Houston Nutt: Destroyer of quarterbacks

Give Ole Miss head coach Houston Nutt enough time and he’ll ruin a quarterback for you, just look at what he’s doing to Jevan Snead this season.  Last year, Snead was a pretty damn good quarterback for the Rebels, he even went eyeball to eyeball with Tim Tebow in Jesus 2.0’s backyard and came away a winner.  Here’s what his numbers ended up being:

2008 - 26 TD’s, 13 picks, 2,762 yards passing and a 145.5 passer rating

Through the first five games of this season, Sneads numbers (as well the fortunes of Ole Miss) have seen a steep decline:

2009 - 9 TD’s, 9 picks, 868 yards passing and a 107.6 passer rating

Now let’s compare Snead’s numbers to the numbers of other quarterbacks to this point of the season:

Tyson Lee, Mississippi State - 3 TD’s, 6 picks, 826 yards passing and a 108.8 passer rating
Greg Paulus, Syracuse - 8 TD’s, 10 picks, 1,187 yards passing and a 126.7 passer rating
Jonathan Crompton, Tennessee - 13 TD’s, 9 picks, 1,210 yards passing and a 129.1 passer rating
Terrelle Pryor, Ohio State - 9 TD’s, 6 picks, 948 yards passing and a 132.3 passer rating
Joe Kemp, Tulane - 4 TD’s, 5 picks, 883 yards and a 138.5 passer rating

Pryor can’t throw it a lick, Crompton’s not much better (except when he’s playing the 2009 Georgia defense), Paulus hadn’t played competitive football in five years, Kemp attempted 34 passes in 2008 and Lee is (and always will be) an absolute deer in headlights.  Yet all these quarterbacks are having better statistical seasons than Snead.

Maybe the prolonged exposure to Nutt is finally having an effect on the guy, because lord knows it’s happened to other quarterbacks.  While he was at Arkansas, Nutt developed Matt Jones into a drug addicted NFL wide receiver and also helped give Mitch Mustain the tools by which he would eventually become the third string quarterback at USC. 

A fantastic example of the Nutt Effect on quarterbacks is Casey Dick.  During Nutt’s last season at Arkansas, Dick was absolutely terrible, throwing 10 TD’s against 18 picks.  After Nutt was replaced by Bobby Petrino, Dick actually had a decent senior season in 2008, throwing for 2,500+ yards with 14 TD’s and 13 picks.  Want your kid to develop into a top flight NFL quarterback prospect?  Step number one is have him avoid Houston Nutt at all costs.

Son, I love you…now go sit on the bench

Speaking of quarterbacks playing badly, Colorado’s Cody Hawkins has been benched again by his father Dan in the wake of the Buffs’ second half collapse against Texas.  I really hope Cody gets his degree and subsequently finds a good paying job, because he’s going to need a couple years of therapy to repair this father-son relationship.

This means that for the second straight season, Colorado has decided to take the redshirt off of Tyler Hansen and put him under center.  The trouble with this scenario is that Hansen played terribly last season, with a passer rating in the low 80’s.  He’s definitely no knight in shining armor riding in from the Rockies to save the program.

It’s been a steady downhill slide for the younger Hawkins, who showed so much promise just two short seasons ago.  As a redshirt freshman in 2007, Cody led the Buffaloes to six wins (four more than the previous season) and an Independence Bowl bid.  It’s one thing to coach your kid in pee wee football, but on the collegiate level?  Seems like a lot more can go wrong than go right.

The no fun college town

Did Crockett and Tubbs pull up stakes, head up I-95 and end up in Amherst, MA?  Word came earlier this week that four UMass football players have been suspended following their arrests on drug charges.  The suspended Minutemen are junior DB James Carven, junior DL Bob McLaughlin, junior LB Mike Mele and sophomore DB Shane Viveiros.

My buddy Sean V. would say that these dudes all sound white, so they must have been busted for pills, but I have no idea what these guys were caught with.  Interestingly enough, these arrests came on the heels of news that the Amherst police are cracking down on unlicensed kegs being purchased within city limits.

Licensing a keg in Amherst involves going to the police station and filling out paperwork listing the people who live at the residence where the keg will be taken to.  Now that’s a royal pain in the ass for the college kids just hoping to get obliterated on the cheap following a long week of skipping classes.

This crackdown comes in the wake of an unusually high number of hospitilizations related to binge drinking by UMass students.  Damn, maybe they should start putting a time limit on keg stands up there.

With all the keg crackdowns and football player drug busts, can any fun be had by UMass students anymore?  It could be worse, they could reside in the worst college party town in American, that being Pullman, WA.  For years, Wazzu students have had to drive over the border to Moscow and party with University of Idaho students.  What’s the second worst college party town in America?  You guessed it…Moscow, ID.

How to not go out in style

Tom Osborne, now there’s a football coach who knew how to get out when the getting was good.  His record during his last five years as Nebraska’s coach?  A sterling 60-3, including a 4-1 record in bowl games.  That lone bowl blemish was a close loss to Bobby Bowden’s Florida State team in the ‘94 Orange Bowl.

Speaking of Bowden, he’s now become a guy who can only wish that his departure from the college game was as glorious as Osborne’s was.  As Bowden nears the end of a fantastic career, he’s become a strange icon…Florida State fans love him, but most don’t want him around anymore.

Foremost among those fans is Jim Smith (is that the most generic name in the history of generic names?), who happens to be the chairman of the Florida State University trustees.  He’s an FSU grad and he loves him some Seminole football, and he gave the following nugget to the Tallahassee Democrat the other day:  “We’re not paying to support an average or mediocre program.  We’re paying for a quality program, and we’re not getting that right now.”

OUCH.  Smith could probably be taken to task for a lack of gratitude, but hey, this is college football, where you’re only as good as your last 10-win season and BCS appearance (just ask Tommy Tuberville).  Bowden built a great program, but along with that he built up the expectations of the Seminole fan base.  Today, those expectations appear to be unrealistic for him to meet.

For now, I think the succession plan involving Jimbo Fisher taking over the coaching reins after Bowden’s retirement (forced or not) appears to have the green light.  But as the team’s offensive coordiator, hasn’t Fisher had a direct hand in the current train wreck that is Florida State football?  Lucky for him, Darth Vader isn’t overseeing the program.  Vader didn’t promote underperforming middle managers, he choked them to death with that Force thing.

Oh, one more nugget concerning trustee honcho Jim Smith…the program’s record during his time as a student at FSU?  15-20-5.  Thankfully for him, FSU gave Bowden the job back in the 70’s instead of bringing in some dunce like like Lee Corso.  That hiring led to the type of quality program that Smith didn’t get to enjoy during his days as a pimply faced undergrad.

Top recruit abandoned in Athens

Speaking of old coaches, Penn State’s Joe Paterno isn’t going to get his team into a BCS title game this season, but he’s busy laying the groundwork for subsequent Nittany Lion teams to take a crack at it.  This week he got another quality verbal commitment, this one from Connecticut prep star Khairi Fortt, one of the nation’s most highly regarded linebackers.

Penn State’s main competition up to this point had been Georgia, but apparently, the hospitality down there wasn’t quite what Fortt had expected when he visited Athens recently, as he told the Stamford Advocate:

“Two guys left me.  I was left at a dorm party with people I didn’t know.  Once I was just walking alone in the streets.  Georgia is a school in the south, in a top conference, the SEC, the weather is warm, I have a lot of family there and the academics are good. (The final decision was about) how I connected with the players.”

Man, that laissez faire attitude that Mark Richt has with his players is something to behold.  You would think that he would make them accountable enough to at least be good hosts to recruits, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.  That dude is just too cool for school, man, just too cool for school.

While I’m on the subject of Richt, isn’t it ironical that the coach who sent his entire team onto the field to draw a celebration penalty against Florida a few years back would get victimized by a celebration penalty after a late go ahead touchdown against LSU?  Ahhhh, karma.

That bitterness will eat you up

When Auburn hired Gene Chizik away from Iowa State last year, the majority of pundits panned it as a bad hire.  Here’s a sample of the criticism to scan over.

I recall that folks at Iowa State didn’t seem too upset over losing Chizik, but after his 5-19 record at the school, you couldn’t really blame them.  Fast forward to the present, and Chizik has already matched that win total with a 5-0 start at Auburn.

All of a sudden, I’m detecting a lot of bitterness in Cyclone Nation that didn’t seem to exist just a few months ago.  Take a look at the Auburn-Tennessee picks last week from the sportswriting staff at the Iowa State student paper:

“9. Auburn @ Tennessee

Nate – Tennessee – Auburn rolled to a 4-0 record, but the streak comes to a halt in Knoxville.

Michael – Auburn – This will be a battle of two of the most respectable coaches in the SEC.

Jake – Tennessee – Auburn isn’t as good as advertised. I hope.

Chris – Auburn – It’s Ivan Drago vs. Tommy Gunn on the sidelines; Two villains in orange ready to tangle for mediocrity in the SEC.

Kayci – Tennessee – I will pick any team, any time that plays Auburn.”

The way I see it, Chizik’s reversal of fortune seems to be a case of a good football coach blossoming after he got away from a bad football school.  THerefore, the bitterness on the part of Nate, Michael, Jake, Chris and Kayci (Kayci?!?!) is easily explained.  It’s a case of die hard Cyclone fans coming to grips with the fact that they’re pulling for one of college football’s true bottom feeders.

Just when you get the offense right…

In the wake of USC’s head scratching loss to Washington, it seemed like all everyone could do was give head coach Pete Carroll the business for getting victimized by yet another inferior Pac-10 opponent.  Hey, I agree, there’s no reason USC shouldn’t have taken Washington out behind the wood shed.

But I think far less attention was paid to the fact that Washington coach Steve Sarkisian had a big hand in making USC the seemingly invicible juggernaut that everyone seems to think they should be.  Once he left for Seattle, he didn’t leave his intimate knowledge of his old team back in Los Angeles.  The guy basically owns a blueprint of how to beat USC.

So a week after stunning the Trojans, Washington laid an egg against Stanford and now Sarkisian’s team is pretty much back to where we thought they’d be…an improvement over the Ty Willingham debacle, but not quite ready to be a contender.

Now, Sarkisian and company are set to cross a couple of time zones and take on a Notre Dame team that’s played three straight games that were decided in the final minute.  If the Irish let this one get away from them, that’s pretty much it for Charlie Weis.

Sure, Pete Carroll gets the business for losing to Washington, but nobody’s asking him to clear his office out.  But if it’s Weis doing the losing, he’s got more than a few boosters faxing him over quotes for moving companies.

Try as he might, Weis still can’t get things right on both sides of the ball.  Last season, Notre Dame wasn’t that terrible on defense (39th nationally), but pretty damn mediocre on offense (65th nationally).

Fast forward to the present, and the Irish have figured out how to move the ball a little bit.  Through four games, Notre Dame already has 11 touchdown drives of at least 70 or more yards compared to 18 such drives all of last season.  But that 39th ranked defense is suddenly a very porous 94th ranked defense, even though a shutout of Nevada is included in that body of work.

The evil Bob Stoops

On the Dan Patrick Show this past Monday, there was an inordinately long segment where Patrick talked up the college game with CBS analyst Gary Danielson.  After he spent an eternity giving his theories on how a college football playoff should be implemented (just put one in so people will drop the subject), Danielson turned his attention to Oklahoma quarterback Sam Bradford.  Click here to listen to the whole thing.

In Danielson’s enlightened opinion, Bradford should have thrown his hat into the NFL Draft ring after last season (”What is he gonna do, come back to win one more game?”).  Apparently, Danielson is still in contact with some of his old Detroit Lions buddies who told him that they would have taken Bradford ahead of Matthew Stafford if given the chance.

I wonder what kind of input that Danielson’s unnamed Lion contacts actually have on the team’s draft decisons.  Who knows, he could have been talking to a couple of equipment guys, but dammit, SOMEBODY in Detroit was in love with Sam Bradford.

In the course of the interview, Danielson proceeded to throw not only Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops under the bus, but Bradford’s parents as well.  To hear Gary talk, he kind of implied that they all participated in an evil conspiracy to keep the kid at Oklahoma, and subsequently they’re all to blame for his injury.

Of course, all of this got back to Stoops, who described Danielson’s comments as “foolish.”  Who knows, maybe the decision to come back for his junior season was all Bradford’s, or maybe Stoops attached himself to his quarterback’s ankle and refused to let him leave Norman.  Pete Carroll tried that move with Mark Sanchez, but Sanchez wiggled free and made it to New York.

I’m sure Stoops cares about Bradford, the last thing he’d want is for the kid to get crippled up before he can receive his NFL riches.  But what is Stoops being paid a lot of money to do?  Win football games for Oklahoma.  To that end, I can’t really blame him for trying to get his most accomplished players to use up as much of their eligibility as possible. 

This and that

Ohio State has shut out two straight opponents, and if they do it again at Indiana this weekend, that will be the first time in 36 years that the program has turned that trick.  However, the Hoosiers looked mighty damn good in dropping a close game to Michigan last week.  Three shutouts in a row?  I don’t think so…The chess match between Auburn offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn and Tennessee defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin should be very interesting to watch this weekend.  To hear Kiffin talk, he’s more worried about Auburn’s offense than he was about Florida’s…Is there a more dynamic quarterback-receiver tandem right now than Blaine Gabbert throwing to Danario Alexander at Missouri?…Jahvid Best, you won’t fool me again, and neither will Cal when it comes to road games.  It’s like they can’t function away from Berkeley…Colorado’s Rodney Stewart is one impressive running back.  In that losing effort to West Virginia on Thursday night, he was finding holes that didn’t look like they were there.