Coachpocalypse 2012

You're fired. All of you (you know who you are).

Tom O'Brien? You're fired:

North Carolina State coach Tom O'Brien has been fired after a disappointing 7-5 season, the school announced Sunday.

O'Brien will not coach in the Wolfpack's upcoming bowl game. Offensive coordinator Dana Bible has been named interim head coach, and all assistants have been retained through at least the bowl.

Frank Spaziani? You're fired:

Frank Spaziani will not return as Boston College coach, the school announced Sunday.

The Eagles finished 2-10 in 2012, concluding with a 27-10 loss to NC State on Saturday, and won just six games the past two seasons. His teams got progressively worse each season under his watch.

Danny Hope? You're fired:

A strong finish for Purdue wasn't enough to save Danny Hope's job. One day after Purdue retained the Old Oaken Bucket and became bowl-eligible for the second straight season, athletic director Morgan Burke announced that Hope had been fired.

Hope went 22-27 in four mostly injury-ravaged seasons.

And Jon Embree? Oh, you're definitely fired:

After just two seasons, Colorado is parting ways with head coach Jon Embree.

Embree, who signed a five-year contract in Dec. 2010, went just 4-21 in two seasons -- including a 1-11 campaign this year with the Buffaloes. The lone win came Sept. 22 against Washington State.

Colorado closed out the season with eight straight losses.

Of those, only O'Brien's firing could be considered anything other than totally unsurprising, but all are worthy of some words and stuff. Unfortunately I'll be mostly unavailable for about the next 24 hours; I'll make up for it by throwing up a bunch of content on Tuesday with some slightly more detailed analysis of those and any other Coachpocalypse 2012-related events that occur in the interim.

And it's official

The last in an ongoing series titled, "Oh I'm so surprised, Auburn":

Auburn announced Sunday that coach Gene Chizik was dismissed two years after leading the Tigers to their first national title since 1957. The Tigers closed with a 49-0 loss to No. 2 Alabama that was the second-most lopsided Iron Bowl game ever and worst since 1948.

The move came after a 3-9 season without any Southeastern Conference wins. It was the most losses by an Auburn team since an 0-10 season in 1950.

Chizik had three years left on a contract worth $3.5 million annually.

And so it is. As mentioned above, Chizik won a national title two years ago; based on my research, no other coach had ever been fired faster fewer than four years after a national title (Larry Coker pulled off that impressiveness). But that's probably because nobody had ever turned a national-title-worthy team into a tire fire in fewer than four years; Chizik did it in two (and how!).

Let's marvel at some numbers: Auburn got shut out in its last two SEC games, lost its last three SEC games by a combined score of 150-21 (!), didn't score more than 21 points all year against a major-conference team (and that was in a six-touchdown loss to Texas A&M) and finished 12th or worse in the SEC in basically every significant category other than scoring defense, which was aided significantly by November obliterations of functional byes New Mexico State and Alabama A&M. And zooming out a bit shows that in the last two years -- since Cam Newton left, to be specific -- Auburn went 4-13 in the SEC and didn't finish higher than 66th nationally other than rushing yardage last year, and that was a byproduct of employing Gus Malzahn and therefore not replicable since Malzahn is now coaching elsewhere. In all, Chizik went 7-18 in the SEC and 19-20 overall at Auburn when not in possession of the most laughably dominant college player since Vince Young (and the validity of those Cam Newton wins remains ... ummm ... questionable).

The 8-5 years would've been fine given the current awesomeness of the SEC West if there had been any tangible signs of progress; going winless in conference play and being awful at everything doesn't qualify as progress, obviously. I think a lot of the tire-fire-ness had to do with bringing in Scot Loeffler, a widely respected quarterbacks guy who had one good year as an O-coordinator at Temple and then got brought in and tasked with taking Gus Malzahn's assortment of spread dudes and turning them into a pro-style thing. That was never gonna go well given Auburn's lack of viable quarterbacks and skill-position guys weighing more than 170 pounds, and the results bore that out. I actually thought Chizik did reasonably well bringing in coordinators with meaningful histories of success other than that. He replaced Ted Roof after last year's craptacularity with former Falcons defensive coordinator Brian Van Gorder, which seemed pretty swell at the time but ended with Auburn 96th in rushing defense and 101st in pass-efficiency defense this year. Whether that was more an issue of talent development or playcalling is debatable, but in hindsight, Van Gorder obviously wasn't an optimal short-term hire (and a short-term hire was a necessity considering what everybody knew the offense was gonna be and what everybody knew Chizik's job status was gonna be).

So every Auburn message board loonie is now posting some version of an "I told you so" since the Auburn message board world exploded when Chizik got hired away from Iowa State with a 5-19 record and general uncompetitiveness in two years. To be fair, Iowa State was in pretty crappy shape at that point but actually regressed from five wins in Dan McCarney's last year to three in Chizik's first year and then two in his second and then immediately improved under Paul Rhoads, who's about to go to his third bowl game in four years. The thing about Chizik was that he'd been a good defensive coordinator at Texas before that and was a next-big-thing coaching candidate for a couple years before Will Muschamp got his job and became the same thing. So it wasn't a certainty that Chizik was a bad head coach just because he failed at Iowa State with little talent; it's pretty much a certainty now. I honestly don't even know whether Chizik's legacy will be that of a guy who won a national title or that of a guy who took a national-title-caliber program and absolutely ran it into the ground (both on and off the field) to the point that he was no longer employable by the time the sophomores on that championship team were seniors.

And here's the super-duper-depressing part for Auburn (well, other than the part about the NCAA investigation that might saddle the next guy with some not-insignificant penalties):

Auburn said the total buyout for Chizik and his assistant coaches is $11.09 million. Chizik's buyout will total $7.5 million and be paid in monthly installments for the next four years.

That is amazing. Michigan's entire staff is getting paid something like $2 million this year via relatively short contracts that could probably all be bought out for somewhere in the ballpark of $6 million (with most of that being Brady Hoke's). Auburn's gonna be paying out twice that amount for Chizik and his various terrible hires to not coach and no longer has the benefit of Bobby Lowder just writing huge checks to cover everything since his bank is not doing so well (and by "not doing so well" I mean "no longer exists"). That said, it is the SEC, which means the money will be found somewhere.

Who will it be found for? Depends what/whom you're willing to believe. The 247 Sports story a couple weeks ago that reported that Jay Gogue was "preparing to possibly dismiss" Chizik included the following line ...

Louisville offensive coordinator Shawn Watson has been named as a potential candidate.

 ... that seemed/seems so patently absurd that, like, I don't even know, man. My reaction at the time:

LOLWUT? I'm serious right now.

Shawn Watson??? The Shawn Watson who got let go as O-coordinator at Nebraska in 2010 after four years of his West Coast-ish offense produced a crappier passing game every year? The Shawn Watson who took over the Louisville O-coordinator job almost by default four games into last year and has overseen very modest improvement thanks largely to having by far the most talented quarterback (one who's gone from freshman to sophomore) in the craptacular Big East? The same Shawn Watson whose head coaching experience consists entirely of three years and an 11-22 record at Southern Illinois in the mid-90s (and who's now 53)?

No. There is no possible way Shawn Watson is a realistic candidate. There is nothing on that guy's resume that would warrant him getting serious consideration for a head coaching job anywhere outside the MAC/Sun Belt (or maybe at Vanderbilt). He'd be the 2009 version of Gene Chizik except if Chizik had no recent head coaching experience and had been fired as D-coordinator at Texas rather than being so good that he moved directly into a Big 12 coaching job.

Yeah. I'd be much more likely to believe that Bobby Petrino (a) is at the top of the list and (b) has already been contacted, which is more or less what this Louisville Courier-Journal piece implies. Petrino is slightly crazy, moderately unpredictable and extremely egotistical, with those issues cumulatively being the reason one of the better coaches in the country apparently can't even get an interview at Kentucky. He'd like a job, preferably a decent one; Auburn is probably the one decent place utterly desperate enough to win at this point that all the aforementioned stuff could be overlooked.

The other obvious guys out there: Malzahn, who has Arkansas State at 8-3 and in the top 30 nationally in both total offense and scoring offense since that's what Malzahn does, and Kirby Smart, who's run Alabama's defense (kind of; Nick Saban does some of that) for the last five years and would be a doubly nice hire since, you know, he's Alabama defensive coordinator. He's also only 36 and, if I'm not mistaken, is the second-highest-paid assistant in the country. He's got Muschamp-esque stability at this point and is only leaving for a legit job; Auburn is that but also happens to be suffering directly from Alabama's awesomeness, so switching sides at right now would seem to be a suboptimal career move.

Regardless, he's worth a call. Same for Malzahn and Petrino and every other viable candidate who isn't Shawn Watson. I have to believe that Auburn can get somebody capable of winning a lot since Auburn is Auburn and just won a national title two freakin' years ago. I also have to believe that Auburn's administration is pretty much insane based on recent coach-hiring ridiculousness and that the job is pretty significantly less desirable than it was two years ago; how insane and how much less desirable are kinda hard to say, but the proof will be in the hiring pudding.

It doesn't matter but obviously matters a lot

So. Michigan. Ohio.

For the first time in eight years (if this had blog had existed for eight years, anyway), this post does not include an obligatory reference to some very large and very disgusting number of days since Michigan last beat Ohio and an accompanying plea to do so again before I die. Unnecessary.


But here's a fun fact: It's been 727 days since Ohio beat Michigan and 1,901 days since Ohio officially beat Michigan (lol wwwhheeeee). Those numbers probably don't show up anywhere on the Columbus Dispatch website but are factual nonetheless.

Those numbers also don't really matter but kinda matter because, for the first time in a really long time, The Game isn't a game Michigan really needs to win (at least not any more than any other version of The Game since all versions of it are must-win). Since Iowa has the offensive version of Greg Robinson calling plays and Penn State's touchdowns don't count and Michigan State gets called for penalties just for being the dirtiest dirt in the history of dirt, Nebraska is going to the Big Ten title game; Michigan is going to some meh corporately sponsored bowl game in Florida against a generic SEC team (barring a crazy confluence of events that could still yield a BCS game) and has a roster full of guys who have all experienced a win over Ohio (and Michigan State and Notre Dame and everybody else) in their relatively successful careers. In that regard, the difference between 8-4 and 9-3 is negligible.

That said, 9-3 with a win over Ohio seems, like, way preferable to 8-4 with a loss to Ohio.

. . . . .

I'm just old enough to be able to vaguely remember the '95 game:


And I'm just old enough to be able to pretty accurately remember the '96 game:


Those were fun; I don't remember the satisfaction being diminished by Ohio finishing with a number of wins slightly larger than Michigan's number of wins. Good things are good by definition. Also good: The possibility that Brady Hoke will have finished his first two years at Michigan with at least 20 wins, including two over Ohio, with the byproduct being two straight 10-plus-win seasons for Michigan for the first time in ... ummm ... a while.

This is what I wrote last week:

I would like to cling to the idea that Urban Meyer is John Cooper. I would like to laugh at another awesome Ohio season becoming infinitely less awesome because of Michigan. I would like to think that Brady Hoke might own Ohio the way Jim Tressel owned Michigan (except without the CheatyPants McSweaterVest stuff). I would like to think that Michigan will have gotten back to the good ol' days of "eh nine wins whatever." I would like to hold onto my totally unrealistic hopes of a BCS at-large berth in the Fiesta Bowl, where I'd get to watch Denard be Denard one more time.

Yes. All those things. All those things for Denard. All those things for 364 days of satisfaction, plz.

BEAT OHIO.

So realignment isn't what it's all about?

This is almost a week old now. Don't care. Must be displayed.

Yahoo has a very sporadic video feature called "Road to Saturday" that occasionally does something very cool with a story largely unknown to everybody. This one is one of those; it's about Harvard's Senior Walk. Watch it. Now.

"Thank you so much for being my family." That says it all.

Expansionpalooza

So conference realignment apparently makes every writer-type person's head explode into 10,000 words about various related topics. Given the pure volume of content that's been produced over the last couple days (some of it newsy, some of it analytical, some of it speculative), there's a lot of stuff out there worth reading. I have attempted to compile said stuff here for something to do before/after/during the Thanksgiving engorgement.

Coastal Division FTW: Brian at MGoBlog wins the interwebz for this:

Okay okay okay you guys I've got it

WEST

Nebraska
Iowa
Wisconsin
Minnesota
Northwestern
Illinois

EAST

Michigan
Michigan State
Ohio State
Penn State
Indiana

COASTAL*

Maryland
Rutgers

*ineligible for championship game, plays all games against coastal division

Yesssss. I'm unclear as to why Purdue no longer exists, though.

The real divisions: They aren't done yet, according to Jim Delany, who basically accused Maryland's president of smoking crack by saying this about the reported Maryland-and-Rutgers-to-the-Leaders thing:

"I have absolutely no idea where that came from," Delany said Tuesday. "We have not had discussion one about that. Just because it's out there doesn't make it true."

That's spectacularly awesome news inasmuch as it provides some hope that Michigan and Ohio State will end up in the same division. Anything other than that as an end result means the people doing the dividing still don't understand exactly what/why they're dividing.

Gene Smith agrees: According to a Gene Smith radio interview (or at least the guy conducting the interview), the Michigan/Ohio State thing might actually be in the works already:

Get the feeling talking to Gene just now that OSU and Michigan in same division will be a likely endgame. ...

Gene: "we have to protect that last date vs. Michigan"

Keep up the good work, Gene Smith. Those words have never before been typed in that particular order on this blog.

Now what? Scary thoughts from Jack Handy Gene Wojciechowski:

The Big Ten could stop at 14 teams or go all-in and expand to 16. The ACC could hit the expansion gas pedal. The Big East could suffer another cluster migraine. Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott, who is a registered expansionist, could start kicking the tires on two to four programs.

Whatever happens, this isn't the end of realignment and expansion. These days, you're either in or you're out.

The Big Ten is in.

I mean ... yeah. There's a lot of speculation out there in the ether that the Big Ten has no intention of stopping at 14 and has some totally genius master plan to bring in Georgia Tech and somebody else to get to 16 and commence world domination. Believable? Yeah. Pretty much everything is at this point. And it probably goes without saying that I would hate a 16-team Big Ten with the fiery passion of 1,000 suns; a 16-team conference isn't a conference as much as a loose affiliation of teams that occasionally play each other. I do not want the Big Ten to be that since it means never again playing Wisconsin or Penn State or Northwestern or somebody; it probably will be anyway.

And just to be clear, Notre Dame ain't comin'. Even if the Big Ten were to pluck another respectable program away from the ACC (Georgia Tech or Boston College, hypothetically), the ACC could just turn around and help itself to Louisville and UConn out of the Big East to fill its two holes and not really be any worse off than it is now. There's nothing the Big Ten can do to get Notre Dame, especially since being a part of any conference has to seem less desirable than ever at this point. As for the other conferences, I have no idea what happens next and have no desire to speculate about the infinite possible scenarios.

The thing about TV money: Very Smart Man Jon Chait of the New York Times brings up the BTN-on-cable thing in an attempt to explain why bilking a lot of people out of a dollar probably isn't a viable long-term strategy:

As a profit-making mechanism, this is essentially a scam. It relies on an opaque pricing mechanism (bundled cable television) forcing people to pay for a product they don’t want. Right now, it’s a highly lucrative scam. But bundled cable television pricing is not going to last forever, and possibly not very long at all. There is already a revolution in video content under way that is going to render the cable television bundle model obsolete. When that revolution has finished, the Big Ten will realize it pulled apart its entire identity to grab a profit stream that has disappeared.

Upshot: Internet TV distribution will render cable bundles irrelevant, at which point the Big Ten will have sold its soul for doughnuts. There's some truth to that argument; there's also some, um, falseness. The cable TV model isn't going away in the immediate future because cable TV companies aren't gonna start giving their content away the way newspapers did. That's not even possible since producing live content costs money (a lot of it). You'll either pay a cable company for cable or you'll pay various entities (say, MLB and the Big Ten or maybe Google at some point in the not-too-distant future) for the online packages you want. The inevitable a la carte pricing Chait's talking about will most likely will result in individual channels just costing a lot more since fewer people will have them (this argument can be rehashed in any number of places on the interwebz), so BTN.com will just cost you (or me, to be more accurate) $10 a month instead of $1 a month since the number of people actually wanting to pay for it will get cut in 10. Chait's point (I think) is that demographics and market shares won't even matter at that point -- and he's right -- but Rutgers and Maryland won't drastically alter "the entire identity" of the Big Ten any more than adding Nebraska did. They'll just be average programs that are kinda/sorta geographic outliers (although both are closer to Penn State than any other team in the conference is currently).

Chait also cites the Big 12 as an example of a superconference imploding due to "geographic appendages" but fails to acknowledge that the Big 12's implosion had nothing to do with the geography of the conference or the decrease in the number of rivalry games or anything of that nature; it was all about Texas getting a hilariously oversized piece of the revenue pie. The reason the Big Ten is so desirable is exactly the opposite: equal sharing of a massive pie.

Anyway, there's some interesting stuff in there, and even if I don't agree with most of it, I unquestionably agree with this QED assessment of why the whole thing sucks:

Without tradition, college football is just an NFL minor league. Big Ten football mainly consists on a week-to-week basis of games like Michigan versus Minnesota and Illinois versus Wisconsin. Those games have meaning to the fans in ways outsiders can’t grasp. The series have gone on for a century. They often have funny old trophies. Every game is lodged into a long historical narrative of cherished (or cursed) memory. Replacing those games with some other equally good (or, as the case may be, not good) program is like snuffing out your family dog and replacing it with some slightly better-trained breed. It is not the same thing.

Well said.

Summing it up: Going a step beyond the BTN-in-various-markets discussion is this excerpt from ESPN's Adam Rittenberg:

But the real big day for the league will be when it announces a new television agreement in 2017. Keep in mind all the other conferences have had their turn and cashed in. The Big Ten is the last in line, and should get the biggest payout. 

The Big Ten is going to get a head-asplodingly massive TV deal in about four years that will dwarf what the SEC and Pac-12 are getting (their contracts are locked in for at least 15 years each), and that head-asplodingly massive deal will probably be an order of magnitude more massive just because somebody at the Big Ten will be able to convince ESPN/FOX/whoever that viewership on the East Coast will increase incrementally via the Maryland/Rutgers fan bases plus the roughly half a million Big Ten alums in the major metro areas. So yeah: Staking claim to those markets has financial benefits that go way beyond just getting that $1-a-subscriber payout for the BTN. In conclusion, Jim Delany might be hate all of us but definitely loves money.

The money goes somewhere: The view from the other side: Rutgers just won the lottery and has a list of things to buy. It's a depressing list, really.

End the subsidy and significantly reduce the student fees. Everyone else helped out athletics through its lean years. Now that it's finally found a good job and moved out of its parents' basement, it's time to not only be independent but pay some back rent as well for the sanity and well-being of everyone involved. ...

Staff raises and respectable budgets should be in order all around. ...

In summary, expect incremental improvements for the time being, with the hopes of accomplishing more over time. Rutgers has been stimulating its athletic department for the past decade to the precipice of being a Big Ten team, and clearly that strategy has been completely vindicated.

Rutgers haz a happy.

The best thing ever: BHGP. Brilliant.

PISCATAWAY, NJ (AP) -- Despite recent victories in Maryland and New Jersey, Lord High Commissioner of the Big Ten Jim Delany declared yesterday that he is far from satisfied and will look to expand his football/media empire. In a top-secret briefing held at Big Ten high command's field headquarters, Delany outlined a vision for Big Ten expansion that promises to bring the Big Ten to New England, Quebec and beyond.

"At long last we have a secure foothold on the eastern seaboard" said Delany, the gold buttons on his immaculate commissioner's uniform gleaming in the sun. "With our new redoubts in New Jersey and Maryland, we are well disposed to expand our realm via land and sea and will not hesitate to do so."

Delany then clapped his hands and a servant in white livery produced a large map of the world with the arrayed forces of the college football conferences represented on it. Delany proceeded to demonstrate his strategy by feverishly moving miniature stacks of money and TV screens around on the board.

"First we will march through New York, capturing the crucial SUNY system in one fell swoop. Then, we will flank the concentrated ACC forces in Massachusetts and capture New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, leaving Boston College contained and isolated. From there, it should be a simple matter to capture Quebec and Greenland." A maniacal glint then came into the eyes of the bushy-eyebrowed conference bureaucrat: "And once we have Greenland, it is but a hop, skip and a jump to Iceland... and Europe!"

Delany then adjusted his bicorne hat and directed his adjutants to prepare his white stallion, Fritz Crisler, for departure. As his mount was made ready, he explained his broader strategy. "The ACC and SEC are far too dug in along the Mason-Dixon line for our forces to make a frontal assault, and we regard the barren wastes to our west as scarcely worth the candle of an invasion. Therefore our only option is to move our forces across the sea to Europe, then circle around and attack from the south. No conference can sustain a two-front war, as the Conference USA demonstrated so memorably."

There's more; read it. The illustrations alone are worth your time.

This will probably help Gene Chizik

This week in "Oh I'm so surprised, Auburn":

According to multiple sources, NCAA investigators have spent weeks looking into potential improprieties involving Auburn recruits, players, coaches, representatives of the school's athletic interests and third parties.

Assistant coaches Trooper Taylor and Curtis Luper have been scrutinized by the NCAA, sources said. Taylor is the assistant head coach and wide receivers coach, while Luper coaches running backs and is the recruiting coordinator. Both Taylor and Luper were taken off the road recruiting several weeks ago amid the NCAA probe, sources said. 

Level of surprise on a scale of 1-10 that Auburn and/or Trooper Taylor are involved in recruiting shenanigans: -7,883. And to answer the obvious question:

Sources told Yahoo! Sports in September that the NCAA has been investigating the recruitment of 2012 Auburn signee Jovon Robinson, whose Memphis Wooddale High School academic transcript was found to be forged and was subsequently declared ineligible in August to play this year at the school. The NCAA probe is believed to be more widespread than just Robinson but is not believed to revisit the 2010 allegations involving former star quarterback Cam Newton.

I see. Insert "so you're sayin' there's a chance" gif here.

And to answer the other obvious question: three. Gene Chizik has three days left at Auburn.

Catching up had that one day at Alabama

Conference realignment rabble rabble: The Big East might not be in super-excellent shape:

Boise State, San Diego State and BYU have had conversations with Mountain West membership about the possibility of returning to the league, sources told ESPN.

The talks originated after last week's decision in Denver by the BCS commissioners to award an automatic access bowl berth to the highest-rated champion to the "Group of Five" conferences. That decision in essence put the Mountain West on equal footing, as far as playoff access is concerned, with the Big East starting in 2014.

San Diego State has since reaffirmed its commitment to the Big East; the others haven't really done anything publicly, which to me serves as somewhat of an acknowledgment of veracity.

Amazingly, this stuff has nothing whatsoever to do with Big Ten expansion and is solely a result of the new postseason structure, as mentioned above. Seeing as how there's no inherent advantage to playing in the Big East rather than the Mountain West -- all the "Group of Five" conferences have equal access, so it might actually be a benefit to play in a weaker conference and have a better shot at going undefeated -- it makes sense that Boise State would prefer not to be totally isolated 2,000 miles to the West of all its conference opponents and instead retain some geographic sanity.

BYU's situation is slightly different but essentially the same in that being independent < being in a conference in terms of future BCS access. There's no highest-ranked-independent autobid, meaning BYU as an independent would never get a berth in a BCS game without getting an at-large bid (via an unbeaten season, most likely). The "Group of Five" thing offers access that doesn't otherwise exist.

Realistically, I won't be surprised if Boise and/or BYU end up back in the Mountain West, even if it means a slight pay cut in terms of TV revenue (Boise's is impossible to calculate without knowing what the Big East's new media rights deal will look like, but BYU's would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.5 million a year). I also won't be surprised if nothing happens since conference realignment and logic are pretty much mutually exclusive.

Why not? Miami did the reasonable thing Monday by self-imposing a bowl ban for the second straight year. Keep in mind that the NCAA hasn't yet come down with a ruling on the whole Nevin Shapiro thing; at this point, Miami is done whatever's necessary to proactively mitigate the damage.

What undoubtedly made the decision a little harder than it otherwise would've been: Miami is 6-5 and would've clinched a spot in the ACC title game with a win over Duke this week (likely). That said, a loss Florida State in the ACC title game (much more likely) or a loss to Duke would've resulted in a either a 7-6 or 6-6 record and a really crappy bowl game of little to no interest. What's the point of playing in a crappy bowl game this year while knowing that said crappy bowl game might be costing you (via NCAA sanctions) a potentially-much-better bowl game a few years from now? It's a worthwhile tradeoff, IMO, even without knowing the exact effect on the Committee on Infractions.

Speaking of which, I wonder how Ohio State's feeling about that 2011 Gator Bowl loss right about now.

An eventful career: Mike Price retired Friday -- effective at the end of the season -- with UTEP hanging out toward the bottom of Conference USA at 3-8. The AP lede says it all:

UTEP coach Mike Price is retiring after a 31-year career notable for two Rose Bowl bids at Washington State and a drinking binge that cost him the Alabama job before he ever coached a game for the Crimson Tide.

Ahhh yes. Mike Price: The guy who went from coaching Ala-freakin'-bama to coaching UTEP without ever losing a game. And he was good: He went 83-78 and went to two Rose Bowls with Washington State (which seems incomprehensible now) and then went 16-8 in his first two years at UTEP before hitting a wall since UTEP is UTEP. Assuming a loss next week in the season finale, he'll retire with a record of 47-60 in nine seasons (!) at UTEP and a 177-182 record overall, which doesn't seem that impressive but has to be taken in context with the craptacularity of the teams he's taken over at pretty much every stop.

There's an alternate universe in which the guy at that strip club loses his camera, Price turns into Bizarro World Nick Saban and UTEP strings together something like 20 straight losing seasons. Price probably parties a lot in that universe and blows his $10 million a year in spectacular ways yet totally gets away with it since he's Bizarro World Nick Saban.

Anyway, in this universe, he's recommended that defensive coordinator Andre Patterson be the next coach; the AD has said only that Patterson will be considered and that he hopes to have a permanent guy in place by Christmas. I won't bother trying to come up with other names since UTEP won't be picking from guys whose names mean anything to anybody.

So long, Brandon Jenkins: Brandon Jenkins's choices: (a) rehab from a broken foot and come back for a fifth year at Florida State to terrorize the left tackles of the ACC or (b) rehab and be a first-round pick. He chose the latter:

Brandon Jenkins said the past three months rehabbing a broken foot have provided ample time to think about his future, and Monday he informed Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher he was ready to enter the NFL draft.

The senior defensive end could have accepted a medical redshirt after he suffered a Lisfranc injury in the first quarter of FSU's opening game this season, allowing him to return for 2013. But after turning down an opportunity to enter the draft a year ago, Jenkins decided it's time to test the waters in the NFL.

There's not much to add here. Jenkins is/was one of the best pass rushers in the country and will almost certainly be a first-round pick as long as everything heals correctly. Can't blame a guy for taking the money, especially when there's not a whole lot more he can do at the college level.

And Florida State has been OK without him: first in the country in total defense, fifth in scoring defense, first in rushing defense, seventh in pass-efficiency defense, 25th in sacks, etc. It's nice when the loss of Brandon Jenkins just means you have to put Bjoern Werner on the field; he has 14.5 tackles for loss and 9.5 sacks across from Tank Carradine, who has 13.5 and 10.5, respectively. Carradine's a senior and therefore will need replacing next year, but Werner's only a junior and should be back (unless he isn't, in which case Jimbo Fisher will have some serious work to do on the D-line).

The Minnesota weirdness: Weirdness. Yes. So Minnesota receiver A.J. Barker -- who was easily leading the team in catches, yards and touchdowns even after missing the past three games with an ankle injury -- went OFF on Jerry Kill in an epic 4,000-word Tumblr rant that served as his farewell to Minnesota. A relatively mild excerpt:

In light of that pathetic, manipulative display of rage and love you put on this past Thursday, I have come to the decision, with the guidance of my parents and my closest friends, that my time on this team has come to an end. It kills me that I have to do this before the season’s over, but this is the only way I can protect myself against the manipulation and abuse I’d have to endure from you the rest of this season. ...

It was during this discussion (with the trainer) that you came over and exploded on me in front of the entire team in our indoor facility.  “YOU DON’T FUCKING GET TO TELL THE TRAINER WHAT YOU DO!” followed by a 20 minute tyraid where you attacked everything about me, from an athlete to my character as a person. ...

I’m being told that if I wanted to, I’d be healthy. I’m being told that “I don’t have a say” in my own injury or rehab?

Well, Jerry Kill, this is 2012, not 1974 in small town Kansas, I do have the right to have a say in my own body and how it is being treated. ...

OH SNAP. Barker has officially quit the team and intends to transfer, which won't be an issue since he's technically a walk-on and therefore won't have to sit out or deal with any of the typical red-tape stuff.

But ... like ... WTF happened? Kill finally came out with his side of the story the other day, with the implication being that Barker wasn't totally thrilled with (a) the way the trainers were handling his injury and (b) not being offered a scholarship despite being the obvious No. 1 receiver.

Barker said he was forced to practice by Kill last Tuesday -- another allegation that Kill denies -- but he was unable to get through warmups. An MRI test the next day revealed ligament tears and a bone bruise above his heel, he said.

Kill said Barker's actions toward the training staff disrupted practice. That's when Kill admitted to dressing Barker down.

"Nobody wants to see a kid not play or get his dreams or those kinds of things," Kill said. "But at the same time, I can't let him do something different than everybody else. You can't be having a confrontation with an adult trainer and it's OK. That's not what we ask of everybody else."

So stuff happened, at which point LOUD NOISES ensued and everybody got angry. I don't doubt that there was some ... umm ... unpleasantness. I've been at D-I football practices; unpleasantness is everywhere because motivating 100 guys to not do things the lazy way is really hard. The issue apparently was whether Barker was doing his own thing (acupuncture, etc.) rather than the trainers' thing, and I can see a guy like Jerry Kill freaking out if people aren't following directions/orders/whatever; there's a reason guys like Jerry Kill make their way from the Southern Illinoises of the world to the Minnesotas of the world.

Given the nature of the dispute, it's pretty unlikely anything comes of it other than maybe the Minnesota administration suggesting he tone things down a bit in practice. Beyond that, Barker's just the bajillionth casualty in the history of football of a coach saying probably-meaner-than-necessary things.

Seems reasonable: Phil Bennett was definitely drunk after Baylor's WTF win over K-State last week:

“Alabama? We would have beat them tonight!” Bennett said in the postgame fray. He continued on that thread by giving a rare shout-out to a once-bitter conference rival of Baylor’s when he said, “That’s why Texas A&M is doing well in that league … SEC teams don’t face anything like us.”

Mmmkay. This would be the appropriate time to point out that Baylor is still 119th in total defense and 114th in scoring defense.

That was fast: Jordan Wynn has himself a job: He was named quarterbacks coach at Hawaii last week under Norm Chow, who was Wynn's O-coordinator at Utah.

Utah QB Jordan Wynn’s playing career came to an end in September after a season-ending injury to his shoulder in a loss to Utah State, his fourth major injury in college. Now, just over two months later, his college coaching career is already starting.

On Thursday, the 22-year-old Wynn was named the quarterbacks coach at Hawaii — where his old offensive coordinator, Norm Chow, is the head coach — starting in January.

Serious question: Has anybody every gone from playing at one school to coaching at another in the same season (although Wynn doesn't technically start until after the season)? I mean ... that's crazy. It's also awesome for Wynn, who was a pretty good player when his shoulder was attached to his body and already has a degree. I have nothing more to add except this: Those glasses are utterly spectacular.

OK, Sports Illustrated: The Notre Dame helmet would probably be sufficiently identifiable without the superimposition of Jesus and the Latin and whatnot:

Good thing there's no SI jinx anymore, right? RIGHT?