Point Blank – September 26

What a “Bettor Better Know” – NCAA #4

The shifting sands of the NCAA coaching landscape come front and center this week, a rather dramatic move made in Baton Rouge; some drastic and proper steps being taken in South Bend; and Ron Turner being told to not report for work this week at FIU, even though there is little indication that he had been showing up anyway.

Since there is another long read ahead it will be another Jukebox Monday, and The Who will make their second appearance of the early season, a fitting time since they will soon be just down the road a bit short, joining so many greats for Desert Trip, which unfortunately is taking place right in the middle of football season. So with Les Miles at the top of the topic list we go to “I Can See for Miles”, this one from last year in Glastonbury - 

Item: This time, Les is no more (the offense had Miles to go before being any good)

Few coaches in the history of college football have been as successful as Les Miles, who went 114-34 at LSU, only Alabama posting a better record in the SEC during that time. But few coaches have also skated as close to the edge as Miles while having that success, largely because it set a high standard of expectation. This time the writing was on the wall because not only did the Tigers lose twice in September, they lost twice without any semblance of the offense having developed, an offense that just happens to have the best RB in the country.

So for Miles, and OC Cam Cameron, who was fortunate to have survived this long, the LSU head-sets are gone for good. 

Of course you do not have to feel sorry for Les – his buy-out is pegged at $12.9 million, minus whatever amount he has already been paid from his $4.3 million for 2016. Now the question for the handicapper is what comes next. 

At many programs firing a coach like Miles, who is a good motivator and extremely popular with his players, might be a risky move this early in the season, potentially setting off a rebellion. I don’t believe that will be the case. Taking over as HC will be Ed Orgeron, formerly HC at Ole Miss, before going 6-2 as the interim HC at USC when Lane Kiffin was fired. Orgeron is one of the best recruiters in the nation, and was the primary guy in terms of signing many players on the current roster. He brings an old-school personality that should anchor things pretty darn well.

There is also, of course, big-time DC Dave Aranda, and you can’t put much blame for those two defeats on this defense, which only allowed one TD across eight quarter in those games. Taking over the offense will be Steve Ensminger, an LSU grad who has been an OC at Texas A&M and Clemson, while also working at Georgia and Auburn, and has been back with his alma mater since 2010. They won’t skip a beat under him, and the designs might even be better than Cameron’s.

There may be a perception of chaos with the program in the betting marketplace, but I don’t see it. Might there even be opportunities to play on the Tigers if they get downgraded too far?
As for the biggest reason for Miles failing in recent seasons, his inability to attract a top QB and develop a passing game, there is a whole lot of that going on around the SEC…

Item: Just how bad are the SEC QBs (and not just this season)

It isn’t just LSU that has struggled with QB play this season, it has become a factor across the entire SEC. To be kind, the quality of the QB play stinks. 

Neither Danny Etling nor Austin Appleby were anything special at Purdue. Greyson Lambert was mediocre at Virginia. Tevor Knight had one brilliant bowl game for Oklahoma, but transferred out because he was not going to keep a starting job. All four of those guys have had starts for SEC teams already, although Lambert has been beaten out by the younger Jacob Eason at Georgia. How bad was the LSU recruiting that Etling was able to move into the #2 slot? The schools playing their own recruits have not been faring all that much better – do you see the NFL scouts drooling anywhere?

The SEC has become the top conference in the nation in recent years because it has been able to recruit the best defensive players from the talent-rich southern states. But could a case be made that because there is so much focus on defense, great QBs choose to go to somewhere else, like the pass-happy Big 12 of Pac 12? Consider this – since 2010 there have only been two SEC QBs go on to become full-time NFL starters, Cam Newton, who only played one season at Auburn, and Dak Prescott, who is starting this season because Tony Romo is injured (though on merit he is showing that he is a legit NFL starter). 

Want to know how bad it really is? Here are the other SEC QBs since 2010 that are even in the league – AJ McCarron is the #2 at Cincinnati; Ryan Mallett the #2 in Baltimore; Tyler Bray is #3 in Kansas City; Brandon Allen is #3 in Kansas City; Zach Mettenberger is #3 in Pittsburgh; and Connor Shaw is on the Reserve list for the Bears. That is it. What has been a major weakness at LSU is indeed a weakness, but it is one that is spreading across the league. There is a style of football that some of the best QBs coming out of high school are saying no to, and perhaps some defenses that they just don’t want to go up against. 

Item: Brian Van Gorder didn’t get to face any SEC QBs, but some of those he did face weren't really ready

Joining Miles and Cameron as high-profile coaches that didn’t last through September is Notre Dame’s Van Gorder, and it is difficult to find any fault with Brian Kelly’s timing. In 2014, after Van Gorder replaced Bob Diaco, how the HC at Connecticut, the Fighting Irish had their worst defense of the Kelly era, allowing 29.2 points and 404 yards per game. They improved last year but were still nothing special, and not only have they been a failure this season, allowing 32.7 points and 455 yards per game (the points don’t include a Duke kickoff return for a TD), but when you go deeper into the circumstances of the QBs they have faced it has been even worse: 

--In the opener, they were facing a true freshman in Shane Buechele of Texas.

--Last week it was Michigan State’s Tyler O’Connor, making his second-ever road start.

--This past Saturday it was Duke red-shirt freshman Daniel Jones. 

Mixed in there was also a rout of Nevada, which does not account for much – not even Van Gorder was going to be out-schemed by Brian Polian.

Michigan State and Duke both had their best offensive game of the season, by far, against the Fighting Irish in South Bend. The Spartans rolled to 36 points and 503 yards; against Wisconsin this past week the production fell to six and 325. Duke rolled up 31 and 500 (again not counting the KO return), the points more than against Wake Forest and Northwestern the previous two weeks combined.

Injuries and suspensions have been a problem for the Fighting Irish in the secondary, but in each game they have simply been out-schemed, and there has not been a single sack from a member of a DL that looked promising on paper. In particular was the feebleness of the defense in Saturday’s loss, after Duke had struggled mightily vs. those previous two pedestrian opponents. Stepping in will be Greg Hudson, who has not done anything to raise any eyebrows in previous DC stints with Minnesota, East Carolina and Purdue, so there is no reason to expect any magic, although at this stage the defense probably can’t get any worse.

I’ll get back to Michigan State in a moment, but first another coaching situation to clear up…

Item: Ron Turner had already left the building…

I upgraded Florida International a half point after the firing of Turner. I do not believe any coach in the nation was bringing less passion to his program than a veteran of too many coaching battles that was just biding his time until retirement. The recruiting was flat, the offensive schemes, which were supposed to be his forte, were checkers instead of chess, and the players were not taking the field with much enthusiasm.

FIU AD Pete Garcia summed it up succinctly - “0-4, and losing the way we had the pat couple of games, the quicker you do it the better. This way they still have their (conference) season to play, and they can start that 0-0.” If the effort isn’t there, better to give the players a fresh start and not have an entire season get wasted. 

Ron Cooper’s resume is nothing special – he didn’t do anything special at Eastern Michigan; his post-Howard Schnellenberger tour at Louisville was downright ugly, a slide from 7-4 to 5-6 to 1-10 (they only game the Cardinals won that season was against 0-11 Illinois); and four seasons at Alabama A&M brought a yawn-inducing 23-22. Since then he has bounced around as an assistant at various outposts for 15 years. But the change itself has a chance to light some kind of spark for a team that was not playing with any energy, and in particular I will be reading between the lines to see if there is a rapport between Cooper and the players (this is only his second season with the program).

Item: The game flow and the scoreboard did not sync up at East Lansing

Sub-Item: The game flow and the scoreboard did not sync up at Cowboy Stadium

Sub-Item: The game flow and the scoreboard did not sync up at Tempe

I am going to use this set of games to set up the lead topic for Wednesday, the annual early-season tribute to Shakespeare with “The Play’s The Thing”, but for now be careful with your gradings of Wisconsin/Michigan State, Arkansas/Texas A&M and California/Arizona State.

The Wisconsin scoreboard rout in East Lansing did not represent the field at all – those were two even teams battling it out, State actually having slight edges in first downs and total offense, but there were some major “bounce” plays that went into the Badgers directions, one TD directly scored, and another set up via a five-yard drive, that had no real Wisconsin football merit attached.

With 2:30 left in the third quarter Arkansas and Texas A&M were tied 17-17, and the Razorbacks had the ball on the Aggies one-yard line. There is more to be learned from that game position than the 45-24 final score. Arizona State was trailing California 27-20 entering the fourth quarter, and it was 34-34 with 6:21 remaining. Over that final stretch the Sun Devils ran six plays and gained 10 yards (I don’t count a one-yard loss on a kneel down at the end), yet scored 17 points. The Golden Bears had the ball for 19 consecutive offensive snaps, and got out-scored 14-7 during that sequence.

More to come on the theme on Wednesday, but for now I don’t have a downgrade of any of those three losing teams, nor an upgrade of any of the three winners. 

Item: Penn State is a different kind of “Linebacker U” this season

James Franklin wasn’t fired at Penn State following Saturday’s non-competitive loss at Michigan, but it is likely that the first seeds are being planted. There have been three road challenges against the Big 10 elite the past two seasons, trips to Ohio State, Michigan State and Michigan, and the Nittany Lions were not even competitive, losing by 106 points. While the circumstances at Penn State continue to make this a difficult building process, Franklin may be overmatched at this level. That is for the administration to determine later; for now he does have a built in excuse that matters to the handicapper – a school that is often referred to as “Linebacker U” because of so many greats that have played the position, now gets the name for an entirely different reason.

When Penn State takes the practice field on Tuesday there will be four scholarship LBs available. That is all. It is a combination of not having recruited much depth at the position, with one signed in 2016; three in 2015; and two each in 2014 and 2013, but also attrition taking a toll. Two of those eight recruits are no longer with the program, and injuries have ravaged the one position group Franklin could not afford - 

"Our linebacker situation, I don't know if I've ever seen anything like it. We're just going to have to keep moving guys. Right now, we're going to have a hard time practicing with the number of guys that we have, so we may have to continue moving guys, different positions; I don't know if I've ever seen anything like this before. "

Note Franklin’s focus on “practice”. It is one thing to be depth-shy in a game, which brings the natural consequences, but always remember that a significant part of what ends up on the scoreboard each Saturday is what takes place on the practice field during the week. If you don’t have the numbers, how do you both put your first team defense together, but also have a second-unit that the offense can go up against? Is there any way to put the scout team together, the group that would emulate the Minnesota defensive schemes, when you don’t have the bodies?

Among the issues on game day this week will be Brandon Smith having to sit out the first half, after getting a targeting penalty at Michigan. A key to follow during the week is if they can get Jan Johnson, Jason Cabinda or Brandon Bell on to the practice field; otherwise there just won’t be much that DC Brent Pry can dial up.

Item: On coping with Bowling Green…

There was another scoreboard that did not tell a proper tale from Saturday, although it came pretty close – the 77-3 Memphis rout of Bowling Green. What is difficult to reconcile is that for as bad as it was, it could have been much worse. The Tigers led 70-3 with 4:40 left in the third quarter and completely backed off, and starting QB Riley Ferguson never took the field in the second half, after throwing for 359 yards and six TDs in the first two quarters.

How about this for a trivia teaser – 11 different players scored TDs in that game, all from the same team.

It is not a surprise that Bowling Green would fall off a bit after losing Dino Babers, but this has been the most drastic Power Rating downgrade that I can recall in over three decades of charting the NCAA gridirons. The Falcons have lost to the spread by 109.5 points through the first three lined games, an unheard of market error of 36.5 per game. What the hell happened?

There is a transition going on offensively, with former Texas tech assistant Mike Jinks in charge, and with an able QB in James Knapke one would not have expected it to be as difficult as it has been. That unit may come around, but the defense has been a disaster. That unit started five under-classmen on Saturday, with seven more on the two-deep. 

Jinks was harsh about that defense afterwards, perhaps being honest, but might he have been too blunt for his young squad - “Defensively those are the guys that we’ve got. That’s what there is to play with. So it is what it is. … We can’t go to the waiver wire and pick up some more football players. This is our football team, for better or worse.”

Bowling Green is -3 over Eastern Michigan this week. If we use our good friends at The Gold Sheet as a neutral source, had this been the opening week of the season the line off of their power ratings would have been -26. This is a staggering adjustment given where these teams have been in MAC play in recent years, and the sort of thing I would often look to play against, but right now I can’t find anything in the Falcons showings that can be trusted, with the post-game frustrations from Jinks on Saturday leading me to believe that maybe things really are that bad.

Item: On grading Final Drives (North Carolina went 3-3 on 4^th down plays to beat Pittsburgh)

Here is another tricky grade – the drama of North Carolina’s final drive to beat Pittsburgh 37-36, the Tar Heels going 63 yards in 17 plays (73 net yards with a penalty included) over the final 3:35. It is something that comes up often on final drives, and through all of the crunching it is not easy to find a balanced solution – how much does the handicapper discount fourth down plays?

In this instance they were huge, North Carolina converting on 4th-and-7, 4^th-and-6 and 4^th-and-9 on that game-winning march. What happens statistically is that the offense is rewarded, and the defensive penalized, because the team with the ball is losing on the scoreboard. They go for it on fourth down because the game situation forces them to.

In terms of grading, you could credit the Pittsburgh defense with making three stops; those fourth-down distances being such that the offense would not have dared an attempt at any other time of the game (the final fourth down, from the 26-yard line, would have at least been a FG try). That is my preferred path; the rest of it gets taken care of with yard-per-play charts, which are so much more effective than base counts of total statistics. Those tables will grade it as 73 yards in 17 plays, a win for the defense and a loss for the offense, a far better measure of what transpired than the total production of the drive (73 yards, four first downs and seven points looks rather good otherwise).

Item: Tracking OT results as regulation only (especially for Totals)

One of the subjects that I will touch upon annually is that I only track regulation play in game results, for both the scoreboard and yardage tables, disregarding overtime because of the unique NCAA rules. The statistics do take some time, requiring the sorting out of the OT play-by-play, but the scoreboard is rather easy. The problem is that most stat services don’t even do the scoreboard sorting, and as such when trends get compiled a game like UL-Lafayette/Tulane will be tracked as an Over, despite the fact that it was 16-16 at the end of four quarters, more than two full TDs below the closing Total.

Saturday brought four different Totals that swung from Under to Over because of the added session (also Idaho/UNLV, Washington/Arizona and Vanderbilt/Kentucky), and you are better off in the long-run tracking each of those results as Under’s, in terms of predictive value going forward.

Item: And it is official...

TeaserDude has won the Chicago Cubs -200 pool, getting a clean ride through the weekend. The losers can also be particularly jealous because his local options for that prize are among the best that anyone in North America could hope for. I will update when the particular parlor is chosen.

In the Sights, Monday MLB…

I am surprised that the marketplace is offering up Bartolo Colon and the Mets in this short range given all of the circumstances that are in play, so it will be #905 New York (7:10 Eastern) in play, with as low as -114 out there in the early trading, and value extending up to -125.

There doesn’t need to be much said about the devastation the Marlins are going through, the final week of the season becoming a long and difficult cycle. But in terms of baseball specifics, just how ready can Adam Conley be, pitching for the first time in five weeks because of tendonitis in the third finger of his pitching had? Because it is September there was no opportunity for him to get a rehab start.

Perhaps the value biggest story here has been the markets simply not accepting how good Colon has been. His 14-7/3.12 overall has been superb, but down the stretch when the Mets have needed him the most he has stepped up in a major way – in 10 starts since August 1^st it has been a 5-1/2.26, allowing two earned runs or less eight times through that stretch. Over his last two starts he has had more strikeouts than base-runners allowed, and there are few pitchers that can be trusted more to keep their cool under the Playoff pressure that is out there. Meanwhile the latter stages are also well-set, all key arms in the bullpen fresh courtesy of yesterday’s easy rout of the Phillies.

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