While not my intent, the questions in this week’s mailbag largely fall into two buckets: the College Football Playoff rankings and coaches who keep either saying wild things or losing big games. (Or both.)
Note: Submitted questions have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Do you think Mike Gundy is on thin ice? Jabbering like from time to time always has been forgiven as was losing to Oklahoma and the occasional dud season. Now he’s jabbering AND losing. Have the Cowboys’ boosters finally had enough of him? — Charles B.
I never would have imagined Gundy could be on thin ice, but he made a bad season that much worse with his comments this week. The last thing someone making $7.75 million per year should be doing is accusing fans who criticize the program of being failures at life and shaming people who can’t pay their bills, especially at a time when a coach is dependent on fans to fund the roster.
Gundy has built enough credibility in 20 seasons of winning eight to 10 games a season to give him a pass for one six-game losing streak, but those comments, much more so than his previous ramblings, may have turned off many of even his most loyal supporters.
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From a pure football standpoint, it makes little sense why Oklahoma State has deteriorated to the point where it’s getting blown out by West Virginia and Arizona State. The Cowboys won 10 games last season and returned one of the most experienced teams in the country, led by the reigning Doak Walker Award winner Ollie Gordon II. But Oklahoma State is 101st nationally in rushing offense (3.7 yards per carry). And the defense, which unfortunately has lost its two best players in linebackers Collin Oliver and Nick Martin, to injury, is currently the worst of all P4 schools (6.9 yards per play).
An implosion like this one invariably leads to questions about culture, and that starts with the head coach. I don’t know what Gundy is like inside the football building these days, but publicly he has spent much of the season grumbling about … well, everything. His coaching staff. A lot of NIL stuff. And now, people who dare to feel negatively about the team’s 0-6 Big 12 record.
Oklahoma State is not LSU or Auburn. And Gundy has won 100 games more (104 to be exact) than any other coach in program history. With Boone Pickens no longer around to pay for everything, it seems unlikely folks there would raise $25 million in a month to buy out their coach. But, could there be a hard talk between the coach and athletic director Chad Weiberg where they discuss whether Gundy, who is now 17 years past 40, might enjoy an early retirement party?
The most likely scenario remains the status quo (for now), and he did apologize on Tuesday night, but the fact we’re even talking about alternatives tells you how far things have fallen.
— Mike Gundy (@CoachGundy) November 6, 2024
Can Oregon become the first team to “clinch” a Playoff spot with a win this weekend against Maryland? Even if the Ducks lost their last two games, likely missing the Big Ten Championship Game, would the committee drop them from No. 1 to No. 13 for losing a prime-time game at Wisconsin and a rivalry game to Washington? Is there anyone else that can “clinch” a spot in the next two weeks? — Josh T.
It had not occurred to me until I read this, but … I think the answer is yes. Provided no Jordan Travis-type situation resulted in that slide. Oregon still would have two really good wins over Ohio State and Boise State and a decisive win against a 9-3 or 8-4 Illinois team. I can’t imagine there will be an abundance of bubble teams with three Top 25 wins.
There’s only one other team I’d be willing to say this about: Georgia. Yes, one-loss Georgia. If the Dawgs beat both Ole Miss this week and Tennessee next week, they’re in. Well, technically they’re not in until they beat UMass the following week, but with that cleared, they could lose to Georgia Tech and in the SEC Championship Game and still be in. They’d have two top-10 wins (Texas and Tennessee), a top-15 win (Ole Miss) and a fourth Top 25 win (Clemson). Seven at-large teams aren’t beating that.
Based on BYU being ranked No. 9 by the committee, can we assume it would be out of the Playoff with a loss? — Lawrence, Tacoma, Wash.
I wouldn’t say that. We still have five weeks of games to go. Many of the teams around BYU will lose as well, some more than once. But the 9-0 Cougars coming in below five one-loss Big Ten and SEC teams confirms what we’ve suspected all along that the committee is not going to give teams outside the “Power 2” (excluding Notre Dame) the same benefit of the doubt, even if chairman Warde Manuel insists the committee doesn’t care about conferences.
Just look at how it viewed Penn State, which has no Top 25 wins, and BYU. The Nittany Lions, at No. 6, essentially got more credit for losing a close game to No. 2 Ohio State than BYU did for beating the committee’s No. 13 team (SMU) on the road and clobbering its No. 19 team (Kansas State) at home. It’s bizarre but not surprising. It’s the same order the AP has those two.
A 12-1 BYU team that does not lose until the conference title game will be safely in, because the committee won’t drop it far for playing and losing an extra game. But Tuesday night’s rankings did raise a possibility I’d previously dismissed: No. 12 Boise State could pass the Big 12 champ for the fourth first-round bye.
Now, if BYU loses to, say, Utah this week, and still makes the conference title game but loses to, say, Colorado? I would not like the Cougars’ chances.
Do you think Penn State finally could make the leap with a different coach like Georgia did going from Mark Richt to Kirby Smart? Or is James Franklin maxing out what is possible? — Tyler S.
I get why you’d make that specific comparison. Penn State and Georgia (before Smart) both had won their most recent national championships in the 1980s. And Franklin in his 11th season has an eerily similar resume as Richt at Georgia. Both won their first conference championships early (Richt in Year 2, Franklin in Year 3) then remained right on the cusp of something greater but couldn’t quite get there. And much like Franklin’s 1-10 record against Ohio State, Richt started 2-8 against Florida. Losing big games to rivals has a way of dampening consistent 10-win seasons.
The comparison is flawed, however, because Penn State is not playing with the same deck as Georgia.
The state of Georgia has become one of the most fertile recruiting turfs in the country. It now regularly ranks third in most blue-chip prospects (four- and five-star prospects) each cycle, behind only Texas and Florida. Whereas the number of blue-chippers in Pennsylvania has declined. It is now either barely in the top 10 or not at all. Georgia is surrounded by big recruiting states like Florida, North Carolina and Alabama. Pennsylvania has Ohio, but the Buckeyes generally get dibs there, and then it’s kind of a grab bag with New Jersey, D.C. and Maryland.
Penn State has a lower ceiling than Georgia, but its ceiling may still be higher than it is now. A more apt comparison might be Michigan. Even had Jim Harbaugh stayed, it was not realistic that the program would ever be able to reload class after class after class like Alabama, Georgia and Ohio State do. But with a great coach and a core of key players that stuck together for three years, Michigan did reach the summit, even if for only one season. Penn State, where Franklin regularly signs top-10 classes, could do the same.
But I don’t know of some obvious coach out there who would do better than Franklin. Smart, given his Georgia ties and Nick Saban mentorship, was long seen as a potential Richt successor in the years before they finally parted ways. Who is Penn State’s version? Matt Rhule? Probably not anymore. Al Golden? He has been phenomenal as Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator, but his time as Miami’s head coach did not go well. Jim Knowles? Some (not all) Ohio State fans would say, by all means, take him.
Franklin still has a chance to redeem himself this season. No one is going to be talking about firing him if he goes 11-1. And if Penn State beats an SEC team in a first-round Playoff game, fans will be thrilled. If, on the other hand, we’re talking 10-3 and an early exit, there may be no getting around the ceiling thing.
Which spread would have been more shocking at the start of the season: Indiana being a 14-point favorite over Michigan or Notre Dame being a 26-point favorite over Florida State? — Daniel B.
I’m fairly certain both would have melted my brain, but I’ll go with Notre Dame. FSU being this terrible was not a possibility I could have conceived, so I would have assumed the Irish had somehow morphed into 2019 LSU.
But they were mortal enough to lose to Northern Illinois and are still nearly four-touchdown favorites over Florida State.
How is it possible that Lincoln Riley lost only 10 games out of 65 at Oklahoma and has lost 10 out of his last 16 at USC? Can you think of another coach who had the same type of sustained success at one school and then failed as miserably at another? — Erik W.
No coach will ever have a more extreme case of this than Rich Rodriguez, who posted three straight top-10 seasons at West Virginia, went to Michigan, went 3-9 in his first season and was gone after three years. But I digress.
Riley inherited an ideal situation at Oklahoma, but he kept it going long past the point of cycling out Bob Stoops’ roster. Whereas he walked into a rebuilding situation at USC. But the issues seem to go deeper than that. I’ve written and talked quite a bit already about his recruiting issues, inability to adapt to NIL, etc., but I want to focus on one aspect specifically: close games.
USC suffered its fifth last-minute loss of the season at Washington, which led Riley to say this: “Normally, these things end up over time going about 50-50 on these games that come down to one play, and we’ve happened to have the year that not too many of them have went our way.”
He’s not wrong. Most analytics folks believe someone’s record in close games comes down to luck. And I know one coach who had exceptionally good luck in close games: Riley at Oklahoma.
Remember that famous 59-56 West Virginia game in 2018 with Kyler Murray? Or the 42-41 game against Iowa State a year later? I felt like he had an awful lot of those, so, I looked it up, and sure enough, he was 18-7 in one-score games, including 6-1 in his last season there. And he started off his USC tenure in a similar fashion, going 5-2 in those games in 2022 and winning his first two in 2023, most memorably a triple-overtime game at Arizona. Since then, it’s 2-6. So it may be that the last season and a half of his career has been one big overcorrection.
But it says a lot about how Riley managed to rack up a resume that obscured some of his flaws. If that 18-7 record at OU was even, say, 15-10, it might mean one Playoff berth instead of three, one Big 12 title instead of four, etc. While that’s still very good, maybe he would not have been considered a top-five coach.
The Athletic has the Playoff covered, producing your 17 projections per day, and is completely obsessed with the final 12 teams. It has gotten boring. How about this exercise? Give us the NEXT 12 teams that would form a Playoff. The first 12 out if you will. — Brian S.
If you thought I was going to roll my eyes at this … it did not work. Should we call this the Challenger Bracket? (Here is my latest main bracket.)
1. Alabama/8. Washington State vs. 9. Iowa
4. Ole Miss/5. Colorado vs. 12. Army
3. Texas A&M/6. Louisville vs. 11. Clemson
2. SMU/7. South Carolina vs. 10. Pittsburgh
Deion Sanders against Army? Iowa going to the Palouse in December? Sanders vs. Lane Kiffin in a quarterfinal game? But sorry, I know this is boring.
Which first-year coach — other than Curt Cignetti — have you been most impressed with this season? And which have you been most disappointed with? — Andrew, Chicago
I’m impressed by Syracuse’s Fran Brown. I admittedly knew next to nothing about the former Rutgers and Georgia secondary coach when Syracuse hired him, but he quickly made his mark in the transfer portal, landing former Ohio State quarterback Kyle McCord; then in recruiting, where a program that previously ranked in the 50s or 60s nationally is looking at a second straight year in the mid-30s; and now on the field.
Syracuse, 6-2, has two very bad losses, at home against Stanford (now 2-7) and 41-13 at Pitt two week ago, but it won at UNLV and beat Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech. With games remaining at Boston College, at Cal and against UConn, before closing against Miami, the Orange have a good shot to win eight games for just the second time since joining the ACC in 2013.
Note: Brown may be the perfect example of my belief that being a good coordinator is not an indicator of whether someone will be a good head coach. The 42-year-old New Jersey native had never been a coordinator. But as ESPN’s Andrea Adelson reported this spring, “On his iPad, (Brown) has folders from every stop along the way, with notes, schedules, schemes, reminders and plans for how he would run his own program.”
Syracuse AD John Wildhack was an unconventional hire, having spent the entirety of his career at ESPN. Credit to him for looking in a less obvious place.
As for the second part of the question, I’m concerned Oregon State made a short-sighted decision when it promoted defensive coordinator Trent Bray to replace Jonathan Smith. Even without departed quarterback Aidan Chiles (Michigan State), running back Damien Martinez (Miami) and wide receiver Silas Bolden (Texas), the Beavers, 4-4, shouldn’t be losing to Nevada, shouldn’t be losing at home to UNLV or certainly not losing 44-7 at Cal. Bray does not seem likely to become Washington State’s Jake Dickert.
How do the ethics work with sports journalists donating to their alma maters? I assume donations to the school’s general or academic funds are fine, but what about athletic departments or NIL funds? — Reggie C., San Diego
I suppose it depends on what you cover. I write about college sports, so I’m sure as heck not donating to my alma mater’s athletic department. Someone who covers the NBA or NFL might not have the same conflict.
I do give annually to my old student paper, to which I’ll forever be indebted for helping me launch my career. Most student publications cannot survive without donations, and I’d encourage anyone with a similar experience at their alma mater to do the same.
Or, if you’re feeling extra generous, consider helping Oklahoma State’s message board posters pay their bills.
(Top photo of Lincoln Riley: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Imagn Images)
