I was playing the original Legend of Zelda video game the other night, and the saga starts when protagonist Link wanders into a cave where an old man awaits with a sword.
“It’s dangerous to go alone,” he opines. “Take this.”
In a mashup that might only occur inside my classic-video-game-and-sports-addled mind, my thoughts wandered within a cave of metaphors. Suddenly, I pondered how college football coaches need the same old man outside their offices, offering contract papers instead of weaponry.
It’s been a tough half-season for college coaches, and they’d do well to be armed, but with ironclad employment deals instead of swords: magic, white, wooden or otherwise. With Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy among the first, 11 coaches have already seen their contract papers replaced with walking papers. With several other “dead men walking” — like Wisconsin’s Luke Fickell and Florida State’s Mike Norvell — the total number of headset-clad individuals on the unemployment line likely will grow.
It’s a bloodletting that would border on record-breaking, if such records were officially kept. According to my limited research, 2010 saw the most coaches — 14 — fired or forced to resign under pressure within a single season.
The weird thing is, if you’d asked me before this season started, I thought the days of rampant mid-season and mid-contract firings were numbered. If a coach ran a clean program, proved competent at some level and had a decent culture built within the team, it seemed the money spent to buy out a coach’s contract would be better allocated to fix other problems.
With the age of name/image/likeness (NIL) and revenue-sharing upon us, spending millions upon millions to pay someone NOT to coach seems wasteful at best and reckless at worst. But it seems the desire to toss out the old, bring in the new and start eyeing the transfer portal has won out. Well north of $100 million from university athletic departments across the country is being spent on the fired coaches this year … not counting those still cashing paychecks from the past few seasons.
Yet here we are, with two coaches fired last week (Colorado State’s Jay Norvell and Florida’s Billy Napier) and many others facing the guillotine.
All of that, of course, brings us to the teeter totter of OU head coach Brent Venables’ perceived job security. Venables has proven competent at building a world-class defense, and he has become a top-level recruiter. The culture within OU’s locker room also seems to be positive, as few impact players have transferred out during his three-plus years at the helm. And there have been no more, or even fewer, off-the-field incidents than other programs have endured.
One thing Venables hasn’t done, however, is win big. Outside of a 10-win season in 2023 with what might have been the easiest schedule in program history, he had posted two losing seasons coming into this year.
Ten years ago, a coach like Venables might not have survived a second losing season in three years at a place like Oklahoma. At a blue-blood program with such high expectations, it probably would have been time to cut bait and try again on the coaching market. In our current era, though, OU’s administration likely saw a struggling coach with some positive attributes and decided to help instead of send him packing. In came a more robust NIL program, a top-notch general manager and stronger support staff, all paid with money that didn’t need to be spent on a contract buyout.
It sounded like a smart, Moneyball-esque play in my book — regardless of the outcome on Owen Field on Saturday — one I thought would become more of the norm around the country. But obviously, I’m wrong.
Penn State just paid the second-largest buyout ever given to a fired coach, when said coach was three weeks removed from having a top-five team and just one season after securing TWO victories in the College Football Playoff.
I’m interested to see if/how such a payout will hurt the program, with money that could have helped retain players and strengthen staff going out the door and down the highway instead. I’m also curious to see whom Penn State will find to replace a guy with 104 wins and five top-10 finishes in 12 seasons at the school.
Whomever it is, I recommend that he carry a copy of his contract wherever he travels, as it’s dangerous to go alone.
It’s also dangerous to drink peanut butter-and-banana-flavored whiskey while watching your favorite team lose miserably. Yet, here we all are together for the aptly named Hangover Highlights.
- Saturday’s 34-26 home loss by the No. 14 Sooners to eighth-ranked Ole Miss was as disappointing an OU football game I’ve suffered through in many years.
- Everything supposedly a strength of this year’s Sooners was brutally exposed as lies. A great defense! Nope, a good defense brought down to Earth by a team with an actual pulse on offense. An exciting new quarterback! Nope, a quarterback whose accuracy has proved to be as shaky as his ability to read coverages. An up-and-coming offensive coordinator! Nope, a play-caller who let his best offensive weapon touch the ball just twice in the final eight minutes of the game.
- Ole Miss methodically out-coached and outplayed the Sooners for much of the day, with coach Lane Kiffin even effortlessly dunking on defensive tackle David Stone during a post-game interview.
- The Sooners had just 16 rushing yards in the first half on nine carries against one of the weaker rushing defenses in the SEC. Outside of a bolt-from-the-blue 76-yard touchdown pass by John Mateer to Isaiah Sategna III to open the second quarter, the Sooners had little offensive success at all in the opening 30 minutes. Counting the Sategna TD reception, the Sooners collected four first downs in the entire half.
- I’ll give OU credit for making a game of things in the second half. Running back Xavier Robinson broke out in a big way with two touchdown runs and 100-plus rushing yards. Showing refreshing vision for an OU back, Robinson’s effort helped the Sooners gain a brief lead, 26-25, late in the third quarter. But the spark of hope quickly extinguished, as Ole Miss scored a touchdown on the next possession and never trailed again.
- As has been the case with many Venables defeats, it wasn’t so much that the Sooners lost as simply HOW they did. A defense that looked incredible in the first half of the season allowed the Rebels to convert nine third downs, pass for 315 yards and total a whopping 431 yards of offense. Mateer, who is believed to be almost fully recovered from his thumb surgery last month, had trouble spotting open receivers or finding open running lanes, with both available throughout the game.
- His offensive coordinator didn’t cover himself with laurels either. Despite Xavier Robinson proving himself to be an X-factor for the offense, OU offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle only gave him the ball TWICE in the final eight minutes of the game. The sophomore running back had been the main reason the Sooners were even in the game to that point, but Arbuckle stopped handing him the rock. The first-year OU offensive coordinator started the second half with putrid QB draws, and he also called a baffling stretch-run play from the doorstep of his own end zone that resulted in a safety. Stretch runs are notoriously difficult to block and slow to unfold — two things you wouldn’t think you’d want to mess with from your own goal line.
- What now for the Sooners? A gauntlet of good-to-great teams await: Tennessee (in Knoxville), Alabama (in Tuscaloosa), Missouri (at home) and LSU (at home). At this point, OU is what it is: A mistake-prone squad with a middling offense and a good — but apparently not elite — defense. That sure seems unlikely to result in many — if any — wins from this point on.
- Meanwhile, Oklahoma State is having its worst season since it finished 0-10-1 in 1991. The rudderless mess in Stillwater is simply playing out its string of games and hoping not to crash into the Seretean Center for the Performing Arts.
- The Cowboys were blanked 42-0 on Saturday by a Texas Tech team that seemed disinterested in shooting for a massive blowout and more focused on keeping guys healthy.
- OSU again trotted out wide receiver Sam Jackson V as the quarterback, with the same results as previous weeks. Jackson had just 48 passing yards, and backup Noah Walters added 33. The Cowboys managed just 182 total yards while being blanked for the first time this season.
- I really wish I could say more, but a program without a head coach, healthy quarterbacks and an only-just-this-week-under-contract athletic director is hard to discuss. Since the game was played on the road, we didn’t even get to enjoy a banana conga line or a section full of tarps-off individuals.
- Heck, because of the recent controversy between Texas Tech and the Big 12 about throwing things on the field, we also couldn’t revel in Tech fans flinging tortillas after big plays.
- Whatever good vibes Arizona State had after toppling Tech from the realm of the unbeaten last week died a sputtering death in the Valley of the Sun on Saturday night. The Sun Devils were downed by Houston, 24-16, which only puts further doubts on the strength of the Big 12 Conference.
- Both Alabama and Texas somehow … SOMEHOW … emerged victorious Saturday despite each trailing late in the fourth quarter. Alabama was down eight points with fewer than three minutes left but scored back-to-back touchdowns in the final seconds to defeat South Carolina, 29-22. Texas, meanwhile, faced a 17-point fourth quarter deficit at Mississippi State before toppling the Bulldogs in overtime, 45-38.
- No. 10 Vanderbilt survived 15th-ranked Missouri, 17-10, in one of only three games this week between ranked teams. I didn’t expect to see a defensive battle break out between the offensively potent Commodores and Tigers, but there it was tied 3-3 at halftime.
- The game reached a climax while tied at 10 in the fourth quarter when Vanderbilt’s C.J. Heard simply took the ball out of Missouri running back Jamal Roberts’ hands and ran the other way. It sparked a methodical, game-winning, 10-play, 44-yard drive for Vandy, capped by a 1-yard TD dive from my BFF, Diego Pavia, with fewer than two minutes remaining.
- The other game between ranked teams turned quickly as third-ranked Texas A&M scored four touchdowns in the opening 16 minutes of its second half against No. 20 LSU, en route to a 49-25 blowout. With the post-halftime meltdown, LSU’s Brian Kelly can comfortably be placed on the coaching hot seat.
- Could Kelly and Venables be competing for their coaching lives when LSU and Oklahoma meet at the end of the season? There’s a lot of football to be played between now and then, but don’t be surprised if each has copies of their contracts within reach as they leave the locker rooms for the Nov. 29 kickoff.
