LSU vaults to top of Misery Index
There were simpler ways for Brian Kelly’s career to proceed than getting made fun of for fake Southern accents and dance moves with recruits that set a new standard for cringeworthy videos on the Internet.
Even if it was never going to result in a national championship, he had a good thing going at Notre Dame. The Irish had their recruiting niche, they could engineer a schedule to put them in contention for the College Football Playoff every year, and their teams were largely appreciated for what they accomplished. Notre Dame is a very tough job, but Kelly was so good that he often made it seem pretty easy.
Since Day 1 at LSU, though, Kelly has been like a newly divorced dad hitting the same bars he used to frequent 20 years earlier only to figure out that most of the patrons are younger than the leather jacket he pulled out of the closet that night. The stench of trying too hard to be LSU instead of Notre Dame is clinging to Kelly like four days without a shower in the Louisiana heat.
But when it spills over from Twitter memes to on-field decision-making, that’s a problem. And in LSU’s 40-13 loss to Tennessee, Kelly’s identity crisis set the stage for a blowout that didn’t need to happen.
Tennessee, to be clear, is a better team than LSU. The Tigers would have struggled to win this game under any circumstances, much less with a special teams unit that allowed the Vols to start their first two drives inside the LSU 30-yard line.
But it wasn’t a lost cause. The Tigers were only down 10-0 when Kelly made his first shaky decision, deciding to go for a fourth-and-4 instead of taking the field goal. It didn’t work.
Then down 13-0, he went for another fourth down, this time just shy of the 50yard line. It didn’t work and gave the Vols another short field that they converted into a touchdown.
Then, fortunate to be trailing 20-7, Kelly decided to try his luck one more
time at the end of the half despite facing fourth-and-10 from the Tennessee 45. It was unnecessarily desperate and costly, as Tennessee had enough time to tack on a field goal.
“We’re getting out-coached,” Kelly said during the halftime interview.
Personnel issues were always going to limit how good LSU could be this season, but it shouldn’t have been outside of Kelly’s grasp to put a sound, well-coached team on the field. Instead, LSU has trailed by double digits in four of its five games against FBS opponents, with the only exception being New Mexico.
LSU has won some of those games, but the consistent issues early in games suggests real problems with preparation and execution.
That’s why LSU is No. 1 in this week’s Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which fan bases are feeling the most angst about their favorite program.
Four more in misery
Oklahoma: The only frame of reference most Oklahoma fans have for what’s happening to their team right
now is the John Blake era, a three-year stretch in the late 1990s when the Sooners were very bad. But bringing up those tough times should be considered an over-the-line insult – to Blake, that is.
At least Blake’s teams, as awful as they were, had a few decent wins. At least Blake’s teams managed to score a point against Texas. At least Blake’s teams usually got blown out by historically good opponents like Nebraska or legitimate top-10 teams at the time like Texas A&M.
But Brent Venables cannot claim any of that in his first season. Oklahoma’s October – which now includes a 49-0 loss to Texas on the back of a 55-24 loss to TCU last week – puts this program in a situation that is so absurdly, incomprehensibly bad that fans have every right to question whether athletics director Joe Castiglione made a major mistake after Lincoln Riley’s surprise departure.
Virginia: For all the attention on Venables’ rough first year, another former Clemson assistant might be doing an even worse job in his head coaching debut.
Though Virginia is typically under the radar, it was not a broken program when Bronco Mendenhall stepped away for personal reasons after last season. The Cavaliers weren’t great, but they were good enough to beat the teams they were supposed to beat. That’s not happening this season under Tony Elliott, who waited patiently for the right opportunity but has now found himself coaching a team that is appreciably worse than it was last year for no obvious reason.
Virginia should not be 0-3 in the ACC, but that’s where things stand after a 3417 home loss to a Louisville team that has been incredibly disappointing itself and didn’t have the services of starting quarterback Malik Cunningham due to injury.
Iowa: Kirk Ferentz has been a very good coach at Iowa, but not nearly good enough to run the nepotism racket he has pulled off for the last five years by installing his son Brian as offensive coordinator. It’s a joke, it’s an outrage and it’s an administrative failure that nobody from athletics director Gary Barta on down has the stones to confront headon.
Remarkably, Brian Ferentz technically has to report to Barta to comply with the school’s nepotism policy. That means Barta, if he were doing his job, would have likely pulled the plug on this arrangement long before Iowa’s offense hit rock bottom this season.
How can anyone in a position of power look at Iowa, which ranked 130th in FBS in yards per game before this week’s 9-6 loss to Illinois, and feel like the program is being well-served by having its offense get stonewalled week after week by any opponent with a pulse?
Florida State: On paper, a 4-2 record seems about right. Given where Florida State has been the last few years, it’s progress. But in a one-game window, the Seminoles committed two of the worst and costliest mistakes you’ll ever see in a 19-17 loss at NC State.
On the first play of the fourth quarter, Florida State punter Alex Mastromanno started to take off and run when a little bit pressure got in his face. Once he avoided the block, though, he should have kicked the ball. Instead, he started running forward and crossed the line of scrimmage before punting it, which carries a loss-of-down penalty. That pretty much handed NC State a field goal to cut the deficit to 17-16.