The anti-Zooker

The typical downside of hiring a "name" guy is that said guy is usually available for a reason. Proof: Charlie Weis is now working at Kansas. Illinois hired Ron Zook after he took over one of the top five-ish programs in the country and couldn't do better than 8-5. Steve Spurrier won a million games before him and Urban Meyer won a million games after him, which makes a 23-14 record at Florida not so awesome.

There was basically nothing in his track record that indicated Zook would be a particularly good head coach at a place like Illinois. The guy could recruit like a mofo and had a metric ton of noteworthy assistant jobs (assistant head coach at Va. Tech, D-coordinator at Florida, D-coordinator for the Saints, etc.) but had minimal successful head coaching experience, which was borne out in his inexplicable inability to know when to punt or correctly use replay challenges. Obviously, below-average results at Florida =/= doing well* at Illinois (one weird Rose Bowl season notwithstanding).

Tim Beckman has a Wikipedia page that's two paragraphs long despite having the same amount of head coaching experience (three years) as pre-Illinois Zook. The entirety of his meaningful coaching background: five years as D-coordinator at Bowling Green, two years as cornerbacks coach at Ohio State, two years as D-coordinator at Oklahoma State and three years as head coach at Toledo. Getting the Illinois job represents a pretty meteoric rise for a guy who's still only 46 and probably would be unidentifiable to 90 percent of the population of Toledo (let alone any recruit in the state of Illinois). So his resume is about an inch long, his only coaching experience is in the MAC and he may or may not be any good at recruiting. In short, Tim Beckman is most definitely not Ron Zook. Whether that's a good thing probably depends a lot on your opinion of Illinois football and what it is and/or should be.

Going back a little bit, the Okie State job was kind of an odd outlier in terms of geography but was really what got Beckman a head coaching gig (being a MAC coordinator and a cornerbacks coaches won't get you real far). He took a bad defense and made it awful in '07 (101st in yardage, 79th in scoring) and then slightly better in '08 (93rd in yardage, 76th in scoring). Woo. That was apparently enough for Toledo, which probably figured a decent D-I coordinator with gobs of Ohio connections would work out OK. And he did: 5-7, 8-5, 8-4.

Since Toledo is Toledo and you don't pay attention to Toledo, it might interest you to know that Toledo is a pretty good MAC program. The previous three coaches: Nick Saban (yup), Gary Pinkel and Tom Amstutz. I don't feel like looking up their cumulative record at UT, but I guarantee you it's impressive. That said, Amstutz "stepped down" at the end of 2008 because Toledo had gone from consistent division winner to blah. He went 5-7, 5-7 and 3-9 in his last three years (don't worry about who those wins in '08 were against lalalalala) and pretty obviously wasn't on the brink of turning things around. Beckman got there and did it in a hurry.

Here's the part that's kinda hard to figure out: Toledo's defenses weren't very good the last three years. UT finished 76th and 89th this year, 56th and 73rd (not bad) in 2010 and 95th and 116th (!) in 2009. There's obviously been some level of improvement and he's going against MAC offenses and blah blah blah, but man ... I was expecting something slightly more impressive overall. Amstutz's last couple defenses were about equal to the '09 and '11 ones.

There is a pretty significant caveat: Legitimately good offensive teams have absolutely shredded Toledo the past couple years, but the apples-to-apples games have (mostly) gone pretty well. Boise State (65 points), Arizona (41), Northern Illinois (65), Boise State again (40) and Northern Illinois again (63) have definitely skewed the numbers. Outside of those five games, Toledo has given up more than 30 points in regulation just twice in the last two regular seasons. Why Toledo has been giving up 64 points a game to an NIU team that averages about half that number is another question.

So ... I have no idea what to make of Beckman. His defenses were pretty decent except when they were awful, and his offenses were generally pretty good (and MAC-tastic in their spreadiness) but definitely weren't coached by him. Relevant note from ESPN:

Beckman said Friday he'll run a spread at Illinois. He added that he'll try to bring Toledo offensive coordinator Matt Campbell to Champaign ...

That seems like a good idea since the Toledo offense was eighth in both scoring and yardage this year. The Illinois offense was good in 2010 and then a total disaster this year minus Mikel Leshoure; Paul Petrino apparently forgot how to coach or something. Based on UT's last couple years, I'm guessing Campbell (or whoever) will have Illinois throwing at least a little more next year. I'm not sure if that's gonna be a good or bad thing for Nate Scheesdfkjlajfkadsfe, but improvement by default is likely.

I can't really say that about the program as a whole. I do think going the "improved a meh team" route is a lot more practical for Illinois than the "won some at a should-be-dominant school" route, but whether Beckman is actually a program builder or just a guy who had a couple solid years in the MAC is unknowable. Also, stuff like this ...

"It's not broken, it isn't," Beckman told reporters after meeting with Illinois' players. "This is a gold mine. You can win at the University of Illinois."

... sounds great but is hard to reconcile with the fact that Illinois has gotten to eight wins just three times in the last 15 years. Michigan and Nebraska aren't going anywhere, and Notre Dame will get the best recruits out of Chicago this year and next year and every year until Chicago falls off the face of the Earth. There are some obvious disadvantages; a gold mine this is not.

It was pointed out that AD Illinois Mike Thomas has a pretty solid hiring history:

The athletic director, answering questions about fans on local talk radio and Internet message boards who said Beckman wasn't a big enough name, said he heard much the same at the University of Cincinnati, where he hired a pair of MAC coaches that produced consistent winners, Brian Kelly, now at Notre Dame, and current Bearcats coach Butch Jones, whose team is 9-3 this season.

"They all said 'Who's Brian Kelly?' They all said 'Who's Butch Jones.'" Thomas said. "I get that."

First of all, Brian Kelly wasn't much of an unknown in the Midwest by the time Cincinnati hired him; he won a bazillion games and a couple national titles at Grand Valley State and then won the MAC at Central Michigan. Butch Jones also had a way better record at CMU than Beckman had at Toledo, which means both of those guys both had better resumes than Beckman's right now. I'd also argue that winning at Cincinnati is actually easier than winning at Illinois because of (a) the depth of recruiting talent in Ohio and (b) the consistently mediocre Big East. In other words, hiring Brian Kelly at Cincinnati is not the same as hiring Tim Beckman at Illinois except in the most superficial way.

Illinois is a decent program that should regularly get to bowl games but is gonna have a really hard time competing for Big Ten championships barring Tim Beckman becoming Urban Meyer. I don't think that's happening. The more reasonable question is whether he's better than Ron Zook, but again, that's pretty much unknowable. Solve for the variables here: Microscopic MAC sample size + middling results as a coordinator + middle-of-the-pack Big Ten program + zero geographic ties = ???

His resume offers nothing of relevance** except for the complete lack of career similarities, and that might be good or bad or none of the above. I mean, The Zooker wasn't awful except for, like, all the in-game stuff. Beckman will be better there; whether he'll actually produce something better than .500 on a fairly regular basis is what matters.

*Fun fact: Illinois became the first team in D-I/FBS history to start a season 6-0 and finish it 6-6. Go team.

**A close loss to this year's crappy version of Ohio State doesn't mean a whole lot.

RGIII will (deservingly) win the Heisman

Way back in August, I wrote some stuff about the Heisman and how it's become a de facto best-back-on-the-best-team award. Upshot:

The Heisman has become the Best Back on the Best Team Award (or occasionally the Most Dominant Player on a Very Good Team Award),

Now that we've got that out of the way, here are the old and outdated criteria that most people think still matter but really don't:

1. Huge, mind-blowing stats (only necessary if playing on a good-but-not-great BCS team)
2. Being a household name at the start of the season

Like I said before, this isn't 1992, and nobody will care if Case Keenum throws for 5,000 yards and 40 touchdowns while Andrew Luck throws for 2,500 and 30 touchdowns. We're not in the Ty Detmer/Andre Ware era anymore.

As for No. 2, neither of the past two winners was even on the radar at the start of the season -- Cam Newton wasn't even on the freakin' Davey O'Brien watch list, which is comprised of pretty much every quarterback anybody thinks might be capable of being good. If your team is elite and you're the star quarterback/running back, you can win the Heisman.

Woo self-promoting blockquote. Anyway, I then listed a whole bunch of guys who could fall into that last category; Robert Griffin wasn't one of them. At no point did I seriously consider the possibility that (a) Griffin would be good enough to offset Baylor's mediocrity or (b) Griffin would be so good that Baylor would also be pretty good.

Robert Griffin is probably going to win the Heisman tomorrow, as he should. I saw about half of Baylor's games this year and would describe Baylor as a slightly less talented version of 2010 Michigan playing in the best top-to-bottom conference in the country this year. And that team went 9-3. The reason: RGIII.

The numbers are totally and utterly ridiculous in every way for a guy playing in an actual conference. Here, have a poorly formatted chart:

	Pct	TD	Int	Yds	YPA	Rating
Robert Griffin III	72.36	36	6	3998	10.83	192.31
Andrew Luck	69.97	35	9	3170	8.5	167.5

Griffin could play his worst game of the year in the Alamo Bowl and still break the all-time single-season pass-efficiency record of 186.0. Ridonkulous. I should probably mention that he also has 644 rushing yards and nine touchdowns, which would make him a decent starting D-I running back if he were solely a running back.

Going back to Baylor being 2010 Michigan, consider this: RGIII accounted for 67.9 percent of the offense for a team that went 9-3 despite finishing 106th (!) in scoring defense and 114th (!!!) in total defense. In their three losses, they gave up 36, 55 and 59 points. They won games in which they gave up 48, 31, 39, 38 and 42 points. Griffin accounted for at least two touchdowns in every game this year and had more touchdown passes than incompletions (lol) until late in the fourth game of the year. His pass efficiency at that point was something absurd like 221; the dip to 192 isn't that significant considering the absurdity of what he was doing in September.

I was asked about two weeks ago who I'd vote for if I had a ballot. My response: I'd take RGIII but could justifiably vote for Andrew Luck, Trent Richardson or even Tyrann Mathieu. Luck and Richardson are probably the two most talented players in the country, and Mathieu has zero chance of actually winning but has been basically the defensive/special teams version of RGIII. I honestly don't know which of those guys I'd leave off my ballot; probably Mathieu since he went ham on punt returns at super-convenient times but was also the second-best corner on his own team. He's the one guy who's not totally vital to his team's awesomeness (whether that's fair or not is irrelevant at hair-splitting time).

StiffArmyTrophy published this yesterday:

By now, this won't be a surprise to anyone: Baylor's Robert Griffin III is going to win the Heisman Trophy.

By our reckoning, he's going to get approximately 2000 points - 71% of a perfect unanimous #1 vote. (This year, 2781 points is perfect.)

That actually would be a surprise if I weren't an obsessive sicko who'd been kinda-sorta keeping up with the straw polls. HeismanPundit's "final projection" was as follows:

1. Robert Griffin, 32 (8)
2. Andrew Luck, 23 (4)
3. Trent Richardson, 10 (1)

And the StiffArmTrophy numbers aren't even close:

1. Robert Griffin, 482 (133)
2. Andrew Luck, 282 (41)
3. Trent Richardson, 164 (22)

FYI, those are both compilations of ACTUAL votes. The latter one includes only about a third of the total ballots but gives Griffin such a huge lead that the rest won't matter.

So Robert Griffin III is probably gonna win the Heisman. This has nothing to do with SEC hatred (hahahahaha* stop) or Luck being anything other than Mr. Awesome At Everything and has everything to do with RGIII scorching the earth while playing for freakin' Baylor. Hooray for that.

*This is from Paul Finebaum: "Much heat leaving RG3 off my Heisman ballot. SEC defenses would have eaten him alive. Haters get a clue." Mmmkay.

Obvious SEC troll is obvious.

Kansas inexplicably hires Charlie Weis

Hahahahahahaha:

LAWRENCE, Kan. -- Former Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis has been hired at Kansas. Weis will be introduced during a news conference Friday.

The jokes: They're so easy.

On a non-weight-related note, this makes no sense at all. I realize that Charlie Weis is a "name" hire and the pool of quality candidates wasn't overflowing and yadda yadda yadda, but ... I mean ... the guy just hasn't been successful as a college coach since Ty Willingham's upperclassmen stopped taking him to BCS games. The 20-5 start at Notre Dame was achieved without beating a single team that finished the season ranked, which is kind of weird and remarkable, and he went 16-21 after Brady Quinn left and he actually had to, like, develop some of his ridiculous recruiting classes.

That's pretty much Charlie Weis in a nutshell (not that he would fit lol zing!): excellent recruiter, allegedly good strategist, awful talent developer. There's no other way to explain going well under .500 over a three-year post-transition period with recruiting classes that ranked eighth, eighth, second and 21st (according to Rivals) in the country. And unlike Turner Gill, Weis actually got to see his first class through; he got a full five years and could never get his own hypothetically talented guys to even seven regular-season wins, which really shouldn't be that difficult with a supposed "schematic advantage" over everybody.

Speaking of which, Florida was pretty blah this year with Weis as O-coordinator: 102nd (!) in total offense, 72nd in scoring offense, 87th in passing offense, 75th in rushing offense. After a cupcake-tastic four-game start, Florida didn't put up more than 26 points on any FBS team the rest of the year and scored a combined 66 points in its six losses. For you journalism majors, that's 11 points a game. John Brantley missed all or part of three of those games, but still: gack. There is no way that offense should be finishing 102nd nationally.

Just ask, like, anybody who watched Florida this year. You know that means EDSBS:

YOU IDIOTS THANK YOU. Gator fans, let's just hug. That is my hand on your ass. Don't fight it. Don't make it weird.

Lol exactly. Here's SI's Holly Anderson:

Congratulations to the Florida Gators on a great hire (for Florida) by Kansas!

Ouch. And doing that with elite recruits at two places with gobs of money/support/tradition somehow got him a job at a place with absolutely none of those things. In short, I see no way this doesn't work.

I went over all this stuff when Turner Gill got canned, but Kansas football has been bad for basically its entire modern existence outside the end of the Glen Mason era in the late '80s and the middle of the Mark Mangino era. Turner Gill probably just isn't a great coach but managed to turn Buffalo (!) into something respectable before cratering Kansas, which had been sliding from "unusually good" to "decent" and just kept sliding. Winning seven games a year is doable with a good coach -- especially in the hypothetically weakened Big 12 -- but the "good coach" part is definitely a requirement. The 2013 version of Jimmy Clausen/Brady Quinn won't be going to Kansas; the only way to win is through serious player development, and that's the one thing I'm pretty certain Charlie Weis isn't good at.

There's also this:

It was little secret that Weis wasn't fond of Kansas City during his time with the Chiefs, and he moved on to the Gators in part so that he could be near his son, who is also on the football staff. He bought a horse farm in nearby Ocala and has several health issues that include possibly needing hip surgery after the season that could make it difficult to jump right into recruiting.

Still, the opportunity to rebuild the Jayhawks appears to be enough of a challenge.

Errr yeah. Any head coaching job would have been "enough of a challenge" for a guy with an ego the size of his waistband who probably didn't want to go down forever as the blob who signed a bazillion-year contract at Notre Dame and got fired three years later. What it was that made spectacularly named athletic director Sheahon Zenger think Weis was deserving of that challenge is the part I can't figure out.

Still, I'll be rooting for the guy to go 12-1 at least once. There is no way the Weis-at-Kansas thing can end without the picture-frame complement to this beauty:

That is all.

ASU ... ur doin' it wrong

I don't even know where to start, which is appropriate since Lisa Love apparently doesn't either (zing!). ASU's coaching search has gone from "what are they doing?" to "OMG WTF ARE THEY DOING???"

First it was Kevin Sumlin ...

The quest to hire Kevin Sumlin as Arizona State's next football coach is “almost a done deal,” according to a source with connections to ASU's football program.

Sumlin, currently coach of the University of Houston, will likely coach the Cougars in the Conference USA championship game Saturday before any announcement is made, but it is clear that Sumlin or an intermediary and ASU officials have been talking for a while.

... and then they were like "haha jk it's not Kevin Sumlin" ...

Arizona State has reportedly ended its pursuit Houston Cougars head coach Kevin Sumlin, according to My Fox Houston.

The sources told FOX 26 that Arizona State had been in discussions with Sumlin's agent, Trace Armstrong.

"We've dropped from further consideration and moved on," said the Arizona State source who requested anonymity.

... and then it was June Jones ...

A source close to the ASU football program has confirmed that June Jones will be named the team's next coach. The hire is likely to be announced this week.

... and then they were like "WAIT Y U JUNE JONES?" ...

SMU coach June Jones had accepted an offer to coach Arizona State and minor contract points were being ironed out, a source said, when his representatives today received a call saying the offer had been pulled.

The source said Arizona State's explanation was that "it took too long" and the school president was moving on.

"We had accepted the deal," the source said. "I've never seen anything like this."

... and now they're back where they started, at least in a chronological sense. They're not back where they started in a logistical sense since there are now fewer available options; Mike Leach is gone, Larry Fedora is gone and Jones is rightfully pissed. I don't know who's next on the list, and I'm not sure ASU knows.

I spent part of my afternoon defending the briefly inevitable Jones hire before discovering that I no longer needed to defend it. In case you're wondering, here are my reasons: (a) he's turned around two totally awful programs (and yes, going 23-28 at SMU is "turning it around" when it's the worst program in America and your first season ends at 1-11), (b) he's got a somewhat-unique system that would be a legitimate draw for quarterbacks and (c) he's an excellent recruiter (ASU has a pretty good 2012 recruiting class that happens to be ranked exactly the same as SMU's -- tied for 46th nationally -- on Rivals). If June Jones were 48 instead of 58, he'd be at the top of a lot of lists because he'd basically be Art Briles.

But therein lies my concern: He'll be 59 in a couple months. Unless he's Joe Paterno, he's not a long-term hire who's gonna build the program and then enjoy the fruits of his labor. He's a stopgap. In short, he'd be an OK hire: He'd almost definitely improve the program and win some games in the near future but wouldn't have the long-term upside (Jay Bilas says wut) of Briles or Kevin Sumlin or whoever. There's only so much that can be done in the five-ish years Jones has left as an effective coach.

Now that I've written all that, feel free to forget it; it's pretty much irrelevant since Jones is out of the picture (I think) and headed back to SMU. Just know that he's a fine human being:

"June was one of the candidates that we've looked at," ASU Chief Operating Officer Steve Patterson said. "We think he is a fine coach and human being, but we've made the decision to go in a different direction.

"There are a lot of very qualified coaches out there and we're going to continue the process."

Guh. As for who those "very qualified coaches" are ... ummm ... man, I dunno. Nobody else really knows either. It's worth nothing that Sumlin is somehow still out there and might be gettable on a second pass if he doesn't already have something in place with Texas A&M. There's also Art Briles, who's been my non-Mike Leach first choice the whole time and could probably still be had if ASU were willing to pony up $4 million for his buyout (unlikely but plausible if enough donors were on board). People keep suggesting Oregon O-coordinator Mark Helfrich (a former ASU assistant under Dirk Koetter) and Eastern Michigan coach Ron English (a former ASU defensive backs coach), but whether those are realistic candidates or throw-darts-at-a-nameboard candidates is unknown. I'm guessing the latter unless ASU gets really desperate.

Also, stop suggesting Noel Mazzone. The only thing worse than hiring a Plan F candidate would be hiring nobody. "We literally could not find a single candidate who was both interested in coaching us and acceptable to the fan base, so ... ummm ... Noel Mazzone!" Keeping a good-but-not-great recruiting class together (if that would even do it) means nothing in comparison to finding the right coach and not becoming a national punchline for what's quickly becoming one of the most nonsensical coaching searches in the history of coaching searches.

This comment (not even from a skeptical ASU fan!) pretty much sums things up:

Tell me with a straight face that you seriously thought ASU would do a good job with their coaching search.

You win, sir. I cannot do that. I'm not sure whether it's the complete ineptitude in the athletic department or the complete debacle that this search has become that's more laughable/depressing. Hopefully the hire itself works out a hell of a lot better than the process (whatever that process is).

Washington State pwns everybody

It seems extremely weird and a little disconcerting that the best non-Urban Meyer hire of the offseason (no matter what else happens) belongs to Washington State. Washington State!

I intended to write a "coachpocalypse" post about Paul Wulff's firing after a slight-but-insufficient turnaround this year but didn't get to it before his exit became waaay less interesting than his replacement. Yaarr:

It's been a long time since Wazzu won anything of note; they won at hiring Mike Leach. Bill Moos saw an elite, inexplicably available candidate who was literally begging for a decent job (any decent job) and gave him a big chunk of money before anybody else could do the same after coming to the logical conclusion that Mike Leach >>> every other available option.

This is the part where I go over the resume and explain why the guy is so good. To the numbers!

2000: 7-6
2001: 7-5
2002: 9-5
2003: 8-5
2004: 8-4
2005: 9-3
2006: 8-5
2007: 9-4
2008: 11-2
2009: 8-4

That's a record of 84-43 (!!!). At Texas Tech. In Lubbock. At the fourth-best program in (what used to be) the Big 12 South.

Just to clarify, Texas Tech was not awful when Leach got there: Spike Dykes got things headed toward respectability and finished with seven straight non-losing season (basically all 6-5-ish) before Leach took over in 2000 following a year as O-coordinator at Oklahoma. So there was a base for some level of success. Still, look at the numbers: He didn't win fewer than eight games after his second year and finished with a winning percentage of .661 at Texas freakin' Tech! That's basically the same career winning percentage as Mack Brown and Frank Beamer. At Texas Tech.

If Texas Tech were a Pac-12 school, it'd be ... ummm ... Washington State? It's a second-tier program in its own state that was doomed to be located in an undesirable outpost with no real draw other than whatever the on-field product provides. The recruiting undoubtedly and inevitably sucks; any success is achieved by coaching.

Paul Wulff took over a mediocre program at Wazzu and made it awful, then slightly better to the point of being occasionally competitive. His best record (4-7 this year) was the same as Bill Doba's worst record before Doba got fired with a 30-29 overall record in five years. What's crazy is that Washington State won 10 games in '97, 10 games in 2001, 10 games in 2002 and 10 games in 2003, which was the first year after Mike Price bailed for Alabama disgrace and an eventual job at UTEP (derp). There were two Rose Bowl appearances in that six-year stretch; there have been zero bowl appearances since. The Paul Wulff era basically highlighted a lot of the difficulties of winning at Wazzu but shouldn't be taken as proof that nothing good can possibly happen there because it's a total abyss. It's just mostly an abyss.

The way you win at Washington State/Texas Tech/insert undesirable program here is by doing something (anything, really) better than everybody else. Leach can design a passing game like a mofo. The guy is to the Air Raid what Rich Rodriguez is to the spread option: He didn't exactly invent it but coaches it better than (almost) anybody.

Here's where Leach's teams finished nationally in passing offense (starting in 2009 and going backwards): second, first, first, third, first, first, first, first, fifth. The total offense rankings during that time were fourth, fourth, second, sixth, sixth, sixth, first, fourth and 33rd (UNACCEPTABLE). There's a reason Jake Heaps put Washington State at/near the top of his list immediately upon leaving BYU this week. I don't think it requires much explanation. Quarterbacks will go to play for Mike Leach if he's coaching Ethiopia State.

There's a reason he was available, obviously: the Texas Tech thing. I call it a "thing" because I don't know what else to call it since the specifics of what actually happened vary depending on who's talking/writing/opining about it.

Here's what's actually known about the Adam James stuff from the depositions: (a) Leach claimed Adam James was taken into the equipment room and specifically told not to go into the electrical closet (why that would be specified isn't clear) and (b) Adam James agreed with that assessment, couldn't exactly remember how or why he went in there and then claimed he was "locked in" but also said he let himself out a couple times and there was no lock on the door. Seriously, Adam James makes no sense for a large majority of his testimony. It's kind of amusing.

Regardless, that probably wasn't why Leach was fired. This email was uncovered from Texas Tech regent Windy Sitton to Board of Regents chairman Jerry Turner:

"Jerry, I know his firing has been in the works since the Chancellor and the AD were outmaneuvered by Leach. That is our problem."

Derp. The "outmaneuvered" thing goes back to the contract extension Leach had agreed to the previous year only to have AD Gerald Myers allegedly demand a bunch of small-print stuff Leach didn't agree with. Leach then went over Myers' head to school chancellor Kent Hance and got the terms he wanted. Long story short, some people weren't really happy about that.

So ... Texas Tech just finished its first losing season since 1992 (!) and Leach is at Washington State now. He will have some success, probably quickly since he's got some pretty good passing-game talent in place (Connor Halliday could end up being awesome) from an offense that just finished ninth in the country in passing yardage under someone who definitely wasn't Mike Leach. He will win and a bunch of programs will look back in three years and wonder why they didn't hire the guy with an 84-43 career record who just turned 50 and has no history of NCAA violations or anything else other than some weirdness.

Gratuitous video:



The guy's weird and doesn't come across as super smart (seriously, listen to one of his CBS Sports games). He's also a former lawyer who does everything differently because he's convinced that his differently is better; Chip Kelly does the same thing. Hard to argue with results.

An amazing and amazingly brief resume

When Houston Nutt "resigned" and people started looking around for dudes with geographic ties and/or relatively impressive resumes, the list basically went like this:

1. Kirby Smart
2. Gus Malzahn
3. Larry Fedora
4. Mike Leach
5. ???

At no point did I see the spectacularly named Hugh Freeze come up as a candidate until the news leaked that he had both met with the Ole Miss search committee and apparently been offered the job. In terms of name hires, Hugh Freeze is not Mike Leach.

This is the extent of the guy's college coaching resume:

2006-07: Ole Miss tight ends coach and recruiting coordinator
2008-09: Lambuth (NAIA) head coach
2010: Arkansas State offensive coordinator
2011: Arkansas State head coach

That's it. The way you get an SEC head coaching job at the age of 42 and with an inch-long resume is by having a career record of 30-7 (!). He went 8-4 and 12-1 in his two years at Lambuth, took the O-coordinator job at Arkansas State, turned a crappy offense into a pretty good one and then went 10-2 in his one year as head coach.

I should also back up a little and point out that he was previously a high school coach at Tennessee powerhouse Briarcrest and won two state titles in nine years. He got the recruiting gig at Ole Miss the same month Michael Oher (who played under Freeze at Briarcrest) signed with Ole Miss, which was obviously a little shady and prompted an NCAA investigation that ended with a "this is really sketchy but not necessarily a violation" ruling. Anyway, when Ed Orgeron hires you to recruit, you can recruit. He obviously knows what he's doing in a-gun-rack-on-every-truck country.

Seeing as how Arkansas State is Arkansas State and the NAIA exists only in theory, the information we have about the guy as a coach is pretty limited. One certainty: He likes to spread it out and throw. He's not Hal Mumme or Mike Leach but definitely wants to put the ball in the air. His Lambuth teams averaged a little over 40 points and about 465 yards a game; his Arkansas State teams averaged about 32 and 428. This seems like an appropriate spot to mention that Ole Miss was 114th in total offense and 116th in scoring offense this year. That is inexplicably awful for a BCS-conference team and will unquestionably get significantly better.

Freeze also gave a pretty emotional/passionate presser speech ...


... that seemed genuine and probably sold some people on a guy they'd never heard before Monday. He's originally from Mississippi and called Ole Miss "home to me," which is what everybody says but is more literally true in his case. I feel comfortable saying that the Deep South isn't for everybody (like me, for example). Cultural comfort is relevant. Freeze gets it.

So that's what we know. What we don't know is everything else, which is a lot.

I can't find any data on Freeze's NAIA defenses, and it's probably not worth looking for anyway. Since the Arkansas State defensive numbers are are all I've got, I'll list them here: 20th in total defense, 15th in rushing defense, 17th in pass efficiency defense and 15th in scoring defense. The 2010 numbers (under the same defensive coordinator) were almost exactly as bad as those are good: 110th, 101st, 105th, 91st. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but since 2010 was the first year under D-coordinator Dave Wommack, I'll generously give him credit for the turnaround.

This is relevant because Wommack is reportedly coming with Freeze as D-coordinator and actually has a resume filled with SEC stuff and decent D-I coordinator jobs (Georgia Tech, Southern Miss, UNLV, etc.). The defense shouldn't be a major problem, which is more than can be said for the Ole Miss defense the last two years under Tyrone Nix. The weird thing is that Nix was really highly regarded about five years ago, had two straight excellent defenses after coming to Ole Miss and then watched the entire unit go off a cliff in 2010 and '11. Whether Wommack can turn that group into something worthwhile is even less clear than what Freeze can do with the offense. It might be fine and it might be disastrous for a couple years pending some personnel upgrades. Dominance isn't likely.

There's also another massive variable: going from high school to a recruiting job to the NAIA to the Sun Belt to arguably the worst job in the SEC. That is a huge jump. I see the resume and think "OMG 30-7 that's Urban Meyer" and then think "ehhh Ole Miss." I don't even know what word to use to describe the difference between running high school/Sun Belt teams and trying to build an in-the-tank program that's in the same division as LSU, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas A&M; I'm thinking "ginormulantic" (or something). Everything he's done is both impressive and potentially meaningless.

I'm not even sure the poker analogy works here. Freeze is like going in with pocket jokers in some weird game with wild cards and whatnot. He might be Joe Tiller or Gerry Faust or anything in between. If he's closer to the Joe Tiller end of the spectrum, he'll have earned it in that division.

BTW, there is one other thing he's got going for him:

“Once we completed our interviews, our No. 1 choice was crystal clear,” said Mike Glenn, who joined Archie Manning as co-chair of Ole Miss’ search committee. “Our No. 1 choice was Hugh Freeze.”

This is another thing that gets said all the time regardless of veracity but is actually true in this case. Freeze was offered the job while everybody else was trying to figure out if Kirby Smart or Mike Leach or whoever was gonna interview. Being an unknown Plan A is a lot better than an unknown Plan C when it comes to support from both the fans and the administration; given the state of the program, that's not insignificant. He'll get a chance to turn things around, which isn't always the case in the SEC. Now he just has to do it.

Hey, the Big East has teams

This was obviously expected but is still noteworthy:

Boise State, San Diego State, Houston, SMU and UCF will join the Big East Conference in 2013, sources told CBSSports.com. The announcement is expected to be made on Wednesday.

With the addition of those five schools - minus the departures of West Virginia, Pittsburgh and Syracuse - the Big East will have 10 football members.

With those five schools on board, Navy is expected to join as a football-only member -- possibly as soon as next week -- to boost the football membership to 11 schools.

The Big East hopes to add Air Force as its 12th school, but the Falcons still remain undecided. If the Big East can not get Air Force, Temple would be a likely candidate to become the Big East's 12th member.

Upshot: The Big East now makes absolutely zero sense geographically but (most importantly) is alive as a football-playing conference.

UCF was a no-brainer addition from the beginning; the others all had legitimate concerns about hooking up with a totally unstable conference featuring no schools closer than 1,000 miles away. Those concerns apparently weren't enough to turn down both the financial boost (probably not huge but still significant) and the shot at a BCS autobid.

What's funny is that there's no chance the Big East leftovers could have salvaged an autobid based on the current BCS formula, so getting Boise State was an absolute necessity to maintain AQ status. I wasn't sure Boise would join since it wouldn't have been ridiculous to look at the Mountain West and then look at the stripped-to-the-bones Big East and say, "eh, I'll stick with the Mountain West." That obviously didn't happen, and I'm sure the autobid was the reason. See the Orange Bowl and the Las Vegas Bowl.

I've been calling the Big East the WAC East for a while now; that's a little unfair. It's actually the Mountference UWestA East. Your full dossier of Big East football programs once the realignment ridiculousness finally gets resolved: UConn, Rutgers, Cincinnati, Louisville, South Florida, Boise State, San Diego State, Houston, SMU, UCF and presumably Navy and Air Force. That's, like, not a good conference after Boise State. It's a slightly improved Conference USA/WAC/Mountain West/pick a non-AQ conference. But since this is 2011 and the BCS is what it is, that conference will still get an autobid and TV deal for like $300 million.

The winners: all of them, especially Boise State and its de facto contract to appear in the next 10-ish Orange Bowls. The losers: everybody who wanted the Big East to be something other than a sampler platter of pretty good mid-major schools, although that was probably a secondary concern given that the options for the Big East were (a) getting Boise State and some fillers and (b) dissolving entirely.