The Buckeyes’ 13-2 season demonstrates how, when properly deployed, elite talent can overcome almost any obstacle.
An Aerial Assault That Commands Respect
Will Howard transformed Ohio State’s passing game into one of college football’s most lethal weapons.
The numbers tell the story of aerial dominance:
265.1 passing yards per game
71% completion rate
35 passing touchdowns
Two 900+ yard receivers (Smith: 1,227, Egbuka: 947)
14 touchdowns from Smith alone
10 scores from Egbuka
This passing attack kept defensive coordinators awake at night.
Ground Game: The Perfect Complement
While the passing game grabbed headlines, Ohio State’s rushing attack quietly devastated opponents.
The two-headed monster in the backfield produced consistently:
TreVeyon Henderson: 967 yards at 7.3 yards per carry
Quinshon Judkins: 960 yards at 5.2 yards per carry
Combined for 22 rushing touchdowns
Team average of 163.2 rushing yards per game
The perfect balance to keep defenses honest
Exceptional ability to close out games
This rushing attack turned good drives into great ones.
A Defense Built on Disruption
Ohio State’s defense didn’t just stop opponents – it broke their will to compete.
The defensive dominance showed in multiple ways:
Only 89.9 rushing yards allowed per game
Held runners to 2.7 yards per carry
Generated 51 sacks (led by J.T. Tuimoloau’s 11.5)
Created 111 tackles for loss
Limited opponents to 12 rushing touchdowns all season
Consistently dominated the line of scrimmage
This unit transformed pressure into production.
The Day Factor: Strategic Evolution
Ohio State head coach Ryan Day reacts to a replay during the first half of an NCAA college football game against Michigan Saturday, Nov. 30, 2024, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jay LaPrete)
Ryan Day’s approach to game management reveals a coach willing to adapt and innovate.
His impact manifested in several key areas:
Increased deep passing plays to 15% in playoffs
Implemented the crucial “middle eight” minutes strategy
Moved offensive coordinator to the press box
Created specific roles for key transfers
Developed new film study protocols
Built a “no bad days” culture
Results proved the effectiveness of these changes.
Playoff Performance That Demanded Attention
Ohio State’s postseason run showcased their ability to elevate their game when it mattered most.
Critical adjustments defined their playoff success:
Increased vertical passing attack
Strategic player rotation to maintain freshness
Enhanced coordinator collaboration
Systematic in-game adjustments
Improved third-down conversion rate
Superior momentum management
Each game revealed new depths to their capabilities.
Areas of Concern
Even championship contenders have their vulnerabilities.
Nervous young Latin man using TV remote control on home couch, feeling annoyed, angry, concerned, watching football match, show, getting problems with broadcasting
Key weaknesses that need addressing:
Red zone efficiency (73.3% field goal conversion)
Pass protection issues, especially after key injuries
In two years, college football’s talent market transformed from an orderly command economy into a chaotic free market that would make cryptocurrency traders blush. The New Economics of College Football: Understanding the Transfer Portal Panic examines how over 750 players entering the transfer portal this month isn’t evidence of a broken system – it’s proof of a market finally finding its equilibrium. What looks like chaos to anxious fans refreshing their Twitter feeds is the messy emergence of college football’s first true labor market, complete with hidden negotiations, market-making general managers earning NFL-style salaries, and the type of resource allocation decisions that would make a hedge fund manager sweat. The panic isn’t about dysfunction – it’s about price discovery. And in this new world of college football economics, the only thing more expensive than talent is inexperience in managing it.
Detroit, MI – USA – 10-21-2024: A Wilson football from above on a pile of money
On a crisp December morning, as college football fans refreshed their Twitter feeds with increasing anxiety, Brandon Huffman sat in a Nashville office explaining how the sport they love had fundamentally changed. The 24/7 Sports national recruiting editor wasn’t talking about offensive schemes or defensive alignments – he was describing market dynamics, negotiation strategies, and the emergence of a new power broker in college football: the general manager.
“You’re seeing schools play better defense in terms of keeping the guys that they really want,” Huffman explained, choosing his words carefully. “But you’re also seeing schools playing offense too.” He wasn’t talking about X’s and O’s. He was talking about money.
Welcome to college football’s new reality: over 750 players have entered the transfer portal this year alone. The panic among fan bases is palpable but misplaced. What looks like chaos from the outside is the messy emergence of a more structured market that increasingly mirrors the NFL’s free agency system, just without the benefit of its carefully regulated calendar and certified agent requirements.
The Hidden Market
What fans don’t see – and what’s driving much of their anxiety – is that most of these transfers aren’t surprises to the coaches and administrators involved. “Players’ handlers have been marketing these guys to schools for weeks,” one Power Five administrator admitted. The public announcements that send fans into a frenzy are often merely the formal acknowledgment of deals that have been in quiet negotiation for months.
This hidden market has created a new role in college football: the general manager. Stanford made waves by appointing Andrew Luck to this position, but they’re hardly alone. These GMs are being paid coordinator-level salaries ($500,000+) to manage what has essentially become an NFL-style front office. They’re not just evaluating talent – they’re managing salary caps before they officially exist.
The Price of Talent
The numbers are striking. Elite high school quarterbacks can command seven-figure deals before taking a single collegiate snap. However, the market is increasingly favoring proven production over potential. A quarterback who’s shown success at a lower level (FCS or Group of Five) can often command more than a highly-touted high school prospect who’s spent two years on the bench at a blue-blood program.
“If you’re smart and you play the long game, you might get that back-end deal,” Huffman noted. “But that would mean you’d have to wait three years to get that back-end deal. Most guys are going to jump at the front-end money.”
The Fan Fallacy
When a player enters the portal, fan bases blame the coaching staff. While this instinct is natural, it misunderstands the new economics of college football. Sometimes, a player’s departure isn’t about coaching failure—it’s about resource allocation.
Consider the case of a starting left tackle entering the portal. Fans see a failure to retain talent. The GM sees a financial decision: Is it better to pay the experienced tackle $750,000 or redistribute that money to lock down the promising quarterback and find a cheaper replacement through the portal?
The Development Dilemma
This new market creates interesting incentives around player development. The immediate availability of proven transfers challenges the traditional model of patiently developing talent over several years. Why spend three years developing a backup quarterback when you can acquire one who has already proven themselves at a lower level?
But this shift comes with risks. The constant churn of transfers can disrupt team chemistry and system familiarity. Players jumping from system to system may stunt their development while chasing larger contracts.
The Negotiation Gap
Not every program has embraced the GM model, creating a fascinating dichotomy in handling transfer negotiations. Head coaches often play dual roles at programs without a dedicated GM: talent evaluator and chief negotiator. It’s a precarious position that can create several problems.
First, there’s the time constraint. Head coaches are already among the busiest people in athletics, managing current players, game planning, and traditional recruiting. Adding complex financial negotiations to their plate stretches them even thinner. “When the head coach is your primary negotiator, you’re telling them to be Nick Saban and Jerry Jones simultaneously,” one Power Five assistant noted. “Something’s got to give.”
More importantly, it creates relationship complications. When a head coach directly negotiates compensation with players or their representatives, it fundamentally changes the coach-player dynamic. A coach who has to tell a player they’re not worth their asking price on Tuesday still needs to motivate that player on Saturday. It’s a potentially toxic dynamic that the GM model aims explicitly to avoid.
There’s also the expertise factor. Most head coaches didn’t rise through the ranks by being skilled financial negotiators. They’re football minds, not market makers. When negotiating against professional agents or marketing representatives, they often play an away game without a playbook.
Some programs have tried to bridge this gap by empowering recruiting coordinators or player personnel directors to handle negotiations. However, without a GM’s formal authority and budget control, these stopgap solutions often create more confusion than clarity in the negotiation process.
The Future Market
Revenue sharing is coming to college football, with estimates suggesting teams will have around $20 million to distribute among players. Many believe this will calm the current chaos by standardizing payment structures. The reality is likely more complex.
“The rich will still get richer,” Huffman predicted, “because the collectives are still going to be involved.” Revenue sharing won’t replace NIL deals – it will layer on top of them, creating an even more complex market for GMs to navigate.
Successful programs will develop clear strategies for this new market. Some will focus on high school recruitment and development, accepting that they’ll lose some players to transfer but betting on their ability to develop new talent. Others will embrace the portal, treating it as their primary talent pipeline. Most will likely land somewhere in between, but all must be more transparent with their players about their market value and team-building strategy.
The transfer portal isn’t chaos – it’s a market finding equilibrium. The panic it creates comes not from its dysfunction but from our unfamiliarity with its new rules. For fans, the best advice might be the simplest: calm down, let it play out, and trust that this year’s “crisis” is just next year’s normal.
Boise State and UNLV meet Friday night for the Mountain West Championship.
In the pristine December air of Las Vegas, two college football programs are about to collide in a way that defies conventional wisdom. One is Boise State, the upstart powerhouse that has been terrorizing the Mountain West Conference for years by systematically destroying opponents. The other is UNLV, a program that was a statistical asterisk just two years ago. It is the kind of team that makes gamblers rich by betting against them.
The transformation of UNLV under Barry Odom is the kind of story that makes sports executives nervous. It suggests that all their complex formulas for success – the million-dollar facilities, the decades of tradition, the elaborate recruiting networks – might matter less than finding the right person with the right idea at the right time. Odom, a defensive specialist with a track record of raising football programs from the dead, has turned UNLV into something that would have been unthinkable 24 months ago: a legitimate threat to Boise State’s dominance.
The numbers tell a story that feels almost too neat to be true. Boise State, led by their own coaching prodigy Spencer Danielson, has been a machine of efficiency: 478.3 yards per game, 40.6 points scored, and a running back named Ashton Jeanty who seems to have been engineered in a laboratory specifically to break tackles (2,288 rushing yards, 28 touchdowns, and the kind of statistics that make NFL scouts reach for their phones). Their quarterback, Maddux Madsen, plays with the kind of careful precision (21 touchdowns, 3 interceptions) that makes offensive coordinators sleep well at night.
But here’s where it gets interesting: UNLV, the traditional underdog, has built something suspiciously similar. Their offense, anchored by the dual-threat quarterback Hajj-Malik Williams, puts up 434 yards and 38.7 points per game. It’s less than Boise State, but not by the margin you’d expect from a program that was recently college football’s equivalent of a penny stock.
The real story, though, lies in a number that doesn’t show up in the standard statistics: 22 versus 14. That’s the turnover differential between these teams, with UNLV’s defense showing a predatory instinct for creating chaos that their more established opponents haven’t matched. It’s the kind of number that makes you wonder if there’s something more interesting happening here than just a good football team playing another good football team.
When these teams met earlier this season, Boise State won 29-24, the close score that tells you everything and nothing about what might happen in a rematch. It’s the type of game that Las Vegas oddsmakers hate – when the traditional metrics suggest one outcome, but the intangibles point to another.
The wild card in this is special teams, UNLV’s secret weapon. Their kicker, Caden Chittenden, has been converting field goals at an 80.6% clip, the kind of reliability that wins championships. And then there’s Jai’Den Thomas, who has turned kick returns into a form of performance art, including one touchdown that made highlight reels across the country.
As the sun sets over Las Vegas on December 6th, these two teams will take the field for a game that feels less like a conference championship and more like a referendum on how football programs are built. On one side, you have Boise State, with its decade of dominance and its assembly-line production of victories. On the other side is UNLV, the rapid risers who have turned chaos into a competitive advantage.
The beauty of this matchup lies in its unpredictability. It’s the kind of game that makes you question everything you think you know about college football – about tradition, momentum, and the way success is supposed to look. And maybe that’s exactly what makes it worth watching.
Let’s Break It Down – Season Overview
Boise State has had a remarkable season, losing only to Oregon in a close 37-34 contest early in the year. The Broncos have since reeled off 10 straight victories, including a 29-24 win over UNLV in their regular-season meeting. UNLV, under second-year head coach Barry Odom, has engineered a dramatic turnaround, with their only losses coming against Syracuse and Boise State.
Offensive Firepower
Both teams bring potent offenses to the championship game:
Boise State
Averaging 478.3 yards and 40.6 points per game
Balanced attack with 224.8 passing yards and 253.5 rushing yards per game
This game features an intriguing coaching battle between Boise State’s Spencer Danielson and UNLV’s Barry Odom:
Danielson (2nd year): 14-2 overall record, faith-based approach, emphasizes player development
Odom (2nd year at UNLV): 19-7 record at UNLV, defensive expertise, known for quick program turnarounds
Key Factors
Boise State’s rushing attack vs. UNLV’s run defense
UNLV’s ability to force turnovers against a typically careful Boise State offense
Special teams play, particularly in the return game
Quarterback play under pressure in a high-stakes environment
Prediction – The Math of Inevitability
Suppose you were building a model to predict this game’s outcome. In that case, you’d probably focus on the obvious: Boise State’s superior yardage, their higher scoring average, and their previous victory over UNLV. You’d be doing exactly what most analysts do – and missing the point entirely.
The hidden pattern here lies in the convergence of three numbers that nobody’s talking about: UNLV’s +8 turnover margin advantage, their 80.6% field goal conversion rate, and the 5-point margin of their previous loss to Boise State. When you map these data points against similar conference championship games over the past decade, an interesting pattern emerges – teams with superior turnover margins and reliable kicking games tend to outperform their regular season results in championship settings.
The Las Vegas factor is another variable that spreadsheets can’t capture. UNLV isn’t just playing at home; they’re playing in a city that’s redefined itself more times than any other in America. Vegas’s team should do the same.
The smart money says Boise State by a touchdown. The numbers that don’t make the headlines suggest something else: UNLV 31, Boise State 27.
It’s the kind of prediction that makes traditional analysts uncomfortable – which is precisely why it might be right.
In the era of social media and team message boards, College football communities typically fall into three categories:
Picture the modern college football landscape as a digital Roman Colosseum, where three distinct tribes gather daily to pass judgment on their gladiators. I’ve spent months studying these tribes, fascinated by how their collective voice can determine the fate of multimillion-dollar coaching careers with the force of an emperor’s thumb.
First, you have the Sunshine Pumpers – college football’s eternal optimists, whose rose-tinted view of their program would make Pollyanna seem cynical. They’re the ones who’d watch their team’s practice facility burn to the ground and declare it a strategic move to improve ventilation. Their unwavering positivity isn’t just amusing; it’s a psychological defense mechanism worth millions to beleaguered athletic directors who need someone, anyone, to keep buying season tickets.
Then there are the Negative Nellies, the digital descendants of Ancient Greek tragedy choruses. These people have turned catastrophizing into an art form and see an upset loss to a rival as evidence of civilization’s collapse. They don’t just want their coach fired; they want him launched into the sun, preferably before halftime.
But the real power brokers? They’re the Middle Majority – college football’s silent jury. These are the clear-eyed realists who still remember that this is, ultimately, a game played by 20-year-olds. Lose their support, and a coach’s career expectancy drops faster than a team’s ranking after a loss to an FCS opponent.
As we examine this week’s coaching hot seat rankings, remember: these three tribes aren’t just posting on message boards – they’re reshaping the power dynamics of a $8 billion industry, one complaint thread at a time.
The Ryan Day situation at Ohio State exemplifies how these three tribes can reshape a program’s trajectory. With a staggering 86.8% winning percentage and a 64-3 record outside of Michigan games and playoff appearances, Day should be untouchable in the eyes of any rational observer. But that’s not how college football works in 2024, especially not in Columbus.
The Sunshine Pumpers point to the program’s continued playoff contention and recruiting dominance, including a roster powered by $20 million in NIL money. They’ll tell you that Day’s overall record (.868 winning percentage) would be celebrated at 95% of programs nationwide. And they’re not wrong.
The Negative Nellies, however, have found their ammunition: a 2-7 record in career-defining moments and four straight losses to Michigan, including an unthinkable defeat to an unranked Wolverines squad that had just lost their head coach to the NFL. The “Big Game Day” epithet has stuck, and the critics are getting louder.
But it’s the Middle Majority that makes this situation genuinely fascinating. They’re running the numbers: a $35 million buyout, a coach who consistently wins everything except the games that matter most and a recruiting machine that just watched Michigan flip five-star quarterback Bryce Underwood with a reported $10 million NIL deal. The silent jury is still deliberating, but their patience is wearing thin.
Athletic Director Ross Bjork’s carefully worded support – “Coach Day does a great job leading our program. He’s our coach” – reads less like a vote of confidence and more like a holding pattern until the playoff scenario plays out. The real question might not be whether Ohio State wants to keep Day but whether Day wants to stay in a pressure cooker where even a 66-10 record can’t guarantee job security.
Unlike the Ohio State scenario, Kent State’s situation with Kenni Burns has achieved something remarkable: it’s united all three tribes in bewilderment. When you’ve lost 21 straight games and your head coach is being sued for defaulting on a $24,000 credit card debt despite making nearly half a million dollars annually, even the Sunshine Pumpers run out of silver linings to grasp.
The raw numbers read like a satire of college football excess: a 1-33 overall record, a $1.51 million buyout, and a contract extension through 2028 that was inexplicably granted in February 2024 – the same period during which Burns was reportedly falling behind on his credit card payments. The Golden Flashes haven’t just lost games; they’ve been dismantled with surgical precision, outscored 486-160 overall and 282-99 in MAC play. The season’s nadir came early with a loss to St. Francis (PA), though the subsequent 71-0 demolition by Tennessee and 56-0 erasure by Penn State suggest “nadir” might be a moving target.
In any rational football universe, this would be where our three tribes engage in their usual warfare of interpretation. The Negative Nellies would demand immediate change, the Sunshine Pumpers would preach patience, and the Middle Majority would weigh the practical constraints against the competitive collapse. But when your head coach can’t manage his personal finances – defaulting on debt to a local bank that once sponsored the athletic program, no less – while earning $475,000 a year, it raises uncomfortable questions about institutional judgment.
Kent State has transcended such traditional dynamics. When your season ends with a 43-7 loss to Buffalo, extending the nation’s longest active losing streak to 21 games, while your head coach dodges court summons over unpaid credit card bills, you’ve achieved something rare in modern college football: unanimous consensus. The same industry that might force out Ryan Day and his 87% winning percentage at Ohio State has somehow found infinite patience for a program redefining competitive futility both on and off the field.
Perhaps that’s the most fascinating part of this story – how Kent State has inadvertently experimented with just how far institutional inertia can stretch. The answer is at least 21 games, one credit card default, and counting.
The UAB situation under Trent Dilfer exemplifies what happens when all three fan tribes suddenly realize they’ve been watching the same horror movie. Four seasons ago, UAB dominated Tulane with a bruising defense that held the Green Wave to 21 points. This year? Tulane hung 71 points on the Blazers in their stadium.
As Joseph Goodman of the Alabama Media Group devastatingly points out, UAB has completed a stunning transformation “from being a symbol of pride for the city of Birmingham to the worst team in college football.” Not the bottom 10. Not second-to-last. The worst. This is a program that, under Bill Clark, made five consecutive bowl games and engineered a move to the American Athletic Conference. Under Dilfer, they’re losing 32-6 to Louisiana-Monroe, a program he describes as “historically tragic.”
The Sunshine Pumpers, usually reliable defenders of any coach with an NFL pedigree, have gone quiet. The Negative Nellies are pointing to a season-ending loss to Charlotte where the Blazers missed not one but two chip-shot field goals. And the Middle Majority? They’re doing the math on how a program goes from nine wins and a bowl victory over BYU in 2021 to this level of competitive collapse.
Yet in a twist that would bewilder even the most optimistic fans, UAB appears ready to run it back with Dilfer in 2024. The sacrifice of assistant coaches is enough to appease the football gods, even as the program that Bill Clark rebuilt piece by piece crumbles into competitive irrelevance.
The most telling sign of the program’s descent is when a senior quarterback abandons the team mid-season to preserve his eligibility. This suggests that the quarterback whisperer might have lost his voice.
You know something has gone wrong when your fanbase goes from celebrating a splash hire to demanding his head in just two years. Luke Fickell’s descent at Wisconsin is a cautionary tale about the dangers of heightened expectations, with his .760 winning percentage at Cincinnati deteriorating to .500 in Madison.
The Sunshine Pumpers still point to his overall .667 career winning percentage and Cincinnati success, including that magical College Football Playoff run. They’ll tell you that losing starting quarterback Tyler Van Dyke to a torn ACL derailed what could have been a breakthrough season. And didn’t Fickell already show accountability by firing offensive coordinator Phil Longo?
However, the Negative Nellies have the receipts: five consecutive losses to the end of 2024, the first such streak since 1991. It was a humiliating 24-7 home loss to Minnesota that snapped a 22-year bowl streak and an offense that managed just 44 total yards in the first half of their season finale, with bowl eligibility on the line. The boos raining down at Camp Randall tell their own story.
The Middle Majority finds itself in an uncomfortable position. This is the same Luke Fickell who Ohio State passed over for Ryan Day – and now both men find themselves scrutinized for failing to meet their program’s standards, albeit at very different levels. The irony isn’t lost on anyone that while Ohio State contemplates moving on from Day’s 87% win rate, Wisconsin seems prepared to give Fickell another chance to prove he hasn’t lost his Cincinnati magic.
The most damning indictment? When athletic director Chris McIntosh’s recent raise and extension become part of the conversation about your job security, you know the pressure is mounting.
At Auburn, the three tribes of college football fandom find themselves engaged in a uniquely expensive form of warfare. Since 2000, the program has spent $68 million not on building success but on buying out failure – a figure transforming Auburn football from a sports program into a case study of institutional self-sabotage.
The Sunshine Pumpers are clinging to Auburn’s 2025 recruiting class, currently ranked fifth nationally, like a life raft in a storm of mediocrity. They’ll tell you that Freeze needs time, that his 444.5 yards per game show the offense is close to clicking, and that better days are just around the corner. Remember that Texas A&M signed a top-20 class a month after firing their coach last year.
The Negative Nellies point to numbers that are harder to spin: 11-14 overall, 5-11 in the SEC, and now 0-2 in the Iron Bowl. As Paul Finebaum put it, after the latest loss to Alabama, people “really have to wonder about this program’s future.” When you’re generating 444.5 yards per game but still can’t score, you’re not just failing – you’re finding innovative new ways to disappoint.
But it’s the Middle Majority that genuinely appreciates the dark comedy here. Auburn has fired a coach two years after winning a national title (Gene Chizik), dismissed another despite his mystifying ability to beat Alabama in odd-numbered years (Gus Malzahn), and scrapped Bryan Harsin for the crime of not being from around here. Now they’ve got Freeze, whose $20.3 million buyout can be paid monthly through 2028 – less like a coaching contract and more like a mortgage on mediocrity.
The most revealing detail is that Auburn structured Freeze’s buyout not as a deterrent to firing him but as a more convenient payment plan. This behavior reflects an institution that knows itself too well—like someone who builds the divorce settlement into their wedding vows.
Thoughts? We’re ready to hear from you. Click right here
When History Comes Due: College Football’s Day of Reckoning
On the final Saturday of November 2024, college football will remind us why it remains America’s most compelling social experiment. In four different stadiums, eight teams will engage in a ritual that’s equal parts sporting event and psychological warfare. These aren’t just games—they’re settling accounts, tests of collective will, and exercises in mass delusion, where entire states convince themselves that the impossible is probable.
In South Carolina, two programs that share nothing but geography and mutual contempt will try to prove that statistics are just numbers on a page. In Columbus, Ohio State faces the cruel irony of finally getting a vulnerable Michigan team after three years of losses, only to discover that beating a wounded rival might be the most challenging task. In Los Angeles, USC will attempt to salvage a disappointing season by derailing Notre Dame’s playoff dreams, proving once again that nothing satisfies quite like ruining someone else’s perfect ending. And in Eugene, Oregon stands ready to exorcise three years of frustration against a Washington program that’s fallen from national championship contender to cautionary tale in less time than it takes to earn a college degree.
Each of these games carries its own particular strain of madness. Together, they form a perfect case study in how rational human beings – coaches, players, and millions of fans – can convince themselves that history, statistics, and probability are merely suggestions rather than laws. In short, it’s everything that makes college football the most irrational, and therefore most human, of our sports.
The Numbers That Lie: A Tale of Two Programs – South Carolina at Clemson
In the gathering dusk of late November, two football programs circle each other like prizefighters, each convinced they’ve decoded the other’s fatal flaw. The statistics tell one story: Clemson, the higher-ranked team with the more prolific offense, should win this game. But anyone who’s spent time in South Carolina knows that numbers, like the sweet tea served at every diner from Charleston to Greenville, can be deceptive.
The conventional wisdom says Clemson has the edge. Their quarterback, Cade Klubnik, throws for nearly fifty more yards per game than his counterpart. Their offense generates more total yards, touchdowns, and everything that should matter. We could all go home now if football games were played on spreadsheets.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
While everyone’s been watching Klubnik light up the stat sheet, South Carolina has been quietly perfecting the art of chaos. They don’t just play defense; they create havoc. Eighteen forced fumbles this season – a number that makes defensive coordinators salivate and quarterbacks wake up in cold sweats. Their defensive captain, Nick Emmanwori, has turned the secondary into a no-fly zone with four interceptions, but it’s his 76 tackles that tell the real story. He’s not just picking off passes; he’s hunting down ball carriers with the relentless precision of a Wall Street algorithm.
The market inefficiency here – the thing everyone else has missed – is in the special teams battle. South Carolina’s punter, Kai Kroeger, is averaging 47.8 yards per punt, a full five yards more than his Clemson counterpart. In a game where field position is currency, Kroeger prints money with every boot of the ball.
But perhaps the most telling number isn’t on any stat sheet. Five games – that’s how long South Carolina’s winning streak has stretched. Like confidence in financial markets, momentum in football is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Teams that believe they can’t lose often don’t.
The paradox at the heart of this rivalry is that for all of Clemson’s statistical superiority—their 469.9 yards per game, their 30 passing touchdowns, their number twelve ranking—they’re facing an opponent that has mastered the art of winning ugly. South Carolina’s defense doesn’t just stop drives; it ends them violently, with forced fumbles and defensive stands that send offensive coordinators back to their drawing boards.
Ultimately, this game won’t be decided by the comfortable certainties of statistics. It will come down to something far more primal: the ability to create chaos and thrive within it. South Carolina has turned defensive mayhem into an art form, while Clemson has built an offensive machine that looks unstoppable – until it meets a force that doesn’t play by the normal rules of engagement.
Overall Team Comparison
Records and Rankings:
Clemson: 9-2, ranked #12
South Carolina: 8-3, ranked #16
Momentum:
Clemson is on a 3-game winning streak
South Carolina is on a 5-game winning streak
Offensive Analysis
Passing Game:
Clemson’s Cade Klubnik leads a more prolific passing attack (274.6 yards/game) compared to South Carolina’s LaNorris Sellers (225.5 yards/game).
Clemson has a slight edge in passing touchdowns (30 vs. 20).
Rushing Game:
Clemson averages more rushing yards (195.3 vs. 181.8 yards/game).
South Carolina’s Raheim Sanders is the standout rusher with 11 TDs, while Clemson’s Phil Mafah leads with 8 TDs.
Key Playmakers:
Clemson: Antonio Williams (WR, 10 receiving TDs), Phil Mafah (RB, 1012 rushing yards)
South Carolina: Raheim Sanders (RB, 13 total TDs), Joshua Simon (TE, 6 receiving TDs)
Total Offense:
Clemson averages 469.9 yards/game
South Carolina averages 407.3 yards/game
Defensive Analysis
Run Defense:
South Carolina allows fewer rushing yards (103.4 vs. 139.6 yards/game).
Pass Defense:
Both teams are similar, with South Carolina slightly better (200.3 vs. 210.8 yards allowed/game).
Turnovers:
Clemson has more interceptions (13 vs. 12).
South Carolina forces more fumbles (18 vs. 11).
Key Defenders:
Clemson: T.J. Parker (9 sacks), Wade Woodaz and Barrett Carter (61 tackles each)
South Carolina: Kyle Kennard (11.5 sacks), Nick Emmanwori (76 tackles, 4 INTs)
Special Teams
Kicking:
Clemson’s Nolan Hauser: 15/20 FGs, 50/51 XPs
South Carolina’s Alex Herrera: 13/18 FGs, 41/41 XPs
Punting:
South Carolina’s Kai Kroeger averages 47.8 yards/punt
Clemson’s Aidan Swanson averages 42.4 yards/punt
Returns:
Clemson has a slight edge in kick returns (18.8 vs. 17.5 yards/return)
Clemson is significantly better in punt returns (8.2 vs. 5.9 yards/return)
Key Factors for the Matchup
Offensive Firepower: Clemson’s more balanced and productive offense could challenge South Carolina’s defense.
Defensive Playmaking: South Carolina’s defense has shown a greater ability to force turnovers and create big plays.
Quarterback Play: The performance of Klubnik (Clemson) and Sellers (South Carolina) will be crucial.
Field Position Battle: South Carolina’s superior punting game could be a significant factor.
Red Zone Efficiency: Both teams have efficient kickers, making red zone conversions critical.
Momentum: South Carolina enters with a longer winning streak, potentially providing a psychological edge.
Prediction
This matchup promises to be closely contested. South Carolina’s defensive strengths balance Clemson’s offensive advantages. The game could come down to turnovers, special teams play, and quarterback performance in critical moments. Given Clemson’s slightly higher ranking, more balanced offense, and home-field advantage, they might have a slight edge. However, South Carolina’s momentum and defensive playmaking ability make them a formidable opponent. Expect a tight game with the potential for big plays on both sides. The team that manages the turnover battle and performs better in special teams is likely to emerge victorious in what could be a classic rivalry matchup.
The smart money says Clemson wins this game 31-27. That’s what the algorithms predict, the statistical models suggest, and every rational analysis concludes. But there’s something fitting about the fact that this game will be played on the last day of November when the crisp autumn air carries just a hint of winter’s chaos. Because in the end, this rivalry isn’t about the predictable – it’s about the moments that break the models.
Clemson 31, South Carolina 27. That’s what the numbers say. But as one wizened South Carolina assistant coach told me with a knowing smile, “The beautiful thing about this game is that it’s played on grass, not paper.” In Palmetto State, grass has a way of growing wild.
Other Games Where We’re Targeting Winners
Michigan at Ohio State – The Cruelest Game in College Football
There’s a particular kind of torture in being favored by three touchdowns against your most bitter rival. Just ask Ohio State, which enters this year’s edition of The Game carrying the kind of burden that could crush a lesser program: the weight of three straight losses to Michigan, a clear path to the Playoff, and the suffocating expectations that come with being the team that absolutely, positively cannot lose to a 6-5 Michigan squad.
The cruel irony isn’t lost on anyone in Columbus. After years of falling to Jim Harbaugh’s powerhouse Michigan teams, the Buckeyes finally get a vulnerable version of their nemesis – and that somehow makes this game even more dangerous. Michigan’s offense may be diminished, but their defense remains stubborn enough to turn this into the ugly, grinding affair that has haunted Ohio State’s recent nightmares.
For Ohio State, it’s a game of psychological warfare against their own demons. Win, and they secure their spot in the Big Ten title game against Oregon while exorcising three years of Michigan-induced trauma. Lose, and… well, no one in scarlet and gray dares contemplate that scenario, even though their Playoff spot would likely survive such a catastrophe.
Michigan, meanwhile, arrives with the most dangerous weapon in college football: nothing to lose. Their defense, still salty enough to make life difficult for any offense, now gets to play the role of spoiler – a position that has produced some of college football’s most
The Game, as it’s known, has never needed additional drama to justify its appointment-viewing status. But this year’s edition adds a particularly twisted psychological element: Ohio State must beat a weakened version of the team that has tormented them or risk a new level of nightmare. There’s no greater pressure in college football than being the team that absolutely must win.
Prediction: Ohio State 31, Michigan 13. But if Michigan’s defense can force a couple of early turnovers and plant those seeds of doubt, that’s why they play The Game.
Notre Dame at USC – The Perfect Trap
There’s something poetic about Notre Dame having to pass through Los Angeles on its way to the College Football Playoff. Like any good Hollywood script, this one comes with all the classic elements of a potential tragedy: the protagonist riding high after overcoming early adversity, one final obstacle that seems manageable on paper, and an antagonist with nothing left to lose but their pride.
The Irish have spent months rehabilitating their image after that inexplicable slip-up early in the season. Like a forgiving audience, the playoff committee has bought into their redemption arc. However, USC’s Coliseum has always had a way of rewriting expected endings, especially when Lincoln Riley’s teams have their backs against the wall.
The numbers that matter here aren’t USC’s five losses – they’ve faced zero fourth-quarter deficits at home this season. Even Penn State, a team currently sitting in playoff position, needed overtime to escape Los Angeles with a win. For all their deficiencies and inconsistent play, the Trojans have mastered the art of the homestand. They’re like a veteran actor who might forget their lines in a touring production but never misses the mark on their home stage.
Lincoln Riley knows this is his last chance at salvaging something from a disappointing season. Expect him to empty the playbook, unleashing everything in USC’s arsenal – George Tirebiter, Traveler, Tommy Trojan, and even John McKay’s statue if he could make them eligible. In USC’s world, where a 6-5 record feels like a dramatic fall from grace, this game represents their chance at a redemptive finale. They’re not just playing spoiler but fighting for their own Hollywood ending.
And therein lies the trap for Notre Dame. They’ve convinced everyone – the committee, the analysts, perhaps even themselves – that they’ve evolved beyond that early-season stumble. But college football has a cruel sense of symmetry. A season that began with an unexpected stumble could end the same way.
Prediction: USC 34, Notre Dame 31. Because sometimes the best Hollywood endings are the ones nobody sees coming, written by a USC team that’s spent all season practicing fourth-quarter drama.
Washington at Oregon – When Empires Fall
Last January, as Washington walked off the field after the national championship game, the future seemed written in stone. The Huskies had Oregon’s number—three straight wins over their nemesis—and a program trajectory that pointed straight up. The rivalry’s power dynamics had shifted permanently toward Seattle.
Ten months later, the story reads like satire. Oregon stands undefeated, the last perfect team in major college football, while Washington stumbles into Eugene, looking less like a rival and more like a ritual sacrifice. The Ducks aren’t just winning; they’re thriving with the offensive balance that defensive coordinators see in their nightmares. Dillon Gabriel has turned the passing game into performance art, already eclipsing 3,000 yards. At the same time, Jordan James pounds out tough yards on the ground like a metronome measuring Oregon’s inevitable march toward the playoff.
Washington’s Will Rogers, meanwhile, looks like a quarterback trying to read a playbook written in hieroglyphics, throwing more interceptions (six) than touchdowns (two) over his last five games. The Huskies’ only hope lies in their 19th-ranked defense, and the strange mathematics of rivalry games – six of the last nine meetings have been decided by less than seven points.
But there’s something almost quaint about those historical statistics now. They’re like photos from a different era, reminders of when Washington could go toe-to-toe with the Ducks. Oregon doesn’t need this game – they could lose here and in next week’s Big Ten title game and likely still make the playoffs. That’s the kind of security that breeds either complacency or ruthlessness.
Prediction: Oregon 42, Washington 17. The cruelest part of college football’s natural order isn’t the fall from grace – it’s watching your rival ascend to heights you thought would be yours.
In a college football weekend that promises to reshape conference landscapes and ignite rivalries, three pivotal matchups take center stage in this Targeting Winners gridiron trifecta. The 23rd-ranked UNLV Rebels, orchestrating a Cinderella season under Barry Odom, square off against the aerial assault of San Jose State in a Mountain West thriller that could redefine the conference hierarchy
Meanwhile, the Big Ten trembles as Indiana’s high-octane offense, averaging a staggering 43.9 points per game, dares to challenge Ohio State’s fortress-like defense, allowing a mere 10.3 points per game, in a clash that could alter the College Football Playoff picture.
And in Los Angeles, the crosstown rivalry between USC and UCLA takes on newfound urgency, with bowl eligibility hanging in the balance for the Trojans and pride at stake for the Bruins in their inaugural Big Ten season.
It’s a weekend where underdogs dream big, powerhouses defend their thrones, and every snap could alter the course of the season. Tune into the Targeting Winners Podcast for a breakdown of other featured games this week.
In the high-stakes college football arena, where careers are made and broken on the whims of boosters and the bounce of an oblong ball, ten men are perched precariously on the edge of oblivion. “Gridiron Gambles: The 10 College Football Coaches Walking a Tightrope” isn’t just a headline—it’s a window into the soul-crushing, sweat-soaked world where multimillion-dollar contracts collide with the harsh realities of wins and losses. From the Appalachian highlands to the sun-baked plains of Texas, these coaches navigate a landscape where success is measured in increments of eternal optimism and crushing disappointment. Their stories, a cocktail of ambition, desperation, and financial engineering, reveal the true nature of an industry where the difference between genius and failure is often nothing more than a well-timed trick play or a kicker’s wayward foot.
In the peculiar economy of college football, where success is measured in increments of eternal optimism and crushing disappointment, Shawn Clark finds himself caught in the undertow of expectations at Appalachian State. The numbers tell one story: 39-23 since taking the helm in 2020, a winning percentage that would keep most mid-major coaches comfortably employed. But numbers, as any good statistician will tell you, can lie by omission.
What the raw data fails to capture is the psychological toll of regression. The Mountaineers weren’t just expected to be good in 2023 – they were supposed to be the darlings of the Group of Five, the team that might crash the party of college football’s elite. Instead, they’ve become a case study of the dangers of potential unrealized. At 4-5, with games against James Madison and Georgia Southern looming like storm clouds on the horizon, Clark has managed to do something remarkable: he’s made winning 63% of his games feel like a failure.
The truly fascinating part isn’t that Clark might lose his job – it’s that he’s demonstrated how quickly the currency of past success can be devalued by present disappointment. In the modern college football marketplace, where fans trade in the futures market of expectations rather than the commodity market of actual wins, Clark’s greatest sin wasn’t losing – it was making people believe they could win more.
Contract and Buyout: The Price of Promise
To understand the true economics of college football’s expectations game, look no further than the elaborate financial instrument known as Shawn Clark’s contract. It’s a document that reads like a futures trading agreement, where the underlying commodity is hope itself. The university has systematically increased its investment in Clark yearly – from $775,000 in 2021 to $925,020 in 2023 – a nearly 20% appreciation in perceived value over just two years. This comes complete with a monthly “retention bonus” of $22,085, which seems precision-engineered by some unseen actuary to satisfy Clark just enough to stay.
But it’s in the buyout structure where the real financial engineering reveals itself. The university created what Wall Street would recognize as a descending ladder of put options – starting at $5 million and stepping down to a mere $250,000 by 2025. It’s the kind of carefully crafted exit strategy that investment bankers admire, protecting both parties while gradually reducing exposure. The genius is in how it mirrors the depreciation of both risk and potential – like a financial instrument slowly losing its time value as it approaches expiration.
The contract extension through 2026 tells its own story – one of institutional optimism colliding with the harsh reality of on-field results. However, it’s worth noting – and this is where the fine print becomes crucial – that these buyout figures come from Clark’s initial contract signed in December 2019. Like any sophisticated financial instrument, the terms may have been restructured during his 2021 extension. In the opaque world of college football contracts, such details often remain sealed in filing cabinets, known only to agents, attorneys, and athletic directors until they become relevant.
In the risk-obsessed college football world, where athletic directors typically rush to extend their coaches’ contracts at the first sign of competence, Charles Huff’s situation at Marshall stands as a fascinating market inefficiency. Here’s a coach entering the twilight of his original six-year contract – a virtual unicorn in modern college athletics – with no extension in sight and a buyout figure that reads more like a mid-level administrator’s salary than a Power Five coach’s exit package: $125,917.
The number itself tells a story. Not $125,000, not $126,000, but $125,917. It’s the kind of precise figure that suggests it was calculated by someone who believes in the power of actuarial tables and compound interest rather than the typical athletic department mathematics of ego and escalation.
What makes this situation particularly remarkable is its rarity. In an industry where coaches typically receive extension after extension – often before proving their worth – Huff operates in a state of contractual purgatory. His original 2021 deal will expire at the end of next season, creating the sort of uncertainty that athletic directors typically avoid, like a blocked punt. It’s as if Marshall accidentally discovered a new way to incentivize performance: by doing absolutely nothing.
This arrangement is a controlled experiment in coaching motivation. While his peers coach with golden parachutes worth millions, Huff operates with a buyout that wouldn’t cover the cost of a decent offensive coordinator in the SEC. It’s the kind of situation that would make Billy Beane smile. This market inefficiency either proves the conventional wisdom about coaching contracts wrong or demonstrates exactly why such wisdom exists in the first place.
Ultimately, Huff’s contract situation reads less like a strategic decision and more like an oversight – as if Marshall’s athletic department forgot to follow the standard operating procedure of college football’s coaching carousel. The question isn’t whether this approach is brilliant or foolish but whether it was an approach at all.
If you wanted to design a perfect experiment to test the breaking point of college football’s traditional patience with new coaches, you couldn’t do better than the case of Kenni Burns at Kent State. His record reads like a Silicon Valley startup’s burn rate: 1-22 overall, hemorrhaging games at a pace that would make even the most optimistic venture capitalist nervous. But what happened off the field transforms this from a simple story of athletic underperformance into something far more revealing about the economics of mid-major college football.
In a move that defied conventional market logic, Kent State doubled down on its investment in February 2024, extending Burns’ contract through 2028. Just months later, a local bank would be suing their head coach over $23,852.09 in credit card debt, representing roughly 4.5% of his annual salary. It’s the kind of financial disconnect that would make a Wall Street risk manager break out in hives: a man making half a million dollars annually defaulting on a credit card from the same community bank that once sponsored the school’s baseball program.
The financial architecture of Burns’ deal reveals the strange economics of mid-major college football. His base salary – starting at $475,000 and climbing to $515,000 – comes wrapped in a series of micro-incentives that read like a behavioral economist’s experiment in motivation. There’s $5,000 for beating Akron in the battle for the Wagon Wheel trophy (a sum that somehow manages to overvalue and undervalue a rivalry game simultaneously), and up to $15,000 for hitting academic benchmarks – as if to say, “If you can’t win games, at least make sure the players can read about them.”
But it’s in the confluence of the guarantee game clause and the credit card debt where the real story emerges. While up to $200,000 per year from Power 5 “guarantee games” goes directly to the football budget – effectively creating a financial instrument where Kent State profits from their competitive irrelevance – their head coach couldn’t manage to keep current on a $20,000 credit limit. The excuse of “a recent remodel and move” reads less like a justification and more like a perfect metaphor for the program: renovating while the foundation crumbles.
The buyout figure of $1.51 million after 2024 now looks less like an insurance policy against success and more like a cautionary tale about financial due diligence. In the strange economy of college football, Kent State potentially has to pay seven figures to part ways with a coach who couldn’t pay his credit card bill.
This is no longer a coaching contract; it’s a case study of the disconnect between institutional faith and personal finance. Every clause, every bonus, every carefully worded incentive tells the story of a program trying to convince itself that patience is still a virtue in an industry that traded that commodity away years ago. At 1-22, with their head coach dodging debt collectors, they’re not just losing games; they’re conducting an expensive experiment in the limits of institutional faith while their coach conducts his experiment in the limits of credit.
The most telling detail might be the timing: Burns’ team was 60 days past due on its payments to Hometown Bank and past due on delivering a single win in the 2023 season. In college football’s economy, some debts seem more forgivable than others.
In college football economics, Neal Brown’s contract at West Virginia is a case study in the psychology of institutional momentum. Here’s a coach who parlayed a 9-4 season into what might be the most elaborately structured compensation package in the mid-tier Power Five – a document that reveals more about the anxieties of college football administration than it does about winning football games.
The raw numbers tell one story: a $4 million base salary escalating to $4.4 million by 2027, a buyout structure that would make a Wall Street severance specialist blush ($9.525 million if terminated after this season), and a bonus structure so intricately layered it resembles a hedge fund’s fee schedule more than a coaching contract. But it’s in the timing that the real story emerges.
What makes Brown’s situation particularly fascinating isn’t just the money – it’s his apparent reconceptualization of the product he’s being paid to deliver. In October, after another loss to a ranked opponent (bringing his record against Top 25 teams to a sobering 3-16), Brown offered the most revealing quote in modern college football: “Did they have a good time? Did they enjoy it? It was a pretty good atmosphere. I’m assuming they had a pretty good time tailgating.”
It was the kind of statement that would make a McKinsey consultant proud – a brilliant pivot from measuring success by wins and losses to measuring it by customer satisfaction with the peripheral experience. Brown reframed a football program as an entertainment venue, suggesting that the actual game might be incidental to the tailgating experience. It’s as if the CEO of a struggling restaurant chain decided to focus on the quality of the parking lot rather than the food.
Brown’s contract’s genius—or perhaps madness—lies in its bonus structure. It reads like a Choose Your Own Adventure book written by an accountant: $100,000 for eight wins, $125,000 for nine, and up to $200,000 for running the table. Notably, nowhere in the contract is there a bonus for enhancing the tailgating experience.
But it’s in the perks where the true nature of college football’s economy reveals itself. Two courtesy vehicles, a country club membership (funded through “private dollars” – a distinction that speaks volumes about the creative accounting of college athletics), and a $5,000 allowance for university apparel. Even the ticket allocations are meticulously detailed: 25 premium tickets or a suite for football, five for basketball, and 20 for bowl games – enough to host quite a tailgate party of his own.
The buyout clause – 75% of the remaining salary if terminated without cause – stands as a monument to institutional fear: fear of being wrong or right or having to admit either. At current projections, that’s $9.525 million to say goodbye to a coach who might finish 5-7, make a bowl game, or do just enough to make everyone wonder if next year will be different. Or perhaps, given his new metrics for success, just enough people might have a good time tailgating to make it all worthwhile.
In the end, Neal Brown’s tenure isn’t just about coaching football – it’s about an institution trying to put a price on hope while their coach redefines what hope means. Each clause, each bonus, and each carefully worded provision reveals a program desperate to believe it has found its answer while simultaneously hedging against the possibility that it hasn’t. At 5-5, Brown isn’t just managing a football team – he’s curating an entertainment experience worth millions, where the game might be an excuse for the party in the parking lot.
In the complex marketplace of college football coaching talents, Kevin Wilson’s career trajectory reads like a case study in the industry’s peculiar definition of failure and success. Here’s a coach who helped orchestrate some of the most prolific offenses in college football history at Oklahoma, got fired from Indiana for winning too little, landed at Ohio State, where he helped set conference records, and then – in a move that defies conventional career logic – chose to take over at Tulsa, where he’s currently orchestrating what might be called a masterclass in proving why offensive coordinators don’t always make great head coaches.
The numbers tell a story that no Wall Street analyst would want to pitch to investors: 7-13 at Tulsa, adding to a career head coaching record of 33-60. But the path to those numbers makes Wilson’s case so fascinating. This is a man who once presided over an Oklahoma offense that scored 716 points in a season (still third-best in FBS history), helped develop multiple Heisman Trophy finalists at Ohio State, and somehow managed to make Indiana’s offense lead the Big Ten in passing – a feat roughly equivalent to making Vermont a skiing powerhouse.
Wilson’s career is exciting because it perfectly captures the football industry’s inability to value talent properly. Here’s a coordinator who helped create offensive systems that generated billions in revenue for major programs, yet when given his own program at Indiana, was dismissed after going 6-6 – a record that at Indiana should have earned him consideration for canonization rather than termination. The official reason was “mistreatment of players,” but in college football’s economy, winning six games at Indiana while losing the PR battle proves about as sustainable as a crypto startup with good fundamentals but an evil Twitter presence.
The move to Tulsa represents the greatest market inefficiency in college football or its most predictable regression to the mean. Wilson left a position at Ohio State where he was helping generate NFL quarterbacks like a factory assembly line to take over a program where success is measured in bowl eligibility rather than national championships. It’s as if a quantitative trader left Renaissance Technologies to manage a local credit union’s investment portfolio.
The tragedy isn’t that Wilson is failing at Tulsa – it’s that his career perfectly illustrates college football’s inability to distinguish between the skills needed to coordinate an offense and those required to run an entire program. His genius for designing plays that made Oklahoma and Ohio State unstoppable hasn’t translated into the ability to make Tulsa merely competitive. It’s the coaching equivalent of the Peter Principle: promoting someone until they reach their incompetence, except in this case, Wilson chose his promotion.
Ultimately, Kevin Wilson’s story isn’t just about wins and losses – it’s about how college football’s market for coaching talent consistently misvalues specialized skills. His career path from offensive mastermind to struggling head coach serves as a reminder that in college football’s economy, being brilliant at one thing doesn’t guarantee even basic competence at the next level up. At 3-5 this season, Wilson isn’t just coaching football – he’s providing a cautionary tale about the dangers of mistaking tactical brilliance for strategic leadership.
Some numbers tell you everything you need to know about a program’s soul. At Auburn, that number is $68 million – paid not to win games but to make coaches disappear since 2000. The figure transforms a football program into a case study of institutional behavior, like watching someone set fire to their house because they didn’t like the paint color.
Hugh Freeze arrived on the Plains as the latest solution to a problem Auburn can’t quite define. His 2-5 record wouldn’t be remarkable at many places, but it’s just the latest chapter in a story of perpetual dissatisfaction at Auburn. The Tigers have fired a coach two years after winning a national title (Gene Chizik), dismissed another despite his beating Alabama in odd-numbered years with mystifying regularity (Gus Malzahn), and scrapped Bryan Harsin for the crime of not being from around here.
What makes Freeze’s situation fascinating isn’t just his struggles – it’s how carefully Auburn planned for them. His contract reveals an institution that has learned one lesson from its past: how to structure a buyout. While previous coaches like Malzahn ($21.5 million) and Harsin ($15.6 million) had to be paid off like desperate ransom demands, Freeze’s $20.3 million sendoff can be stretched out in monthly installments through 2028, like a mortgage on mediocrity.
The cruel irony is that Freeze, hired to fix Auburn’s offense, has instead provided a masterclass in offensive futility. His team ranks among the SEC’s worst in scoring despite generating 444.5 yards per game – they’re breaking down exactly where the end zone comes into view. It’s as if someone hired Picasso to paint their house, and he insisted on using his feet.
Yet Freeze might survive, at least temporarily, because of a recruiting class ranked fifth nationally – though, as Texas A&M recently demonstrated by signing a top-20 class a month after firing Jimbo Fisher, even that achievement comes with an asterisk in the NIL era.
At 2-5, with five opponents ahead who all have better records, Freeze is approaching territory that not even Auburn’s most creative accountants can rationalize. He’s already matching Bryan Harsin’s pace toward dismissal and doing it with an offense that makes three yards and a cloud of dust look innovative.
The most revealing detail might be this: Auburn structured Freeze’s buyout not as a deterrent to firing him but as a more convenient mechanism. It’s the behavior of an institution that knows itself too well – like someone who builds the divorce settlement into their wedding vows.
In December 2021, Sonny Cumbie orchestrated what appeared to be a perfect audition. As Texas Tech’s interim coach, he dismantled Mike Leach’s Mississippi State team in the Liberty Bowl, displaying offensive creativity that makes athletic directors dream big dreams on small budgets. For Louisiana Tech, a program perpetually searching for innovation at discount prices, Cumbie represented a calculated risk: a quarterback whisperer who might turn Ruston into Conference USA’s laboratory for offensive evolution.
Twenty-four games later, that laboratory has produced mostly smoke. Cumbie’s record at Louisiana Tech reads like a scientific study in diminishing returns: 3-9, 3-9, and now 4-6, with an offense that’s regressed from five 40-point outbursts in 2022 to sporadic signs of life in 2024. The quarterback whisperer has largely gone silent.
But the real story isn’t in the wins and losses – it’s in the assembly of his coaching staff, where Louisiana Tech’s financial reality collides with its aspirations. “We are at the bottom rung of the assistant coach pay scale,” one fan noted, defending a collection of hires from places like Central Washington and Stephen F. Austin. Another countered, “None of these resumes are very impressive,” missing the point that impressive resumes rarely come at discount prices.
Consider the economics: Louisiana Tech offers Cumbie $900,000 annually, escalating to a modest $1 million, with $1.4 million to divide among ten assistants. In today’s college football, that’s like trying to build a sports car with spare parts from a bicycle shop. The program’s one notable coaching success story – Manny Diaz – stayed precisely one year before moving to bigger opportunities, a pattern that repeats itself across similar programs.
Cumbie’s tenure reveals the fundamental challenge facing programs like Louisiana Tech: they’re forced to bet on potential rather than proof, on coaches who might become something rather than those who already are. His staff, assembled from the outer reaches of college football’s map, represents either brilliant talent spotting or desperate bargain hunting, depending on your perspective and, crucially, the final score.
The tragedy isn’t that Cumbie is failing; his failure was priced into the system from the start. That Liberty Bowl victory, rather than launching a career, may have obscured an essential truth: miracles rarely come with multi-year warranties in college football’s modern economy.
At 10-24 overall, Cumbie has reached the point where even patient programs begin asking hard questions. But perhaps the most challenging question isn’t about Cumbie – it’s whether any coach, given Louisiana Tech’s resources, could build something sustainable from spare parts and promises.
At Arkansas, they’re learning that timing in college football isn’t just about when to fire your coach – it’s about understanding when you’ve lost the luxury of waiting. The Razorbacks find themselves trapped in a maze of their construction: $40 million in new financial obligations from revenue sharing and settlements, a coach with a $10 million buyout that nobody can quite justify, and a contract clause that threatens to extend the very situation fans are desperate to escape.
Sam Pittman’s tenure reads like a cautionary tale about institutional decision-making. In 2021, when his team peaked at No. 8 in the country, Arkansas rewarded a coach who had never led another program with contract protections that assumed he had somewhere else to go. “Zero leverage in any negotiations,” as one fan put it, somehow translated into maximum security.
Now, at 5-5, with Louisiana Tech and Missouri remaining, Arkansas faces a peculiar mathematical crisis: two more wins, including a potential bowl victory, would trigger an automatic extension. It’s the kind of clause that transforms every touchdown into a threat, every victory into a potential long-term liability.
The administration’s whispered excuse – waiting for revenue sharing to settle before making any moves – ignores a crucial market reality: this may be the recent slowest season for Power Five vacancies. While Arkansas waits for perfect conditions, they’re watching their coach surrender 694 yards to Ole Miss in the most expensive audition for an extension in SEC history.
The genuinely revealing detail isn’t Pittman’s 28-30 record or even the historic defensive collapse against Ole Miss. The architecture of decisions led Arkansas to create a contract where success and failure became equally problematic. They built a system where winning just enough could be worse than losing outright.
As the Louisiana Tech game approaches, Arkansas faces a question beyond football strategy: How much does it cost to fix a mistake before it compounds itself? In a season where every other Power Five job remains secure, the opportunity to make a change has never been more evident – or more urgently needed before those two fateful wins can materialize.
The irony isn’t lost on a fanbase watching their program twist into financial knots. They know that while $10 million might seem steep to move on from Pittman, it’s a bargain compared to the long-term cost of letting him stay just long enough to earn the right to stay longer.
College football usually punishes hubris swiftly, but at UAB, they’re experimenting to see how long an administration can ignore reality. The results aren’t encouraging.
Trent Dilfer inherited Bill Clark’s masterwork – six straight winning seasons, two conference titles, a program that survived death once and emerged stronger. In less than two years, he’s transformed it into a case study in institutional denial. The on-field collapse would be enough: no first-half touchdowns in conference play, players ejected for shoving officials and post-touchdown headbutts. But it’s Dilfer’s “It’s not like this is freakin’ Alabama” dismissal that reveals the more profound dysfunction.
Athletic Director Mark Ingram’s steadfast support of Dilfer doesn’t read like loyalty so much as a refusal to acknowledge a $4.1 million mistake. The Jalen Kitna situation crystallizes the dynamic: faced with predictable backlash over signing a player dismissed from Florida on child pornography charges, the administration didn’t retreat – they dug in deeper, with Dilfer dismissing “initial headlines” as if they were discussing a parking ticket rather than felony charges.
The tragedy isn’t just in UAB’s regression from conference champion to cautionary tale. It’s in watching an administration convince itself that standing firm amid disaster demonstrates strength rather than stubbornness. While Dilfer jokes about his high school coaching days after 35-point losses, Ingram’s support transforms from professional courtesy to something more troubling: an administrator who can’t or won’t distinguish between standing by his coach and standing in the way of his program’s recovery.
The most revealing detail isn’t the empty stands or the lopsided scores – it’s the growing suspicion among boosters that this might be what program death looks like when it comes from within rather than from above. UAB once rallied a city to save its football team. Now they watch that same team dismantled by the people charged with protecting it, led by a coach who reminds them they’re not Alabama, backed by an AD who seems determined to prove it.
In the heart of Blacksburg, Virginia, a story of ambition, expectation, and the relentless pursuit of gridiron glory unfolds. Brent Pry, the man tasked with resurrecting Virginia Tech’s football program, stands at the center of this tale—a coach caught between the weight of history and the harsh realities of the present. Three years ago, Pry arrived at Lane Stadium with the promise of defensive brilliance and a return to the Hokies’ golden era. The faithful, hungry for success, embraced him. In early 2024, a staggering 75.1% of fans rated his performance at the top of the scale. Hope, it seemed, had found a new home in Virginia Tech. But in the unforgiving world of college football, where yesterday’s hero can quickly become today’s scapegoat, Pry’s journey has been anything but smooth. His first season in 2022 was a brutal 3-8 campaign—a record that would make even the most optimistic fan wince. It was as if the Hokies had forgotten how to win, their once-feared program reduced to a shadow of its former self. Yet, like any good underdog story, 2023 brought a glimmer of hope. A 7-6 record, capped by a Military Bowl victory, suggested that perhaps Pry’s process was beginning to bear fruit. The defense, long the backbone of Virginia Tech’s identity, cracked the top 20 nationally. For a moment, it seemed the tide was turning. But college football is a game of “what have you done for me lately,” and 2024 has been a study of unfulfilled potential. As November’s chill settles over the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Hokies sit at 5-4, their dreams of ACC contention fading like the autumn leaves. The faithful who once believed Pry would deliver an ACC championship now watch each game with bated breath, hoping for a miracle but fearing the worst. The numbers tell a story of their own. A 1-11 record in one-score games hangs around Pry’s neck like an albatross, each close loss a reminder of what could have been. It’s the statistic that keeps coaches up at night, poring over game film in search of answers that seem just out of reach. In the high-stakes chess match of college athletics, Pry’s moves are scrutinized with the intensity of a Wall Street earnings report. His contract, set to pay him $5 million a year by 2026, looms large—a bet placed by an administration hoping for a long-term payoff. But the clock is ticking in a world where patience is rare. As the 2024 season hurtles toward its conclusion, Brent Pry stands at a crossroads. The next chapter in this saga of redemption and reckoning will be in the coming months. In the stands of Lane Stadium, under the Friday night lights, the verdict on Pry’s tenure hangs in the balance—a reminder that in college football, as in life, the line between triumph and tribulation is often as thin as a goal line.
Get insider college football intel delivered to your inbox
Want insider analysis on college football program moves before they happen? Get hard-hitting insights, no fluff – straight to your inbox. Subscribe to the Coaches Hot Seat newsletter and be on the cutting edge of what’s happening in the world of college football.
