Tom Osborne famously almost left for Colorado in 1979.
The legendary coach's Nebraska Cornhuskers had won at least nine games and had finished in the college football AP top 12 in each of his first six seasons since succeeding Bob Devaney. But they were just 1-6 against rival Oklahoma, and when they had finally gotten over the Sooner hump in 1978, winning a 17-14 thriller, they proceeded to blow their national title shot by losing to Missouri the very next week. They had to face OU again in a unique Orange Bowl six weeks later and lost.
Recognizing impatience in the fan base -- and realizing how much Colorado life would fulfill his love of fishing -- Osborne seriously considered CU athletic director Eddie Crowder's offer to take over the Buffaloes. He had second thoughts about leaving his Lincoln project unfinished, however, and stayed.
The project remained unfinished for quite a while. On paper, Nebraska was the best football program in the country in the early 1980s but came up one win short multiple times. Then it fell behind OU again. As athletic director, Devaney's confidence in Osborne never wavered. But a scroll through the letter-to-the-editor archives for the Lincoln Journal Star suggests fan confidence did.
After more than 20 years, Osborne finally broke through. The Huskers won or shared three national titles from 1994 to '97, and Osborne retired, fully recognized as the legend he had been for quite a while.
Patience is often rewarded. Bobby Bowden finally won a national title in his 18th season at Florida State. Mack Brown finally won a national title in his 22nd year as a head coach and his eighth at Texas (after an Osbornian run of futility against OU). Coaches who "can't win the big one" often suddenly do.
You don't always get the happy ending, though. Michigan's Bo Schembechler ... Ohio State's John Cooper ... Auburn's Pat Dye ... Georgia's Mark Richt ... plenty of coaches have come close to the promised land but never arrived. Your fortunes are determined by a combination of luck, timing and great quarterback play. Not everyone gets the best of those three things all at the same time.
Dangerous times for Georgia, Michigan and Penn State
Among the Best Coaches Not to Win a National Title list, Kirby Smart, Jim Harbaugh and James Franklin all rank quite high. They have accomplished remarkable things in their respective head-coaching careers and boast the requisite number of what-ifs.
After going 8-5 in his first season, Smart's Dawgs went 36-7 over the next three years, rising to first in defensive SP+ last season and continuing residence there this year. They lost the 2017 national title game to Alabama in overtime thanks to Tua Tagovailoa's heroics, then missed out on playoff return trips with SEC title game losses in 2018 and 2019. (The 2018 loss, again to Bama, was particularly agonizing.)
Harbaugh resurrected Stanford in the late 2000s, and after a run with the 49ers, he inherited a Michigan program that had gone 12-13 in its previous two years; his Wolverines have never finished worse than 13th in SP+ and have won double-digit games three times in five years. They came within millimeters of a Big Ten title game and potential CFP appearance in 2016.
Franklin is, per SP+, responsible for two of the three best Vanderbilt teams of the past 60 years and has won 11 games three times in the past four years. He has a Big Ten title to his name, plus two No. 6 SP+ rankings. His 2016 Nittany Lions fell short of the playoff via a last-second loss to Pitt, and his 2017 team went 11-2 with losses by a combined four points.
With a loss to Florida, Georgia is all but eliminated from College Football Playoff contention this year. Michigan and Penn State, however, are in a completely different level of struggle, having won a combined one of six games thus far.
While the latter two teams clearly have more issues than the Bulldogs, all three have been beset by something the best teams have no idea about: quarterback issues.
Game managers don't cut it in 2020
Smart's QB issues have come despite recruiting success. He held onto Richt commit and blue-chipper Jacob Eason in 2016, landed four-star pocket passer Jake Fromm in 2017, then stole top dual-threat signal-caller Justin Fields from his Penn State commit in 2018.
Fromm took over when Eason got hurt and led the Dawgs to the national title game (with help from a dominant run game) in 2017. Eason transferred, and Smart elected to keep Fromm atop the depth chart despite Fields' presence. Then Fields transferred ... and Fromm left school earlier than expected (or advised) ... and Smart suddenly had only redshirt freshman D'Wan Mathis and former walk-on Stetson Bennett. He brought in Wake Forest's Jamie Newman, who opted out for 2020. He brought in USC's JT Daniels, but Daniels is evidently still recovering from a wicked knee injury. When Mathis struggled out of the gates, the job instead went to Bennett, with Fields leading an elite Ohio State attack.
Georgia's defense still dominates offenses that are anything less than elite, but when both Alabama and Florida hit the turbo button and turned their respective games with the Dawgs into track meets, Bennett couldn't keep up. Florida's Kyle Trask threw for 474 yards and four scores against UGA on Saturday, but Bennett and late-game substitute Mathis could go only a combined 9-for-29 for 112 yards, two scores and three picks. Georgia scored twice in its first seven offensive snaps ... and then twice in its last 51. Florida won by 16.
Injuries in the receiving corps -- for two straight years, really -- haven't helped the cause by any means. But Alabama lost one of the best receivers in the country (Jaylen Waddle) to injury and hasn't lost a beat. Trask lost amazing tight end Kyle Pitts to a nasty collision with safety Lewis Cine midway through the second quarter Saturday but finished the game 17-for-25 for 241 yards. The Tide and Gators have both the offensive scheme and quarterback play that Georgia doesn't. As a result, the Dawgs will be sitting out of the CFP for a third straight year, while Bama (91% chance of reaching the CFP, per the Allstate Playoff Predictor and Florida (18%) are both in great-to-decent shape.
Sophomores will be sophomores
Here's what we know about Michigan's Joe Milton thus far: He has a cannon arm, he's loaded with potential, and he's very much a sophomore.
In three games as Michigan's starting quarterback, Milton has a) thrown for an easy 225 yards and rushed for 50-plus yards in a 49-24 romp over Minnesota, b) struggled to create any downfield plays (9.4 yards per completion) in a hemmed-in, frustrating loss to Michigan State and c) tried to force the issue against Indiana and created lots of explosions (19.1 yards per completion) while throwing two catastrophic picks. The Wolverines lost to Indiana for the first time since 1987.
Milton's overall body of work -- 61% completion rate, 137.6 passer rating, No. 41 ranking in Total QBR (ahead of players such as Boston College's Phil Jurkovec and Memphis' Brady White) -- is decent enough for a sophomore. But like Georgia, Michigan really needs to paper over other cracks with elite quarterback play. And like Georgia, the Wolverines aren't getting it.
Michigan's cracks are much bigger, mind you. A run game that looked absolutely devastating in the season opener has gotten just 3.3 yards per carry from its running backs the past two weeks. And a once-dominant defense is glitching out more and more.
Against Michigan State and Indiana, Michigan allowed 665 passing yards (14.1 per completion) with six touchdowns and, perhaps most disconcerting for a Don Brown defense, no interceptions and no sacks. Brown is seemingly attempting to play the same aggressive, man-heavy defense on which he made his name, but there's a fine line between being Don Brown and being Brian VanGorder -- if your cornerback unit is young and your pass rush isn't getting home, your aggression just gets you torched.
Michigan still has Ohio State, Wisconsin and a suddenly awesome Maryland offense on the slate in its last five games. If the issues continue, Milton will need to play elite ball just for the Wolverines to have a shot at .500. That's probably asking too much.
One team Michigan's defense could still have success against, though: Penn State.
Improvement isn't linear (and sometimes it doesn't happen at all)
We never got to see the Penn State we expected to see this season. Micah Parsons, the best Swiss Army Knife in college football -- a player who legitimately could have been Penn State's best defensive end, linebacker and nickel safety this season -- opted out during August's pandemic uncertainty. Running back Journey Brown, by far the Nittany Lions' most proven offensive player, was sidelined by an unspecified medical condition. On the first drive of the season, PSU's new top back, Noah Cain, injured his foot and was lost for the year.
New offensive coordinator Kirk Ciarrocca was brought in at least in part because of his ability to get the most out of what was supposed to be a loaded RB corps, with which he could build an RPO-heavy passing game. But three weeks in, he has evidently, and not without justification, lost faith in his run game. He's asking more of second-year starting quarterback Sean Clifford instead, and Clifford is seeing ghosts.
Clifford nearly saved Penn State with his legs in the season opener against Indiana. Not including sacks, he rushed 16 times for 122 yards, sparking a comeback with a 35-yard score late in the third quarter. The success messed with his pocket clock, however -- he began quickly going into scramble mode. Ohio State took advantage of this in the second game, holding him to 28 yards on 13 non-sack carries and sacking him five times.
Maryland's defense took this trend to a new level. The Terrapins were blitz-heavy in their first two games but produced dreadful sack stats and gave up tons of big plays. But the mere presence of an intense pass rush triggered Clifford's fight-or-flight instincts. He rushed 10 times for 83 yards, but he also scrambled his way into seven sacks for a loss of 57 yards. Meanwhile, he completed only 27 of 57 passes with two interceptions.
Clifford attempted 64 passes in all, while running backs carried only 19 times. Part of that was because Penn State was behind due to sudden and extreme defensive issues, but part of it was a total lack of faith in the run. Penn State is broken, and while the pieces could come back together at some point, we don't know if or when that will happen.
It's not solely the fault of Bennett, Milton and Clifford that their teams are all but guaranteed to finish 2020 below preseason expectations. Obviously. But it's also not a coincidence that of the top eight teams in the current Playoff Predictor projections, five are quarterbacked by Justin Fields, Trevor Lawrence (who has an incredible backup in D.J. Uiagalelei), Mac Jones, Kyle Trask and Zach Wilson. Those might be the five best QBs in the game. The other three -- Notre Dame, Wisconsin and Oregon -- are piloted by Ian Book and two QBs (Graham Mertz and Tyler Shough) who combined to go 37-for-47 for 475 yards, 6 TDs, one INT and 87 rushing yards in their respective first starts.
Statistically, Book isn't that much better than the problem children above, but he's experienced. And in the biggest regular-season game of his career -- Notre Dame's Saturday win over Clemson -- he closed out the game by going 6-for-9 for 97 yards with two rushes for 21 yards in the final drive of regulation and overtime. When he had to play elite ball, he did, and Notre Dame's alive and well in the CFP race because of it. Georgia, Michigan and Penn State, not so much.
Given lifetime contracts and unlimited opportunities to figure things out, odds are good that between Smart, Harbaugh and Franklin, at least one of them, probably more, would finally get their ducks in a row and run the table. But when you fail to fix your issues, and -- in Harbaugh's and Franklin's cases -- new ones begin to arise, the missed opportunities of previous seasons start to look like high points, not the adversity you overcame on your way to the top. Not everyone gets to be Tom Osborne, after all.
Observations from the the fourth first weekend of the season
The Pac-12 and MAC finally got their seasons underway, and while there remain a few more teams still to get started thanks to COVID-19 cancellations, here are a few thoughts from the latest batch of season kickoffs.
USC still can't defend the run
If you look purely at the box score, Pac-12 South favorite USC looked mostly strong against a likely solid Arizona State. Quarterback Kedon Slovis suffered a midgame slowdown but completed 23 of 29 passes in the second half and completed seven of his last nine for 107 yards and two scores. Veteran receivers Amon-Ra St. Brown and Tyler Vaughns caught 14 balls, and Drake London hauled in 8 for 125 yards. The Trojans defense, now under Todd Orlando's leadership, held Arizona State's Jayden Daniels to 11-for-23 passing for 134 yards, a touchdown and a sack. All pretty good things!
Daniels rushed for 122 non-sack yards, however, and new backs DeaMonte Trayanum and Rachaad White rushed 24 times for 160 yards. ASU seized control of the game with a 24-7 run, and USC had to use its get-out-of-jail-free card, in the form of a late onside kick recovery, to come back and win, 28-27.
I'm almost more concerned about USC now than I would have been had the Trojans' defense simply produced a discombobulated performance across the board. You could blame that on rust or new coaching or the early kickoff time (9 a.m. local), but instead, after a year in which USC's D ranked 28th in passing SP+ but 82nd in rushing SP+, we're looking at a defense that is still good against the pass and still bad against the run. We don't know if any of last year's issues have been rectified. Meanwhile, opponents have had a particularly lengthy offseason to study and prepare for Graham Harrell's offense.
If we've learned anything this season, it's that first impressions aren't final impressions. (Hello, Michigan.) We'll see what USC has to offer against Arizona this week. But it's fair to say that while Oregon's stock rose a bit with an easy win over Stanford, USC's did not.
Washington State is fun and wild
After Wazzu's game against Oregon State in Corvallis on Saturday night, new Cougs head coach Nick Rolovich told the press his team was missing 32 players, including star running back Max Borghi. Many of the absences were presumably COVID-19-related. Plus, Rolovich was starting true freshman Jayden de Laura at quarterback.
A recipe for disaster? Nope! De Laura threw for 227 yards and rushed for 53 more (sans a sack), Travell Harris combined 107 receiving yards with 49 rushing yards and Deon McIntosh rushed for 147 yards as an optimistic, aggressive Wazzu jumped out to a 28-7 lead, watched it wither to 31-28, then put the game away with a late Harris score.
Rolovich's teams at Hawaii didn't always have the pieces to succeed, but they brought a don't-give-a-damn swagger to the field all the same, and early indications are that this will remain the case in Pullman. And de Laura, with his Rapunzel's-hair-in-the-middle-of-her-healing-maneuver-in-Tangled golden locks (sorry, I've got a 9-year old daughter, I've seen that movie 1,439 times), could serve as the perfect avatar for the Rolovich attack for quite a while.
Watch Wazzu, is what I'm saying. I can't guarantee they'll be successful, but you won't regret it either way.
The main conclusion from the MAC's first week: no conclusion
My SP+ rankings had a phenomenal week overall, going 31-16-1 overall against the spread (66%) to move to 54% for the season. What made that even more impressive is that they started the week 1-5 after whiffing on a lot of MAC games.
I feared SP+ wasn't giving Buffalo, Toledo and Western Michigan enough of an edge against sketchy Northern Illinois, Bowling Green and Akron teams, respectively, and it whiffed on all three of those games. It also leaned toward Ohio and Ball State to win tight games over Central Michigan and Miami (Ohio), respectively. Wrong again.
Accordingly, Buffalo, Toledo, WMU and Miami all rose by decent amounts in this week's SP+ rankings, while Ohio and Ball State fell a bit. But the overall projected wins remain the same, and we are still on track for super-tight division races.
MAC East: Buffalo 4.9 projected wins, Miami 4.0, Kent State 3.8, Ohio 3.3
MAC West: WMU 4.4, Toledo 4.2, CMU 4.0
This Wednesday's Buffalo-Miami and WMU-Toledo games have massive stakes. All four teams looked pretty good last week, and the winners will likely be your projected favorites moving forward. That's some solid midweek programming.