nearly 4,500 yards with 31 touchdowns was the anomaly in an otherwise frustrating career. Armstrong wasn’t even close to the same player last season under a new Virginia staff (2,210 yards, seven TDs) and has continued to struggle with the Wolfpack. Against four FBS opponents, Armstrong has thrown for 155, 260, 180 and 112 yards, which puts N.C. State well outside the top-100 in passing offense and has made it a chore to watch this team play. In fact, even when the Wolfpack led 10-0 at Louisville going into halftime, it was an obvious tease for a 13-10 loss and second half in which their longest drive was six plays. Three of those drives ended with Armstrong turnovers. For all the attention quarterbacks get in the transfer portal, this is an example of how it can go wrong for both parties.
Miserable but not miserable enough
Pittsburgh
Losing to Virginia Tech these days is an automatic entry into the Misery Index. And the Panthers demonstrated Saturday that they very much in the mix to be considered the worst team in Power Five football. A 38-21 loss to the Hokies dropped Pitt to 1-4, with the lone win coming against Wofford. Pat Narduzzi, the Panthers’ coach, has spent a lot of time over the last couple years complaining about the transfer portal and how players are benefitting from name, image and likeness rights. He even suggested a salary cap at one point. Few people want to hear a coach making more than $5 million a year complaining about how much money anyone earns. But when whining inhibits your ability to adjust and adapt to the rules of the sport and your team looks as bad as Pitt has this season, maybe you’re worried about the wrong stuff.
Illinois
When you hire Bret Bielema to coach your football team, you’re signing up for a very specific style. But when he doesn’t have what he needs to play that style – based largely on a dominant offensive line and the running game – it goes poorly. That’s why he got fired at Arkansas. And that’s why he’s going to find himself on the wrong side of Illinois fans pretty soon if this season continues on its current course. Not only did Illinois get dominated 44-19 at Purdue, but it came at the hands of first-year Boilermakers coach Ryan Walters, who was Bielema’s defensive coordinator last season when they went 8-5. Illinois looks unlikely to build on that success in the short-term. They’re 2-3 with double-digit losses to each of the power conference teams they’ve played, and it’s a legitimate question whether Bielema can recruit enough of the players he needs at Illinois to ground-and-pound his way through the Big Ten.
Georgia Tech
Fans of this program have endured a long list of indignities over over the last five years. Losses to The Citadel and Northern Illinois. Scoring two points against Temple. A 73-7 embarrassment against Clemson. The annual Georgia beatdown. But what’s even worse is thinking you’re past all that, only to get sucked back into the vortex of awfulness. That’s where the Yellow Jackets find themselves after a 38-27 loss to Bowling Green. All of the positive momentum Brent Key was able to establish when he took over midway through last season as the interim coach has now been flushed down the toilet after going minus-3 in the turnover battle and possessing the ball for just more than 17 minutes against a Bowling Green team that lost by 31 points last week to Ohio. Tech’s last winning season in 2018 is starting to feel like ancient history.
Connecticut
Not only are the Huskies 0-5 after their tying extra point attempt was blocked with 40 seconds left to lose 34-33 to Utah State, but coach Jim Mora still won’t claim credit for one of the most random college football stories ever. A couple years ago, a Rivals.com reporter posted on social media site X (previously Twitter) that current Pittsburgh Steelers and former Alabama running back Najee Harris told him at a camp in 2016 that Mora, who was recruiting Harris to UCLA at the time, claimed to know the identity of Tupac Shakur’s killer. Mora has subsequently denied this, and reiterated it to the Los Angeles Times in a text Friday after Duane Davis was charged with the 1996 murder. Mora told the paper it was “a complete fabrication.” Too bad Mora refuses to lean into this because it’s a whole lot more interesting than anything else going on with his program.
