Army-Navy really does mean something

Army probably deserved to beat Navy yesterday. Trent Steelman definitely deserved to beat Navy at some point in his career since ... I mean ... obviously. Everybody deserves that. It's Army-Navy.

For once, Gary Danielson said it best:

"Four years of work, a year of prep school, so many injuries, so many hits running this offense. ... I'm not even gonna pretend I know what he's going through."

In a-picture-says-1,000-words form (during the alma mater):

And in a picture-says-1,000-more-words form (while leaving the field):

That's not emotion; that's complete and utter despair. And then he talked to the media anyway because:

“I’m the captain. I’m ready when you need me.”

Army-Navy, man. Army-freakin'-Navy.

Tommy Tuberville's doing what now?

Errr ... ummm ... what?

CINCINNATI (AP) -- Texas Tech's Tommy Tuberville was hired Saturday as Cincinnati's next football coach, leaving the Big 12 for a school trying to move up to a better conference.

The agreement came one day after Butch Jones left to become Tennessee's next football coach, ending a week of uncertainty for the Bearcats.

Tuberville went 20-17 in three seasons at Texas Tech after coaching at Mississippi and Auburn. The Red Raiders (7-5) will play Minnesota in the Meineke Car Care Bowl after missing out on a bowl last season. 

Well that was unexpected. A hypothetical list of logical candidates for the Cincinnati job could've been extended to about 60 without Tuberville being on it, although in hindsight, there was a pretty obvious reason he was on the actual list (even if he is 58):

Athletic director Whit Babcock had Tuberville -- whom he worked with for three years at Auburn -- at the top of his list of candidates. Working on two hours of sleep, Babcock called Tuberville on Saturday morning to see if he was interested.

I'm somewhat skeptical that it took Babcock more than 24 hours to gauge the interest of the guy "at the top of his list," but whatever. Tommy Tuberville, at age 58, is going from a slightly-above-average program in the Big 12 to an above-average program in the Big East, which is to say he's making a maybe-slightly-upward move in terms of success, an upward move in terms of locale and a downward move in terms of pretty much everything else (I'm pretty sure Cincy's stadium is smaller than that ginormous high school one in Texas), hence Cincinnati fans collectively going all "WWWHHEEEE WE GOT A REAL COACH!!!"

I don't need to write 1,000 words here about Tommy Tuberville because he's Tommy Tuberville, the guy who won five SEC West titles in 10 years at Auburn and then became Guy Who Follows Mike Leach And Eventually Gets Fired For Failure To Meet Unrealistic Goals. Except he didn't get fired -- or he hadn't gotten fired yet.

Which leads me to Y U DO THAT. This was written in the Orlando Sentinel before the season and is just one example but was duplicated on every other "coaches on the hot seat" list:

Texas Tech struggled in 2011, losing seven of its last eight games to finish 5-7 as the defense finished close to last in the nation while giving up 39 points per game. Art Kaufman was hired in the offseason, becoming the third defensive coordinator in as many years in Lubbock. With 18 returning starters and a non-conference schedule that features games against Texas State, Northwestern State and Montana, anything less than a winning record and a bowl appearance could spell trouble for Tuberville.

That didn't happen, obviously. But in a conference in which nine of the 10 teams are legitimately competitive, "anything less than a winning record and a bowl appearance" could happen at pretty much any time; Texas Tech is still Texas Tech and therefore not Oklahoma. I mean, 6-6 next year at Texas Tech probably gets you fired; the equivalent at Cincinnati (which is about 8-4 just due to the Big East's awfulness) probably gets you a contract extension and general satisfaction.

Actually, 6-6 next year at Texas Tech almost definitely gets you fired since this happened (to be clear, I'm referring to the contents of the video and not the camera operator's seizure):


Oh yeah. That. /pulls at collar uncomfortably

A hilarious tweet from ESPN's Brett McMurphy:

Two Texas Tech alums just texted me and wrote: "Thank you Cincinnati!!!!"  

So Tuberville was about as popular with everybody as Mike Leach was with the administration, whatever that means. Going 8-5 (probably) pretty consistently at Texas Tech seems ... like ... OK. Spike Dykes made a career out of doing that; for that matter, Leach was basically doing the same until Texas Tech really started going ham in about 2005.

I think it's entirely possible that the above-referenced texts weren't referring entirely to Tuberville but also to Kliff Kingsbury, the former Texas Tech throw-it-87-times-a-game guy who's now 33, Texas A&M's O-coordinator and soooo dreamy after turning Johnny Manziel into JOHNNY FOOTBALL HEISMANZEL NICKNAMES WOOOOO.

A tweet from Football Scoop:

Checked w 2 sources in Lubbock, both said same 4 names: Kingsbury, Monken, Briles & Art Kaufman. Just passing along what I'm told.

FYI, Art Kaufman was brought in as D-coordinator before this year and produced one of the better defenses in the conference (first in passing yards allowed, fifth in rushing yards allowed and second in total yards allowed) after years of unspeakable awfulness.

According to various other people, the guy at the top of the list is either Jim Leavitt or Chad Morris or Brent Venables (AD Kirby Hocutt's BFF). But none of those guys will be acceptable since none of them is Kliff Kingsbury.

This is every related tweet from Saturday:

Texas Tech fans should be overjoyed Tuberville is gone. Kingsbury will be 10 x better. 

Reasonable expectations FTW.

As for Cincinnati, the expectations are more reasonable and will probably be met since Tuberville is a good (not great but good) coach. He went 25-20 at Ole Miss, 85-40 (!) at Auburn and 20-17 at Texas Tech, and relative to the rest of the Big East, Cincy at this point is closer to Auburn than it is to Ole Miss/Texas Tech/mediocrity-is-inevitable tier. And it's probably pretty sweet to be like "BOOM GOT YOUR COACH" after a decade of identifying/acquiring unknown-but-excellent coaches who then got "BOOM GOT YOUR COACH'D" away. Tuberville might be gone in three years, but if he is, it probably won't be for a preferable job since he'll be 62 by the time the 2016 season rolls around. I don't think he'll be gone in three years.

I mean, it still doesn't make a lot of sense, but nothing makes sense, so whatever.

Johnny Football it is

As expected:

Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel became the first freshman to win the Heisman Trophy, taking college football's top individual prize Saturday night after a record-breaking debut.

Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o finished a distant second and Kansas State quarterback Collin Klein was third in the voting. Manziel drew 474 first-place votes and 2,029 points from the panel of media members and former winners. Te'o had 321 first-place votes and 1,706 points and Klein received 60 firsts and 894 points.

So it was close-ish but not really close; Manziel won easily in every region except the Midwest, which Te'o won by a total of three points.

Did he deserve it? Ehhh ... I dunno. In A&M's three games against not-terrible teams, Manziel was meh against Florida, awful against LSU and really freakin' good against Alabama. Since the latter game was in November and was, ya know, against Alabama, that was the one that mattered. Personally, I'd have had Te'o and Klein (not necessarily in that order) first and second on my ballot since Manziel's numbers (a) were necessarily more ridiculous just based on usage/volume and (b) were largely accumulated against terrible defenses, but anything that serves to eliminate some of the stupid voting biases is a net positive.

The caveat: Manziel isn't really a freshman, obviously. There's a not-insignificant difference between being a redshirt freshman and a freshman freshman. He isn't even the youngest player ever to win the thing: Mark Ingram was a couple months younger when he won in '09, and Rashaan Salaam, Tim Tebow, Archie Griffin and Barry Sanders were all pretty close. I don't know what that means; probably something. It also means something that Te'o was only marginally closer to winning than Ndamukong Suh was a couple years ago when he was just destroying worlds; that something is that a defense-only player is never, ever gonna win the thing if there is even a vaguely viable alternative, and Manziel was at least vaguely viable given the ginormous numbers and the Alabama win and the sweet-ass nickname and whatnot.

So Johnny Football it is, which is crazy (regardless of all the stuff written above) since the guy hadn't even won the starting job until August and had never played a down until exactly three months before posing for the picture at the top of this post.

'We're going to the Wing T'

Butch Jones has a plan:


BUT THE SPREAD WING T CAN'T WIN IN THE SEC, MAN.

Catching up grew up on a pig farm

Gus Malzahn knows what's up: Ellis Johnson might have been the worst coach in the history of ever (he went 0-12 in his one year at Southern Miss before getting fired last week) but also might have been one of the better defensive coordinators in the country before that, which makes this ...

New Auburn coach Gus Malzahn didn't wait long to address a defense that has been reeling on the Plains for the last two years. Malzahn has hired veteran Ellis Johnson to be his defensive coordinator.

... a not-insignificant hire. FWIW, he'll also be making not-insignificant money: Auburn's gonna be paying him $800K a year, apparently because Florida State was also trying to hire him to replace Mark Stoops. But that's the going rate these days, even if pretty much the entirety of the Big Ten refuses to pay it despite having piles of cash to roll around in.

As for Johnson, he consistently had South Carolina's defenses at or near the top of the SEC (average national ranking of 19th in yardage and 27th in scoring) from 2008-11 after doing similarly well at Mississippi State for the four years before that and similarly well at Alabama for the four years before that. So he's vaguely familiar with the SEC and assembling good/very good defenses. FYI, his more recent at ones at Mississippi State and South Carolina used a base 4-2-5 with a spur, and Johnson said at his hiring presser that he intends to implement the same at Auburn.

Assuming Johnson is anything close to what he was a couple years ago, he'll represent some degree of improvement: Auburn was 80th in yards allowed and 65th in points allowed this year under Brian VanGorder and 86th and 81st in those two categories the year before under Ted Roof. He's a legit D-coordinator, and with Malzahn being a legit offensive guy, it's not unreasonable to think Auburn will be respectable (as in bowl-eligible) next year and very good again within a couple years.

Seems reasonable: Florida International fired Mario Cristobal this week after a 3-9 season, which ... ummm ... OK. Cristobal is still only 42 and built that program from literally nothing; FIU went from 1-11 five years ago to 7-6 (and the Sun Belt title) in 2010 to 8-5 (and a second straight bowl game) in 2011. And after that 8-5 season, which was exactly one year ago, Cristobal turned down the head coaching jobs at Rutgers and Pitt to sign a one-year extension at FIU. Good choice.

A quote from spectacularly titled executive director of sports and entertainment Pete Garcia:

"We will now turn our attention to attract the very best candidate to fill the position of head coach. We will begin a national search immediately.” 

Good luck with that. A more reasonable quote from Joe Tiller, who for some reason was asked to comment by the New York Times:

“I’m amazed Florida International and midmajors, they act like they’re big timers — and they’re not. They might have a nice little program going someplace, but they’re not amongst the heavyweights.”  

He added, "diabeetus." Anyway, the next time some irritable columnist-type guy writes the inevitable "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" piece about Coach X leaving School Y for more money/a better job/whatever, I will spam his email with links to Mario Cristobal-related stuff.

The best fake Bret Bielema picture ever: This is linked to from Bret Bielema's totally real Twitter feed, which isn't quite as hilarious as Will Muschamp's totally real Twitter feed but gets a lot of hilarity points for this:

People have been asking me if I really grew up on a pig farm. I did and well, here's a little proof.

Yesssss.

Cue sigh of relief from all seven Pitt fans: Pitt apparently won't be looking for its eleventeenth coach in the last four years:

Cross Pitt coach and former Wisconsin offensive coordinator Paul Chryst off the list of candidates for the Badgers job.

Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez says Chryst is "going to stay at Pitt." Alvarez says he helped Chryst get the job at Pitt last year, and doesn't think it would be appropriate to hire him away after such a short time.

Since when did "appropriate" mean anything? Come on, Wisconsin. Get with the times.

So they're similarly built: This is a real picture of ESPN's Dari Nowkhah interviewing A&M tackle Luke Joeckel at Thursday night's Something Something Awards Something:

"Now let's bring Yao Ming over ..."

I don't get it: The Big Ten added Rutgers and Maryland at least in part as Penn State insurance, according to Barry Alvarez:

The Big Ten's recent additions of Maryland and Rutgers were motivated in part by a concern of losing Penn State to another league, according to Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez.

Speaking Friday to the Wisconsin athletic board, Alvarez said Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany wanted to add teams in the Northeast to ensure Penn State would remain in the conference.

"Jim felt that someday, if we didn't have anyone else in that corridor, someday it wouldn't make sense maybe for Penn State to be in our league," Alvarez told the board, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "That they would go into a league somewhere on the East Coast. By doing that, it keeps us in the Northeast corridor."

Considering that the SEC doesn't have sufficient available spots to absorb any meaningful amount of the ACC at this point and thus would have the same problem geographically from Penn State's standpoint, that means Delany was (allegedly) concerned that Penn State would eventually leave for either the ACC or the Big East, in the process taking an incomprehensible pay cut in terms of  TV revenue (especially once the Big Ten signs a quadrillion-dollar deal in 2015) and an even more incomprehensible pay cut in terms of general-fund revenue; Penn State gets a few billion dollars a year in research money from the Big Ten's academic arm, the CIC. Like ... I mean ... no. A line from Brian at MGoBlog goes here:

People in charge of things are just in charge of them. There is not necessarily a reason. 

That is all.

The actual most West Virginia thing ever

I was obviously wrong when I referred to this thing was the most West Virginia thing ever; there is a previously-assumed-to-be-unattainable level of West Virginia that has been attained.

From an actual Associated Press story:

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- West Virginia University has ordered its musket-toting mascot to stop using his university-issued weapon on hunting trips after an online video showed him killing a black bear.

In the video, Jonathan Kimble is shown firing the muzzle-loaded long gun at the bear in a tree. "Let's go Mountaineers!" Kimble yells afterward. He also posted a photo of himself with the bear on Twitter.

"While Jonathan Kimble's actions broke no laws or regulations, the university has discussed this with him, and he agrees that it would be appropriate to forgo using the musket in this way in the future," said WVU spokesman John Bolt.

Bolt added*, "He also agrees that it would be appropriate for him to wear his coonskin cap during all recreational activities and provide 50 percent of all school-musket-generated bear jerky to the university, as mandated by state law."

*Not really. But probably.

Rejected by dog, Tennessee hires man

By Thursday night, I was pretty sure Tennessee's coaching search was gonna end with Dave Hart getting tarred and feathered and Tyler Bray getting promoted to player/coach by democratic vote for the pure, 100 percent Colombian entertainment value. There was a poll on SB Nation site Rocky Top Talk that asked the question "Who should be Tennessee's next coach?" and had tallied the following results:

9 % -- Butch Davis (259 votes)
12% -- Larry Fedora (329 votes)
29% -- Phillip Fulmer (775 votes)
5% -- Butch Jones (152 votes)
9% -- Jim Mora (246 votes)
21% -- Bobby Petrino (573 votes)
12% -- Kirby Smart (323 votes) 12%

WUT. The guy who was leading that poll is currently 62, got fired four years ago after two sub-.500 seasons in his last four and has gotten legitimate interest from literally zero other schools since then. Again: That's the guy who was leading a fan poll asking "Who should be Tennessee's next coach?" I'm pretty sure that said more about the unmitigated disaster that was Hart's search process (and the accompanying despair at Rocky Top Talk) than it said about any of the candidates.

Speaking of which, the guy who finished last? Butch Jones. So of course:

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Tennessee selected Cincinnati's Butch Jones as its fourth football coach in six seasons Friday, ending a tumultuous couple of days for both parties.

The 44-year-old Jones has a 50-27 record in six seasons as a head coach. He went 27-13 in three seasons at Central Michigan and was 23-14 at Cincinnati the last three years.

/furiously types "Clay Travis twitter" into the googles for quality schadenfreude
/discovers surprisingly little schadenfreude
/shrugs

So ... Butch Jones. He's relatively young, he's had two respectable head coaching jobs, he's won or shared four conference titles in six years, he has a career winning percentage of .659 and he turned down both the Purdue and Colorado jobs in the past week. He also had all of 5 percent of the vote in that poll, mostly because his two previous respectable jobs were both in jokes of conferences and his most recent job was at Cincinnati, which lost by three touchdowns to a terrible version of Tennessee less than 18 months ago.

Beyond that, there's one groin-grabbingly obvious question: Will he be any good at a program that hasn't already been established as the best in the conference by Brian Kelly? Because that's what he started with at Central Michigan and that's what he started with at Cincinnati, and that provides some context that makes the aforementioned 50-27 record ... I dunno ... something.

Jones was actually a wide receivers coach under RichRod at West Virginia until he got the job at Central Michigan, which had just gone 9-4 and won the MAC under Kelly. Jones maintained that same level of success for a couple years (8-6, 8-5) before going 11-2 overall and 8-0 in the MAC in his third year, which in turn got him the job at Cincinnati when Kelly bailed for Notre Dame at the end of an undefeated season; it's worth noting that Cincy won 10 games in all three of Kelly's seasons there. Jones proceeded to go 4-8 in his first year (yikes) before getting back to 10-3 last year and 9-3 this year, which should've yielded him the Notre Dame job based on Kelly-related historical precedence but didn't do that since Kelly and Notre Dame seem to be mutually satisfied with his employment status.

Other things worth knowing: Jones coached almost every position on offense as an assistant but none on defense, had a few small-school O-coordinator jobs before going to West Virginia and hasn't in any of his six years coached a team that's finished worse than 44th nationally in both major offensive categories (total yardage and points), with almost all of those teams running a relatively balanced/slightly-run-biased spread that was unquestionably more run-heavy than the one Kelly had implemented. So Jones -- at least based on recent history/data -- is a pretty good offensive coach; he's probably not a great one given his teams' general inability to maintain unadulterated awesomeness after the Kelly years.

And his defenses will be pretty much entirely dependent on the ability of his D-coordinator, especially considering that he referred to himself at Friday's hiring presser as a CEO and "not a micro manager." FWIW, the defenses at both Central Michigan and Cincinnati were pretty bad in Jones' first year but then well above average in each of the latter two, with the D-coordinator at both places being former Georgia co-DC Jon Jancek. In that regard, Jones apparently did pretty well at finding somebody adequate to do the thing he didn't/doesn't know how to do; it's hard to know whether that means anything in terms of his staff-building ability, though, since a sample size of one necessarily includes a pretty large margin of error.

It should also be noted that Jones has never previously coached anywhere outside the Upper Midwest and wherever West Virginia is, which might not mean a whole lot except ...

Hart said at the start of the search that head coaching experience was "critically important" and that he wanted a coach who "knows the difficulty of climbing the ladder in the SEC."

... oh. "Did I say that? I just keeeeeding." I'm pretty sure the only thing critically important as of Friday was whether Jones would answer "yes" to the question "will you coach here?"

That said, what's really critical isn't any of the stuff above this paragraph but whether or not he can win a lot more than Derek Dooley did, because consistently finishing under .500 at Tennessee ... I mean ... no. Just no.

The bad news: Tennessee is in pretty crappy shape right now. Some informative tidbits: Dooley went 0-15 against top-25 teams (of which there are usually many in the SEC), 5-19 in the SEC and 2-14 over his last 16 SEC games, which good grief. To be more explicit, Tennessee hasn't beaten an SEC team other than Vanderbilt or Kentucky since destroying a terrible Ole Miss team in 2010, which really just exemplifies the program's inability to be even vaguely competitive against anybody other than the dregs of the SEC (and Cincinnati) over the last few years. And things weren't unbelievably awesome before that: Tennessee actually hasn't lost fewer than four games since 2004 and hasn't played in a BCS game since 1999.

The good news: Taking the previous paragraph into the account, the bar is set pretty low right now (at least as low as it feasibly can be in the SEC). Tennessee is still a very good/borderline-elite job, especially considering that the Florida/Georgia top tier in the SEC East isn't raping and pillaging the rest of the SEC to anywhere near the same extent as the Alabama/LSU one in the West. There is some talent, there is some money to be thrown around for a staff and there is still the general Tennessee-ness (or some of it, anyway) that existed for the 30 years before the last three.

I wrote this when Dooley got fired:

Tennessee used to be, like, really good. And could be again. Tennessee is still Tennessee in some regards, and there are coaches who can win there (and win big). This would be an optimal time to find one since the rebuilding job after five years of mediocrity is a lot easier than the hypothetical one that'd be needed after 10 years of mediocrity.

That's the deal. Whether Jones is a guy/the guy who can win big remains to be seen; nobody really knows at this point if he can actually build a program (rather than just maintaining an already-good one), and Tennessee needs to be built/rebuilt to some extent. Will he be better than Dooley? Probably. Anything resembling respectability on defense should result in "better than Dooley." Will he be legitimately good? I have no idea; there are so many unknowns at this point that guessing either way is just guessing. Tennessee's obviously expecting the answer to that question to be "yes," but whether that's a real expectation or just a hope is debatable.

Is it possible that he's Nick Saban/Les Miles/random guy with a good-but-not-great record at a mid-tier school who went to the SEC and became a god? I mean, yeah, I guess, but the resume comparisons are crappy ones since (a) Saban was already widely regarded as an elite defensive coach (he had been D-coordinator for the Browns under Bill Belichick, a position for which Jones has no equivalent) and (b) Miles had been an NFL assistant before taking Oklahoma State from terrible to good-ish (a rebuilding job for which Jones also has no equivalent). So yeah: I dunno.

I think this Dave Hart quote kinda summarizes things:

"Life doesn't throw us all fastballs. It throws us curves, and then you've got some screwballs."

Butch Jones, everybody!

As for Cincinnati, there's no obvious Central Michigan coach to poach this time, which dang. All things considered, though, it's a pretty decent job considering that the previous three coaches (Mark Dantonio being the first) all did pretty well for exactly three years and then all got legit jobs. The Big East's terrible-ness might be a detraction but might also be a selling point since going to the Orange Bowl is totally doable; Cincy is easily one of the three best programs in the conference right now, even if it's a crappy conference.

The seemingly obvious candidate: Michigan State defensive coordinator Pat Narduzzi, who went with Dantonio from Cincy to MSU and is pretty widely regarded as one of the better D-coordinators in the country. CoachingSearch.com also suggests Ohio State defensive backs coach (and former uber-successful Cincinnati high school coach) Kerry Coombs and Bengals D-coordinator Mike Zimmer, but I'm pretty skeptical that Zimmer would seriously consider the Cincinnati job since he hasn't coached in college in close to 20 years, doesn't have any specific ties to the school or city other than his immediate employment and might be able to get an NFL head coaching job in the next few years based on his current trajectory.

One other guy who's been mentioned: Toledo coach Matt Campbell, who got his current job all of one year ago and is still only 33 (!!!) but is also pretty highly regarded since his offenses have been largely responsible for Toledo's 26-12 record over the last three years (as well as Tim Beckman's nonsensical ascension to Illinois).

So there are some viable candidates, and most of them would probably be interested in a decent job that regularly yields a lot of wins, a conference title or two and a better job within three years. There are worse places to coach, basically.