Butch Jones is a good coach and has a done a really good job of building Tennessee's program. They have a lot of horses up there.
And honestly, there's not a great deal of difference between Clemson's 4-0 and Tennessee's 2-3. Had Notre Dame consummated that rally with the two-point conversion and won in overtime, it'd have been basically a carbon copy of Tennessee's collapse against Oklahoma a few weeks ago.
But Clemson did close the deal. Tennessee did not. And what we've seen since has shown us the power of negative and positive momentum. Butch Jones is now 14-16 at Tennessee, and you might say his top three wins have been:
1. South Carolina
2. South Carolina
3. Iowa
He's going to have to start producing, as Dan Wolken covers in his weekly Misery Index.
At 2-3, Tennessee's fan base is absolutely a raging bonfire of angst. The losses. The blown leads. The coaching gaffes. The inability to generate a passing game. The slogans and clichés. The empty promises. The prospect of sliding to 2-5 with games coming up against Georgia and Alabama. Sure, theoretically Tennessee could win those games and turn the season around, but there's literally no evidence Jones is capable of such a recovery.
He is 14-16 as Tennessee’s head coach with wins against Austin Peay, Western Kentucky, South Alabama, Utah State, Arkansas State, Chattanooga, Bowling Green, Western Carolina, South Carolina (twice), Kentucky (twice), Vanderbilt and Iowa. Whole lot of empty calories on that record. Meanwhile, Tennessee has to look at what’s going on in Gainesville and feel absolutely sick.
You think first-year coaches can't make a difference? You think everything has to be about a three-year plan? Think again. Jim McElwain has stormed into Gainesville and re-energized Florida football, winning big games with an offensive line that was supposed to get overwhelmed in the SEC and skill players who spent their years underWill Muschamp allergic to the end zone. This wasn’t supposed to be possible until McElwain got a couple recruiting classes and a chance to install his offensive system. Instead, it's happening now, leaving Tennessee fans with a sinking feeling that the next decade may go just about like the last one.
A few Monday links:
-- Last week we told you about the great Ken Burger and his fight with cancer. If you're interested in learning more about Ken, you must read this blog by Joe Posnanski.
We would tell each other stories, mostly. They were stories we had told each other many times before, but telling those stories is better than talking about how the cancer has spread into the liver or the bleak blood counts the doctors report or what it means when they say, “weeks to live,” or what the pain feels like or what is to come. “I’ve lived a great life,” he told me. And then, “Do you remember the time in Augusta …”
We would talk about a very nice but somewhat hapless South Carolina football coach named Sparky Woods. We both liked Sparky very much, but he lost a lot of games and he once had his players revolt, and Ken wrote those facts with enthusiasm. One day Sparky called up Ken to confront him, perhaps forgetting the Ken Burger No. 1 rule of Sportswriting: “Be friendly, but you’re not friends.”
“Ken,” Sparky said to start, “let me say I’m not mad at you …”
“Sparky,” Ken interrupted, “I don’t give a (bleep) if you are mad at me.”
And this:
Kenny was on the Washington political beat in the mid 1980s, and he was sent out to write about a plan the University of South Carolina had to financially save the struggling Folger Theater in Washington. If you wonder why the University of South Carolina was getting involved in the business of the Folger Theater, well, you aren’t familiar with the general preposterousness of the University of South Carolina. You could spend your whole life at South Carolina asking “Why?”
In any case, there was a press conference featuring South Carolina officials along with Helen Hayes, the First Lady of American Theater, an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and Tony award winner, a theatrical legend of the highest order. Kenny had never heard of her. In the years of telling the story, he would never remember her name.
He got to the press conference early because Kenny always got to places early. That’s another story, but a quick one. When Kenny was a kid, maybe eight or nine years old, his father told them they were leaving for vacation at noon. Ken arrived at 12:10 to find that the family car was gone. They had left him. He began crying and after doing that for a while, a neighbor’s car came by. “Get in,” they said. “We were told to pick you up as soon as you finished crying.” He was never late again.
Kenny got to the press conference, and he saw this little old woman there and presumed her to be Helen Hayes. He walked over to introduce himself and shake her hand. She, without prompting, grabbed his reporter pad and signed her name — the one autograph Ken ever got.
But, this being Ken Burger, the story goes on. The press conference began, and there was a lot of high-minded talk about the theater, and its importance to the world and Gary Cooper and Clark Gable and Williams Shakespeare. Ken listened to this for a while, and then when it was time for questions he raised his hand and asked, “Yeah, so, where’s this money coming from?”
Helen Hayes was dumbfounded. Who was this coarse reporter daring to ask about money when they were talking about the theater? When he asked the question again (and again) she upbraided him. “Young man,” she said, “These impertinent questions have no place here.”
At which point Ken Burger looked at the only autograph he’d ever gotten in his life, tore it from his notebook, and put it at her feet. “I didn’t want this,” he said.
-- Bruce Feldman says Charlie Strong is living his nightmare at Texas.
In March, when I visited Charlie Strong, the biggest thing that stuck to me about my afternoon at Texas was how concerned the 55-year-old former defensive coordinator was about just being competitive. Strong is no numbers guy, but he could tell you not once in his four seasons in Louisville did one of his teams lose a game by more than 20 points. In 2014, his debut season at UT, that happened five times.
"The frustrating thing for me is when we lose bad,” Strong told me at the time. "I can take losing — well, I can't take losing at all, but if you hit me on a last-second (game-winning) field goal, I can kinda get over that. But I can't get over a 20-plus points loss in five games."
Strong’s team ended the 2014 season in dismal fashion, losing at home toTCU and then in the Texas Bowl to Arkansas by a combined score of 79-17. "We got embarrassed," Strong said. "You're like, 'What's inside of us, guys? Let's stand up and fight because this should never happen here at the University of Texas.'"
Well, it’s still happening and even in more jaw-dropping ways. On Saturday, Strong suffered the worst loss in his head coaching career when TCU smashed UT 50-7 in a game that wasn’t even that close. The Horned Frogs led 30-0 before the first quarter was over and had a 221-1 advantage in total yards in the opening 15 minutes. Texas (1-4) is off to its worst start since a 1-9 mark 59 years ago.
"We don't know how to compete yet,” Strong said after the TCU game. "There's something about pride, pride in yourself. It's a very competitive sport. You have to know when things aren't going right, that someone has to step up. That's just not what we're getting right now.”
-- Bill Bender of The Sporting News writes on Clemson.
Clemson is good enough to win the ACC championship, a road that will run through Death Valley with Georgia Tech (Oct. 10) and Florida State (Nov. 10) visiting. There are the usual potholes on the road. Imagine a scenario where an undefeated Clemson team rolls into Columbia to face South Carolina and Steve Spurrier in the regular-season finale.
Clemson is good enough to make the College Football Playoff, even in a Power 5 conference that might be at the bottom of the pecking order. The margin for error in the ACC is less than the other four conferences, which Florida State found out as the defending national champion last season.
The Tigers will need to keep winning, and maybe win them all.
If Clemson finds its way in, watch out. This is a program that beat LSU, Ohio State and Oklahoma in the postseason the last three years. That's part of the progression in taking the next step as a program.
-- Pat Forde gives his Fab Four.
Utah, Baylor, Northwestern, Florida.
If you're worried about such forecasts, don't be. It's just too early. Well said by Kirk Herbstreit here:
Exactly.
-- And some staggering stats from David Teel's column in the wake of Virginia Tech's loss in the Hokies' season opener.
Tech lost to Pittsburgh 17-13, and the margin did no justice to the Panthers' superiority.
The Hokies gained 100 yards, their fewest since managing just 60 in Beamer's debut game as head coach, a 22-10 home loss to Clemson in 1987. Tech yielded seven sacks, matching its aggregate from the season's first four games, and rushed for 9 yards, the fourth-lowest of the Beamer Era.
Those remaining among a crowd of 49,120, Lane Stadium's smallest since 1998, voiced their displeasure, and it wasn't because they were cold from sitting in the rain for three-plus hours. It's because the Hokies are 2-8 in their last 10 home games versus Bowl Subdivision opponents and are in the midst of a fourth straight mediocre, at best, season.
Oh my.
-- And we close with a little souljazz from Grant Green:
LW
