- Sep 8, 2014
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Mandel’s Forward Pass: Oh, how the mighty SEC has fallen
https://theathletic.com/115547/2017/10/02/stewart-mandel-forward-pass-sec-football/
Allow us to travel back in time to the end of the 2012 season — the year Alabama won its third national title in four years, Johnny Football captured the Heisman and Jadeveon Clowney beheaded a Michigan running back. That year, the SEC finished with five teams in the AP top 10, six in the top 15 and seven in the top 25.
It was a high time for America’s proudest conference, and as such, most schools’ fan bases approved of their respective head coaches.
Fast forward to 2017. The only SEC schools to grace the latest AP poll are No. 1 Alabama, No. 5 Georgia, No. 12 Auburn and No. 21 Florida. The Big Ten has as many teams in the top 10. Not coincidentally, you can count on one hand the number of conference coaches who should feel secure in their jobs.
The SEC’s recent descent into mediocrity was on full display Saturday. LSU, for years the league’s primary challenger to Alabama, lost at home to Sun Belt foe Troy. Ole Miss, which tormented the Tide and reached a New Year’s Six bowl just two years ago, endured a 66-3 beatdown in Tuscaloosa.
And Tennessee, which a year ago this week sat at 5-0 and ranked No. 9 in the country, suffered its most lopsided loss ever at Neyland Stadium, 41-0 to Georgia.
The SEC of 2012 had at least six teams that could hang with anybody nationally. The SEC of 2017 is at best a three-team league.
As such, mass change is likely coming.
The Butch Jones era at Tennessee is officially down to its last days. In five seasons he’s yet to produce a team that finished higher than 22nd in either poll, and this 3-2 squad isn’t going to come close to approaching that.
Jones missed his window last season when a team with Josh Dobbs and Derek Barnett couldn’t do better than 4-4 in conference. An increasingly desperate Jones last week said the media that covers the team is creating “fake news.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “the negativity is overwhelming.”
And that was before his team managed 142 yards of offense and coughed up four turnovers in front of 102,455 exasperated fans (most of whom were long gone before the final gun).
“It was as bad of an offensive performance as I’ve ever been a part of, and it’s inexcusable,” Jones said afterward.
New Tennessee AD John Currie is faced with a decision. He can wait and see just how bad things get over the next two months, or, he can try to salvage the season by firing Jones now and elevating an interim coach the way LSU did last season with Ed Orgeron, who hit the reset button to much success.
Speaking of Orgeron … well, that honeymoon is over. LSU (3-2), playing without star running back Derrius Guice, managed just one touchdown in the first 52 minutes of an eventual 24-21 loss to Troy, the Tigers’ first home non-conference loss in 17 years.
This coming on the heels of a 37-7 loss on Sept. 16 to Mississippi State — which itself has subsequently been blown out by Georgia and Auburn — does not play well with the sizable contingent of fans who weren’t happy with AD Joe Alleva for giving Orgeron the full-time job to begin with.
To be clear, Orgeron is in no danger of a pink slip anytime soon (he has a $12 million buyout this year, for one thing), and expectations for this team were too high to begin with. Orgeron did not inherit a ready-made roster from predecessor Les Miles. Perhaps he created false hope with last season’s strong finish, which included a Citrus Bowl blowout of Lamar Jackson-led Louisville.
But a loss as bad as Saturday’s makes it that much harder for a coach to eventually win over the public, especially those who still see him as the same guy who flamed out at Ole Miss a decade earlier. It can be done — see Clay Helton at USC last season — but Orgeron can only do so much when Danny Etling remains his best option at quarterback.
“We are not doing a good job coaching all-around, and that starts with me,” Orgeron said Saturday night. “We are not the same team we were in the (Citrus) Bowl.”
Coaching fortunes can change in a hurry in the SEC. Two weeks ago, Auburn fans were ready to rid themselves of Gus Malzahn once and for all. Now, with his offense awakening in consecutive blowouts of Missouri (51-14) and Mississippi State (49-10), they’re back to thinking double-digit victories.
Texas A&M’s Kevin Sumlin has at times seemed like a dead man walking since the end of last season. But freshman QB Kellen Mond has injected a little hope with his play the past two weeks against Arkansas and South Carolina. Granted, Alabama’s defense may irreparably crush his soul this coming weekend.
But here’s a telling indictment of the SEC in 2017: Alabama won’t likely face a ranked conference opponent until the Iron Bowl.
There may only be four games of consequence the rest of the way: Georgia vs. Florida (Oct. 28), Georgia at Auburn (Nov. 11), Alabama at Auburn (Nov. 25) and the SEC championship game (Dec. 2). Those contests will determine the league’s Playoff rep.
The others will mostly determine which coaches get to come back next season.
Knights are fast and furious
On the night of Sept. 7, as Hurricane Irma bore down on the state of Florida, UCF’s team was holed up at a hotel near campus preparing for its game the next night against Memphis. Not until early the next morning did they learn the game had been canceled.
Memphis went on to upset UCLA the next week, while UCF wound up going more than three weeks before playing its second game.
The 3-0 Knights made up for lost time in Saturday night’s rescheduled edition, pasting the Tigers 40-13. This a week after going on the road and routing Maryland 38-10.
In doing so, the Knights sent a statement that they, not USF or Memphis, may be the American’s leading candidate for a New Year’s Six berth.
“The team was hungry to play this one; they didn’t like when it got canceled,” UCF coach Scott Frost told The All-American on Sunday. “They wanted to compete against one of the better teams in our league, and (the Tigers) definitely are.”
Frost, the former Nebraska quarterback and Oregon offensive coordinator, is quietly engineering one of the sport’s most rapid turnarounds. UCF has gone from winless in 2015 to 6-7 in his first season to ranked 25th in the latest AP and coaches polls. And the Knights are doing so with much the same up-tempo style Frost learned from Chip Kelly.
“It’s starting to look like what we wanted it to,” Frost said. “We’ve got a lot of kids right around here in Orlando who can run, who fit what we want to do, and the guys have bought into everything we’ve asked them to do.
Frost landed two important recruits within weeks of getting the job in December 2015, dual-threat quarterback McKenzie Milton from Hawaii and track star-fast running back Adrian Killins from South Florida. Frost knew Milton from him attending camps at Oregon; the Ducks ultimately offered current starter Justin Herbert instead. The 5-foot-8, 158-pound Killins was his first commit.
The 5-foot-11, 170-pound Milton, who started as a true freshman last season, is currently the nation’s seventh-rated passer. Killins had a 96-yard touchdown run against Memphis.
“One of the keys to this whole resurrection was our success in that first recruiting class, when we only had about six weeks to put it together,” Frost said. “We had some good players on this team who just needed some direction, and then we were able to sprinkle in some of these new guys.”
Frost’s name is already being linked to Nebraska, though it’s hardly a certainty current coach Mike Riley will be let go. Plenty of other major jobs will, though. But Frost was drawn specifically to UCF among other options while at Oregon, and he does not talk like a guy with one foot out the door.
“Our goal is to turn this into the kind of place that competes for conference championships every year.”
https://theathletic.com/115547/2017/10/02/stewart-mandel-forward-pass-sec-football/
Allow us to travel back in time to the end of the 2012 season — the year Alabama won its third national title in four years, Johnny Football captured the Heisman and Jadeveon Clowney beheaded a Michigan running back. That year, the SEC finished with five teams in the AP top 10, six in the top 15 and seven in the top 25.
It was a high time for America’s proudest conference, and as such, most schools’ fan bases approved of their respective head coaches.
Fast forward to 2017. The only SEC schools to grace the latest AP poll are No. 1 Alabama, No. 5 Georgia, No. 12 Auburn and No. 21 Florida. The Big Ten has as many teams in the top 10. Not coincidentally, you can count on one hand the number of conference coaches who should feel secure in their jobs.
The SEC’s recent descent into mediocrity was on full display Saturday. LSU, for years the league’s primary challenger to Alabama, lost at home to Sun Belt foe Troy. Ole Miss, which tormented the Tide and reached a New Year’s Six bowl just two years ago, endured a 66-3 beatdown in Tuscaloosa.
And Tennessee, which a year ago this week sat at 5-0 and ranked No. 9 in the country, suffered its most lopsided loss ever at Neyland Stadium, 41-0 to Georgia.
The SEC of 2012 had at least six teams that could hang with anybody nationally. The SEC of 2017 is at best a three-team league.
As such, mass change is likely coming.
The Butch Jones era at Tennessee is officially down to its last days. In five seasons he’s yet to produce a team that finished higher than 22nd in either poll, and this 3-2 squad isn’t going to come close to approaching that.
Jones missed his window last season when a team with Josh Dobbs and Derek Barnett couldn’t do better than 4-4 in conference. An increasingly desperate Jones last week said the media that covers the team is creating “fake news.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “the negativity is overwhelming.”
And that was before his team managed 142 yards of offense and coughed up four turnovers in front of 102,455 exasperated fans (most of whom were long gone before the final gun).
“It was as bad of an offensive performance as I’ve ever been a part of, and it’s inexcusable,” Jones said afterward.
New Tennessee AD John Currie is faced with a decision. He can wait and see just how bad things get over the next two months, or, he can try to salvage the season by firing Jones now and elevating an interim coach the way LSU did last season with Ed Orgeron, who hit the reset button to much success.
Speaking of Orgeron … well, that honeymoon is over. LSU (3-2), playing without star running back Derrius Guice, managed just one touchdown in the first 52 minutes of an eventual 24-21 loss to Troy, the Tigers’ first home non-conference loss in 17 years.
This coming on the heels of a 37-7 loss on Sept. 16 to Mississippi State — which itself has subsequently been blown out by Georgia and Auburn — does not play well with the sizable contingent of fans who weren’t happy with AD Joe Alleva for giving Orgeron the full-time job to begin with.
To be clear, Orgeron is in no danger of a pink slip anytime soon (he has a $12 million buyout this year, for one thing), and expectations for this team were too high to begin with. Orgeron did not inherit a ready-made roster from predecessor Les Miles. Perhaps he created false hope with last season’s strong finish, which included a Citrus Bowl blowout of Lamar Jackson-led Louisville.
But a loss as bad as Saturday’s makes it that much harder for a coach to eventually win over the public, especially those who still see him as the same guy who flamed out at Ole Miss a decade earlier. It can be done — see Clay Helton at USC last season — but Orgeron can only do so much when Danny Etling remains his best option at quarterback.
“We are not doing a good job coaching all-around, and that starts with me,” Orgeron said Saturday night. “We are not the same team we were in the (Citrus) Bowl.”
Coaching fortunes can change in a hurry in the SEC. Two weeks ago, Auburn fans were ready to rid themselves of Gus Malzahn once and for all. Now, with his offense awakening in consecutive blowouts of Missouri (51-14) and Mississippi State (49-10), they’re back to thinking double-digit victories.
Texas A&M’s Kevin Sumlin has at times seemed like a dead man walking since the end of last season. But freshman QB Kellen Mond has injected a little hope with his play the past two weeks against Arkansas and South Carolina. Granted, Alabama’s defense may irreparably crush his soul this coming weekend.
But here’s a telling indictment of the SEC in 2017: Alabama won’t likely face a ranked conference opponent until the Iron Bowl.
There may only be four games of consequence the rest of the way: Georgia vs. Florida (Oct. 28), Georgia at Auburn (Nov. 11), Alabama at Auburn (Nov. 25) and the SEC championship game (Dec. 2). Those contests will determine the league’s Playoff rep.
The others will mostly determine which coaches get to come back next season.
Knights are fast and furious
On the night of Sept. 7, as Hurricane Irma bore down on the state of Florida, UCF’s team was holed up at a hotel near campus preparing for its game the next night against Memphis. Not until early the next morning did they learn the game had been canceled.
Memphis went on to upset UCLA the next week, while UCF wound up going more than three weeks before playing its second game.
The 3-0 Knights made up for lost time in Saturday night’s rescheduled edition, pasting the Tigers 40-13. This a week after going on the road and routing Maryland 38-10.
In doing so, the Knights sent a statement that they, not USF or Memphis, may be the American’s leading candidate for a New Year’s Six berth.
“The team was hungry to play this one; they didn’t like when it got canceled,” UCF coach Scott Frost told The All-American on Sunday. “They wanted to compete against one of the better teams in our league, and (the Tigers) definitely are.”
Frost, the former Nebraska quarterback and Oregon offensive coordinator, is quietly engineering one of the sport’s most rapid turnarounds. UCF has gone from winless in 2015 to 6-7 in his first season to ranked 25th in the latest AP and coaches polls. And the Knights are doing so with much the same up-tempo style Frost learned from Chip Kelly.
“It’s starting to look like what we wanted it to,” Frost said. “We’ve got a lot of kids right around here in Orlando who can run, who fit what we want to do, and the guys have bought into everything we’ve asked them to do.
Frost landed two important recruits within weeks of getting the job in December 2015, dual-threat quarterback McKenzie Milton from Hawaii and track star-fast running back Adrian Killins from South Florida. Frost knew Milton from him attending camps at Oregon; the Ducks ultimately offered current starter Justin Herbert instead. The 5-foot-8, 158-pound Killins was his first commit.
The 5-foot-11, 170-pound Milton, who started as a true freshman last season, is currently the nation’s seventh-rated passer. Killins had a 96-yard touchdown run against Memphis.
“One of the keys to this whole resurrection was our success in that first recruiting class, when we only had about six weeks to put it together,” Frost said. “We had some good players on this team who just needed some direction, and then we were able to sprinkle in some of these new guys.”
Frost’s name is already being linked to Nebraska, though it’s hardly a certainty current coach Mike Riley will be let go. Plenty of other major jobs will, though. But Frost was drawn specifically to UCF among other options while at Oregon, and he does not talk like a guy with one foot out the door.
“Our goal is to turn this into the kind of place that competes for conference championships every year.”
