Bowl game is not out of question in coach’s first year in Boca.
Well, the people who cover Conference USA football for a living have spoken and here is the immediate value they have placed on Lane Kiffin as the new coach of the Florida Atlantic Owls.
One spot in the league’s Eastern Division standings, from a sixth-place finish last year to a fifth-place prediction in 2017.
Hey, it could be rougher. Conference USA media members, meeting this week at a Dallas-Fort Worth Airport hotel, are predicting that firstyear coach Butch Davis and Florida International will finish one spot behind FAU in the same division.
Full disclosure, I have not comprehensively researched the relative strengths of Conference USA brethren like Western Kentucky and Louisiana Tech and Middle Tennessee and Old Dominion well enough to judge those predictions, so let’s do a little educated guessing instead at the best and the worst outcomes that FAU can expect from Kiffin’s inaugural Owls season.
Best Options
(A): Kiffin wins his opening game against Navy on Sept. 1, a Friday night feature on ESPNU, and an unprecedented wave of
excitement for FAU football builds from the earliest possible moment.
(B): FAU makes it interesting against Navy, a team that beat Notre Dame last year and upset Houston, which was in the AP Top 10 at the time. This keeps about half of the people who came to the opening game interested in seeing another at FAU Stadium.
(C): For the first time in nine years FAU posts a winning record. Might seem like a reach, but if Kiffin never had a losing season as a head coach in the SEC and the Pac-12, why should it be assumed that he will in Conference USA?
(D): Kiffin learns quickly how to delegate more responsibility as a head coach, picking up on what he learned from Nick Saban at Alabama, and does not get bored with somebody else calling the plays, in this case, former Baylor offensive coordinator Kendal Briles. A bored Kiffin nobody needs.
(E): Altogether the experience for Kiffin is personally enriching, maybe even with a minor bowl appearance, but not so spectacular that some bigger school quickly steals him. See Bobby Petrino, who spent one 8-4 season at Western Kentucky in 2013 while trying to rehab his coaching reputation and left right away for Louisville, where he now calls the plays for Heisman Trophy quarterback and former Boynton Beach High School star Lamar Jackson.
Worst Options
(A): The Owls get steamrolled by Navy and Wisconsin to open the season and Kiffin finds himself in a psychological sinkhole for the Bethune-Cookman game Sept. 16, which also happens to be the same day as Miami-FSU, Tennessee-Florida, Clemson-Louisville and Texas-Southern Cal.
(B): FAU wins somewhere between three and five games, which has peo- ple wondering if Howard Schnellenberger is willing to come back and give it another try.
(C): The Owls fail to close the gap between themselves and the best teams in the conference. This would feel a little too much like Charlie Partridge’s last season, which included a 52-3 loss to Western Kentucky and a 77-point outburst by Middle Tennessee State.
(D): Kiffin loses to Davis and FIU. We’re talking optics here more than anything else since both programs have far to go. The notion remains that one of these schools, with their massive enrollments and their treasured Florida footprints, will eventually climb to the top of Conference USA and be attractive to some more significant league that is looking to expand. Whichever gets the upper hand at this landmark moment may keep it for a while in recruiting and in national profile.
(E): Most troublesome of all, Kiffin wins the league and gets cherry-picked by a bigger school that has come to believe in him and doesn’t mind paying the $2.5 million buyout for a one-year departure. Western Kentucky has lost three good coaches this way — Willie Taggert to South Florida, Petrino to Louisville and just last year Jeff Brohm to Purdue. That program is strong enough to keep the momentum going no matter who is the coach. FAU is not.
Those are some of the possibilities, and probably Kiffin and the Owls fall somewhere in between the most extreme of them.
I’ll show enough faith in Kiffin and his well-traveled staff to predict a 6-6 season overall and 5-3 in the league. That might be just enough to earn a bowl assignment that fits his preferred beachside lifestyle, say the Popeyes Bahamas Bowl. That would work even better than the Boca Raton Bowl, which likely takes the Conference USA champ.
Not that there isn’t skepticism, too. This whole Alabama-to-FAU experiment by Kiffin is jarring in so many ways. All we’re hoping for right off the bat, however, is a little increase in the entertainment value plus a parade of headlines that otherwise wouldn’t have been written.
Lane can always be trusted to do that, win, lose or withdraw.