Profiles in Disillusion follows the weekend's conquered favorites and other notables through the stages of grief.

Depression. Arizona State coach Dennis Erickson: Your team has lost five straight games after Saturday's 23-13 loss to UCLA, and seven straight to teams from outside of the state of Washington, securing back-to-back losing seasons at ASU for the first time in 62 years. What do you tell your team to keep the locker room positive and psych them up to salvage the season with an upset over hated rival Arizona?

"The good news is, there's only one game left," Erickson said.

Uh, thanks for the pep talk, coach. Other terms used by Erickson to describe various aspects of the Sun Devils' performance over the last two seasons: "Horrifying" and "frickin' ridiculous." No wonder his charges looked like they were in cut-myself-just-to-feel mode after coughing up six turnovers and two defensive touchdowns to the offensively-challenged Bruins. For Devil fans, the longer the Erickson era drags on, the worse it's beginning to smell.

Anger. Les Miles has brought two division titles, two BCS bids, four straight bowl victories and a national championship to LSU. But bungling a two-minute drill in a game with nothing but regional pride on the line? Tiger blog And the Valley Shook has seen enough:

Read More »

It's not the kind of truism that'd show up on, say, an embroidered pillow, but that doesn't make it any less valid: If you're at the point where Baylor has become a "must-win game" for your program, something has gone horribly awry. That's precisely the situation Texas A&M finds itself in as coach Mike Sherman's second year draws to a close and a fresh 65-10 beating at the hands of Oklahoma -- the third straight year the Sooners have put the Aggies away by at least four touchdowns, and the tenth time in two years A&M has allowed at least 40 points in a loss -- continues to fester. With only two wins in their last seven games, the Aggies stand at 5-5 and have to beat the Bears to earn the first bowl invite of Sherman's tenure (and only their fourth bid in the past eight years).

If they don't beat Baylor this weekend, the Ags will have to get their sixth win against undefeated, third-ranked Texas on Thanksgiving night. Sherman's track record suggests this isn't likely, as he's lost his five games against ranked opponents (including last year's 49-9 loss to Texas, the most lopsided Longhorn win in the long history of the series) by an average of 26 points.

That's only part of the reason for Sherman's increasingly shaky status, though, the other part being that his teams aren't necessarily a lock to win the supposed gimme games, either. Sherman's tenure at A&M began with an embarrassing home loss to Arkansas State last year, and he finished his debut season 4-8 with squeakers over awful New Mexico and Army teams. This season, of course, his record has been tarnished by possibly the most humiliating loss any team has suffered this season, a 62-14 debacle at Kansas State, which had face-planted at Louisiana-Lafayette in September and in again in a 66-14 loss at Texas Tech just a week earlier.

And then there's last season's loss at Baylor, which all but sealed the deal on an 0-5 campaign against the rest of the Big XII South.

Read More »

Following the weekend's conquered favorites and other notables through the stages of grief.

Anger. Charlie Weis seemed so very, very fired even before Notre Dame's 27-22 loss at Pittsburgh -- even the staid old Chicago Tribune called the loss just "another speck in Charlie Weis' constellation of disappointments," rapidly imploding on itself -- that the Irish faithful couldn't possibly have anything left in their bile reserves for him, could they? Hasn't the man suffered enough?

Oh, you innocent lamb. The latest marathon comment thread at the Irish blog Blue-Gray Sky includes plenty of rage directed at the refs for various calls -- particularly the puzzling incomplete-pass/fumble switcheroo on ND's last offensive snap of the game -- but that rage is quickly redirected back to the sideline when some commenters start suggesting Weis will use the bad calls as an excuse to hang on for another season. At least a few Domers thinking that far ahead have already excised Weis from their visions entirely:

The new coach has to build around running the ball and playing defense, and winning the line of scrimmage. That is what football is all about.

Same deal at the blog Rakes of Mallow, where a broadside at the refs is followed directly by the requisite jab at Weis's weight, which almost seems quaint and even a little nostalgic at this point.

As the saying goes, though, it's when they stop complaining that you should really start worrying. On that note, perhaps the most ominous signs for the Irish program as a whole are comment threads like this one at the Tribune's Web site, in which readers who claim not to "give a rat's butt about that school" tear various strips off the Trib for spending so much ink on an out-of-state school in the first place -- presumably because they're looking to free up space for more info on Northwestern and Illinois? Ouch.

Read More »

Players, coaches and teams with the most at stake on Saturday.

With its convincing win over Florida State on Saturday night, Clemson moved into sole possession of first place in the ACC's Atlantic Division, potentially setting up the Tigers for their first-ever berth in the ACC Championship Game. That sentence should strike terror into the hearts of Clemson fans, whose optimism and confidence in prospective title runs has been cruelly betrayed each of the past three seasons.

Sometimes the collapse comes late, as in 2006's November collapse, or in 2007, when Clemson only needed to beat Boston College at home to sew up the division but gave up the winning touchdown pass on a busted coverage with less than two minutes to play. Then there was last year, when the title hopes of the overwhelming conference favorite evaporated before the clock hit double zeroes in the season opener. Either way, though, putting the phrase "division leader" anywhere near "Clemson" in a sentence has been the sportswriting equivalent of dousing a voodoo doll with gasoline and lighting a cigarette.

In fairness to the Tigers, I should probably point out that the good Doc debunked the notion of Clemson as perpetual underachiever at his old digs. Well, maybe not so much "debunked" as "balanced": While it's accurate to say that high preseason expectations were the program's kiss of death under Tommy Bowden, it's just as accurate to say that Clemson overachieved in years it was unheralded in the preseason.

Read More »

Following the weekend's conquered favorites and other notables through the stages of grief.

Denial. Nobody's denying that Charlie Weis is now responsible for both of Notre Dame's losses to Navy in the past 45 years, nor that ND's hopes for a BCS bowl have all but evaporated in the wake of the latest such upset on Saturday. But the causes for, and implications of, the loss are apparently still up for debate among members of the Irish faithful. Weis, who proudly assured the media after the game that "I never, ever change" regardless of the results on the field, may be the one in the biggest state of denial, if we can take Navy coach Ken Niumatalolo's assessment of Weis' scheme at face value:

"One thing that helped us, and I really hope this doesn't come across wrong, but I think the thing that helped us this year was last year, because we knew they'd line up the same way," Niumatalolo said.

"We had a pretty good clue that they were going to come back and do the same things as they did last year. We had a few things (planned for that defense)."

Obviously -- the Midshipmen rolled out 348 yards worth of "things" on the ground alone, with a 52-yard touchdown pass on one of their two completions. The denial extends far beyond the walls of Weis' press conferences, of course: Irish blog Brawling Hibernian, for example, is in denial about both Navy linebacker/cruise missile Ram Vela's seeming endless eligibility and the location of Jimmy Clausen's knees on the crucial goal line fumble in the third quarter that no one else is questioning. But Hibernian, along with the commenters at the ND blog Rakes of Mallow, is stone-cold sober about the high likelihood that Weis is toast after this season.

Start naming specific coaching prospects to Irish fans, though, and delusions of grandeur return in full bloom. Posters at the message board ND Nation can't seem to decide where to focus their hubristic presumption -- the idea that Urban Meyer would automatically drop everything and leave Florida for South Bend if the Irish showed even a hint of interest, or the idea that Notre Dame might actually be too good for a coach who only suspended his star linebacker for a half for eye-gouging. Irish blog Her Loyal Sons states its position on the issue rather definitively, instructing ND's fan base to "STFU about Meyer":

Read More »

Players, coaches and teams with the most at stake on Saturday.

To some extent, Rich Rodriguez has been on the spot ever since he took over from Lloyd Carr at Michigan, and even more so since Nov. 1, 2008, the day his first Michigan team lost at lowly Purdue, 48-42, clinching the program's first bowl-less season in 33 years and its first losing campaign in forty. A certain segment of the Wolverine fan base has never quite forgiven "RichRod" for that; though the prevailing wisdom from the very beginning has been that Rodriguez would need time to both re-invent a stodgy offense and make over a stodgy attitude that had pervaded the program, setting a new record for losses in a single season was never going to be anything other than an incredibly bitter pill to swallow for the nation's all-time winningest program.

So to say that Rodriguez is on the spot this weekend -- when the Wolverines will be hosting Purdue, incidentally -- is almost a given. But there was a time when it didn't have to be like this. A month ago, the Wolverines were 4-0, ranked in all the mainstream polls, and showing every indication of reversing the dramatic collapse of 2008; a small minority of pundits was starting to murmur about a potential sleeper run at a Big Ten title, and Ohio State fans, of all people, were casting jealous glances in the direction of the Wolverines and their true-freshman quarterback, Tate Forcier.

Since Michigan's 36-33 win over Indiana on the last Saturday in September, though -- a victory whose thin margin perhaps portended some of the team's ensuing struggles -- the Wolverines have fallen from 4-0 to 5-4, their one win coming against a horrifically overmatched I-AA squad that shouldn't have been on the schedule to begin with. The first couple losses were at least respectable -- an overtime road loss to hungry, desperate Michigan State, a two-point road loss to Iowa, which sits at No. 4 in the current BCS standings -- but there's no lipstick for the pig that is the Wolverines' most recent defeat, a 38-13 collapse against an Illinois team that had shown every indication of having packed it in for the season.

Read More »

Following the weekend's conquered favorites and other notables through the stages of grief.

Denial. Have you considered how weird it is to be a Southern Cal fan right now? Inexplicable early-season losses to unranked, overmatched opponents have become so predictable that Trojans backers have learned to prime themselves for it. But big-game losses to other ranked, BCS-contending opponents have been so rare -- and in the case of Saturday night's tire-iron-to-the-cranium from Oregon, unprecedented under Pete Carroll -- nobody can quite believe it. L.A. Daily News blogger Scott Wolf reports that the players themselves were utterly mystified:

"I could never imagine this in my career at USC," safety Will Harris said.

"I can't remember a game where a team pushed us around the field like that." -- USC safety Josh Pinkard

"Before the season I never thought this would happen," USC quarterback Matt Barkley said.

Trojan fans are equally stunned, of course, though in the case of SC fan Brendan Loy from The Living Room Times, that has more to do with the margin of defeat (27 points, worse than the margins of all seven of USC's prior losses since 2004 combined) than the defeat itself. The unprecedented beatdown had the Orange County Register (echoing the Doc's sentiments) declaring the end of the Trojans' seven-year reign in the Pac-10, Wolf comparing Pete Carroll unfavorably to Paul Hackett and at least one Trojan blog wondering if Carroll was maybe too distracted by his charity work to work the team into its usual big-game froth.

Still, as both Loy and L.A. Times columnist Bill Plaschke already seem prepared to concede, the most unthinkable indignity may still be yet to come for the Trojans, in the form of a trip to the -- gasp! -- Holiday Bowl?

Acceptance. Michigan lost to Illinois on Saturday in big, hopeless fashion, joining mighty Illinois State as the only skins on the Illini's wall this year. The response from the UM fanbase -- a cynical, Eeyorish bunch even in the best of times -- ranged from the somewhat militant love-it-or-leave-it manifesto at Wolverine Liberation Army to the traditional post-defeat critters at MGoBlog to a more philosophical take over at The Hoover Street Rag, which took the well-worn path of zen losers everywhere, via Bill Watterson:

Read More »

Players, coaches and teams with the most at stake this weekend.

No matter what any Georgia fan might tell you, the world will continue to turn if the Bulldogs lose to Florida. It's been a long time since the Dawgs could head into the Cocktail Party (or whatever the schools' killjoy presidents insist on calling it these days) without being worried that something awful was going to happen; since Steve Spurrier took the reins at Florida in 1990, Georgia is 3-16 against the Gators, and it's rarely mattered whether UGA has had the more talented team, the higher ranking, the better coach, or anything else. The Dawgs just seem to have developed a mental complex about this game that no amount of momentum or end-zone celebrating can fix for long.

Even with that history in mind, there's a slightly different mood surrounding this year's game, and it's one that can't feel at all familiar (or pleasant) to Georgia coach Mark Richt, who enters the most critical week of the season feeling more heat than he has at any point in his Georgia tenure. And while this game alone will not be enough to get him fired -- or even put him on a meaningfully "hot seat" -- it will be used as a barometer of how the Georgia program is faring under his watch, and how prepared he is to guide that program out of its deepest trough in at least a decade.

How deep? Despite a string of A-plus recruiting classes and a defense and offensive line that returned nearly all their impact players from last season, the '09 Bulldogs sit at 4-3, already just one loss away from matching the worst number Richt has sustained in a single season. Even that wouldn't necessarily be all that embarrassing -- particularly given the rough and tumble schedule over the first two months -- if the Dawgs were doing anything particularly well at this point.

But the statistics suggest they're not: Georgia is 10th in the SEC in both total offense and total defense, 11th in pass defense (in terms of both yards allowed and efficiency), and dead last in the league in rushing yards, scoring defense and turnover margin.

Read More »

Following conquered favorites and other wounded notables through the stages of grief.

Depression. Twice now Arkansas has taken on its old coach, the controversial Mr. Houston Nutt, and twice now they've failed in achieving their revenge on the villain for ... well, whatever it was he supposedly did to disgrace the Razorback name while sustaining a competitive program in Fayetteville. Given the recent animosity between Rebs and Hogs, Saturday's two-touchdown spanking in Oxford -- sparked by a career day from Ole Miss' jack-of-all-trades, Dexter McCluster -- proved to be a little more than KevinHog of the blog Arkansas Expats was prepared to handle:

An alternative title to this one is "McClustererd!" or if you want to put it another way, "McCluster [expletive]!" Whatever I title the post, it isn't going to fully capture just how down and in the dumps I am today about the Hogs losing to Ole Miss and Houston Nutt for the second year in a row. It feels like salt in the wound coming after last week's loss to Florida. A good thrashing of Eastern Michigan next week will help the healing process, but it is going to take some wins against SEC competition to possibly get us back to that first quarter feeling of the Georgia game when it looked like this Hog program had taken on a new identity ...

At Razorbloggers.net, the despression turns into outright self-loathing for one particularly guilt-ridden Hog fan:

I am no fan of [Houston Nutt] but in this world what goes around comes around. We had this coming to us for all abuse we have been heaping on him and Ole Miss. At some point devine justice steps in and says enough is enough. I am pointing my finger at myself first.

Does it still qualify as Stockholm Syndrome if the guy you're sympathizing with isn't actually keeping you captive anymore?

Anger. Two weeks ago, Texas Tech beat Kansas State by 52 points. One week ago, that same K-State team turned around and beat Texas A&M by 48. So while the prospect of the Red Raiders beating the Aggies by an even hundred was somewhat far-fetched, it was at least grounded in some kind of recognizable logic.

And it's also the reason you'll have to forgive some of the readers over at Double T Nation for being more than a little upset about the actual outcome, which involved the Aggie offense unloading on the Raiders in a 52-30 laugher.

Read More »

Players, coaches and teams with the most at stake on Saturday.

When the clock ticked down to 00:00 on Saturday's installment of the Red River Shootout and the cannon on the Texas side of the Cotton Bowl went off to signal a Longhorn victory, the shot might as well have been fired right through the Oklahoma Sooners' hearts. There they were, fresh off a valiantly fought three-point loss to the third-ranked team in the nation without their Heisman-winning quarterback, yet it felt like time to administer last rites to the season: The Sooners dropped to 3-3 (and, 24 hours later, out of the coaches' poll) with a marquee win to date over Baylor, and they managed to lose Sam Bradford before he was ever really back, maybe for good this time, courtesy of a dramatic first-quarter hit that re-aggravated the shoulder injury that had sidelined him for the first month of the season.

That 3-3 record is a little misleading -- the Sooners are only 1-1 in Big XII play, so technically they're still in the race for the conference crown. But the injuries to Bradford and star tight end Jermaine Gresham -- not to mention the inexperience and ongoing uncertainly among the offensive line and receivers -- are real enough. So is the remaining schedule: OU's remaining six opponents are a combined 26-12, and it's anyone's guess when or even whether Bradford will return on that track. (Even some Sooner fans with whom I waited in line for fried pork chips at the Texas State Fair said that Bradford's best option now was to sit out the rest of the season and prepare for next year's draft). For now, the Sooners' hopes at 24th-ranked Kansas Saturday ride on freshman QB Landry Jones and "Big Game Bob" Stoops, who are tasked with avoiding a fourth loss and holding the sky in place for another week.

Is there precedent for the kind of second-half surge OU would need to claw its way back to respectability? In fact, there is: The '05 Sooners actually entered the Kansas game at 2-3 and in worse shape than this year's team. After losing a stunner to TCU in the opener (in which, incidentally, the linchpin of their offense, Adrian Peterson, briefly left the game due to an ankle injury), the Sooners were blown up by UCLA and Texas by an aggregate score of 86-36; following the Red River game, Oklahoma didn't have a single vote in either major poll.

Read More »