Sunday Superlatives: The best, worst and everything else in coaching from a wild Week 2
Bubba and Earl are still wheezing.
After one of the wildest college football Saturdays in recent memory — we’re talking two Top 10 teams losing at home to Sun Belt schools, a Texas tease and Scott Frost’s final face-plant which cost him his job— let’s take a second to catch our breath, and then have some fun recapping an insane slate yesterday.
Good? Good.
Friendly reminder: The Sunday Superlatives is a rundown column looking at our favorite coaching calls, calamities, quotes and more each Saturday.
Let’s dive into Week 2.
SMARTEST CALL OF THE WEEK
The beauty of this column is that we get to wake up Sunday morning and rewatch some of the post-midnight mania we may have missed.
So while shout outs to Texas Tech’s Joey McGuire, Kansas’ Lance Leipold, Tennessee’s Josh Heupel and Appalachian State’s Shawn Clark for big Week 2 wins, Oregon State’s Jonathan Smith made the gutsiest decision in the Beavers’ walk-off victory over Fresno State.
On the road down by three with three seconds to play, Smith called a timeout. Instead of sending his field goal unit out to play for overtime, Smith went for the Bulldogs’ throat and called a play for linebacker/Wildcat QB Jack Colletto.
Colletto took a direct snap and rumbled into the end zone for the game-winning score — Beavers 35. Bulldogs 32. Pac-12 after dark, baby!
“I kept thinking to myself, ‘We came here down here to win the game, not to go to overtime,'” Smith said.
“The opportunity with Jack Colletto on the 2 and we did it.”
After the smartest call of the week, Oregon State should be undefeated when it hosts Lincoln Riley and the Top 10 USC Trojans in two weeks.
COACHING CALAMITY OF THE WEEK
I don’t watch wrestling. Never have. It’s just not my thing. But as I understand it, the Royal Rumble is among the sport’s most popular events.
Well, I’m pretty sure we saw the college football coaching version from noon to midnight Saturday, where one HC after another looked to 1-up the other in a Battle Royal for the worst performance by his football team.
Where to start?
Is the shine already off the Golden Dome for Marcus Freeman? The Irish’s new, hip young coach became the first Notre Dame head coach in school history to start 0-3. The Irish were three-touchdown favorites against Marshall, but they only managed to reach the end zone three times, losing 26-21 to Marshall. It was a helluva win for second-year Thundering Herd head coach Charles Huff, but suddenly the shine on Freeman has turned into a crisis of confidence in South Bend.
Meanwhile, Jimbo Fisher saw Notre Dame’s ugly offensive performance and said, “Bet?”
The Texas A&M Aggies didn’t muster 200 yards against a defense that allowed 56 offensive points the week before, losing 17-14 to Appalachian State. The fast-talking, $100-million man continues to coach offense like there’s a required speed limit, putting a governor on all his insane athletes. The Aggies ran only 38 plays Saturday!
After the huge upset, Fisher was immediately meme’d postgame, with folks comparing the Aggies’ star-studded roster to the recruiting efforts of the Mountaineers. Fisher’s record at Texas A&M is almost identical (35-15) to his predecessor Kevin Sumlin (36-14) now, too.
I think Steve Spurrier’s famous mid-90s Georgia burn is now the perfect encapsulation for Fisher and Texas A&M.
“Why is it that during recruiting season they sign all the great players, but when it comes time to play the game, we have all the great players? I don’t understand that. What happens to them?”
We’re just asking, Jimbo.
In an ode to Jimmy Kimmel’s, “Apologies to Matt Damon, but we ran out of time bit,” : Honorable mentions Saturday for coaching calamity of the week include Wisconsin’s Paul Chyrst (a total no-show at home against Washington State), Florida’s Billy Napier (his strange clock management worked against Utah, but his fourth-quarter decisions made no sense in the loss to Kentucky on Saturday), West Virginia’s Neal Brown (double-digit favorite losing at home to Kansas means that seat might start to get a tad warm) and Northwestern’s Pat Fitzgerald (the defensive guru saw his Wildcats defense allow nearly 500 yards to Duke).
THE MORAL VICTORY MEDAL OF THE WEEK
Texas scared the hell out of Alabama on Saturday, but the Longhorns’ upset bid came up one point short.
“Nobody gave us a chance in this game,” Steve Sarkisian said after the 20-19 loss.
“None of you, none of the national media. We believed in our locker room that we can go win this game. We played like a team that thought they were going to win the game. Things happened, bad breaks happen and we end up not winning. I’m super proud of our guys that they played our brand of football.
“We played with great energy, I thought we had tremendous effort in all three phases and played a tough brand of football. We were mentally tough, we overcame a lot of adversity today.”
Sarkisian and his staff deserve a lot of credit for having the Longhorns prepared to truly push Alabama. They executed a great plan. They lost their starting quarterback and didn’t blink. Their defense played with a spirit and edge we haven’t seen in years.
But they also left a lot of opportunities on the field.
A dropped touchdown. A missed field goal. A free rusher whiffing on a game-changing sack. Sark settling for four field goals inside the red zone.
They were oh-so-close.
“We didn’t lose today. We just ran out of time,” Sarkisian said.
“In the end, that’s the best team in the country. In a weird way, we can feel pretty good about ourselves, kind of where we’re at in the state of our program.”
Considering Sark’s comments earlier in the week, that is some Grade-A moral victory’ing, so we respect and honor it.
THE KIRK FERENTZ BRAVERY AWARD
Remember, it takes courage to punt when the whole world says you shouldn’t.
It’s Kirk Ferenz’s life ethos, and a strategy Pat Narduzzi valorously adopted Saturday afternoon against Tennessee.
The Panthers punted just three times in their tough overtime loss to Tennessee, but a single, strange decision by Narduzzi late in the first half ultimately cost Pitt its starting quarterback and three points in a one-score game.
Down 21-17 with 1:50 remaining in the first half, Narduzzi chose to punt on 4th-and-2 just short of midfield. The Panthers had one timeout remaining.
Top 10
- 1Hot
Strength of Schedule
Ranking SOS of CFP Top 25
- 2
Marcus Freeman
ND coach addresses NFL rumors
- 3New
Deion Sanders
Opposing view of Prime to NFL
- 4
ACC commish fires back
Jim Phillips calls out CFP committee
- 5
Cignetti responds
Hoosiers HC fires back at SEC
The punt netted just 30 yards, and while the Panthers did force the Vols to also end up punting later too, because they couldn’t stop the clock on defense, they got the ball back with just 14 seconds left in the half at their own 37.
It was then that Narduzzi decided that he did want to go for points to end the half — even though they had zero timeouts now and were 70 yards away from the end zone.
Quarterback Kedon Slovis was then sacked, fumbling the football and getting injured on the play.
Tennessee kicked a 37-yard field goal as time expired in the second quarter.
Nobody makes brazen decisions quite like Pat Narduzzi.
THE THANK YOU FOR YOUR HONESTY HONOR
We’d be remiss not to give a nod to Kirk Ferentz for real this week, too.
Iowa did score a touchdown on Saturday. Progress! But for the ninth straight game, quarterback Spencer Petras failed to throw for a score. Yikes!
The Hawkeyes lost 10-7 to Iowa State at home, as Matt Campbell got his first win in the Cy-hawk series.
Nepotism isn’t the only thing standing between Iowa and a modern offense, but Ferentz isn’t going to fire his son Brian as the Hawkeyes’ OC. He did finally admit Iowa may consider a change at quarterback though, as Petras completed less than 50% of his passes again and threw for under 95 yards.
“It’s not going well for (Spencer Petras) right now,” Ferentz said.
“It’s not going well for anybody in the offense, quite frankly.”
Talk about an understatement.
According to Elias Sports, the Hawkeyes are the first team since McNeese State in 1979 to score and allow fever than 10 points in their first two games.
CASH THE CHECK COORDINATOR OF THE WEEK
Fueled by a week’s worth of disrespect, Kentucky spit in the face of any “soft” talk, bullying the Florida Gators in the second half for a 26-16 comeback win.
Mark Stoops — who delivered a postgame quote guaranteed to get plastered everywhere inside Kroger Field: “We may win. We may lose, but by God we’re going to be tough.” — has one of the best contracts in sports, but his 40-year-old DC Brad White also earned every penny of whatever he makes a week from his $1.4 million salary Saturday with an outstanding gameplan against the Gators.
White totally flummoxed Florida quarterback Anthony Richardson, who was the king of the early Heisman hype after Week 1. Richardson frequently panicked under pressure. He tossed a pair of interceptions and was just 14 of 35 passing.
Most impressively, White devised a plan to keep Richardson in the pocket, holding him to just four yards rushing on six carries.
In the second half, White’s defense allowed zero points, had a pick-six and stopped Florida on downs twice. That’ll do.
“There’s no magic play call,” Kentucky defensive coordinator Brad White said afterward. “It was just about guts and determination.”
The UK way, baby.
THE MICHAEL MYERS MASKED MAN OF THE WEEK
Some Sundays, it seems only right to give fair respect to the head coach who puts a dagger into the heart of one of his cohorts.
Take a bow, Clay Helton.
The former much-maligned USC head coach has found a fresh start at Georgia Southern in 2022. And in some hilarious irony, almost exactly a year to the day when he was fired by the Trojans, Clay Helton ended the Scott Frost era at Nebraska with a stunning 45-42 win in Lincoln.
The Eagles were 22-point underdogs and got $1.4 million to walk out of Memorial Stadium was a win.
The loss was so embarrassing — it was the Cornhuskers’ 11th defeat by less than 10 points in the last two seasons — Frost was fired on Sunday despite his buyout dropping by $7.5 million on Oct. 1.
Clay Helton. Dead and buried just a year ago. The man in the Michael Myers mask on Saturday. So there’s still some future hope for Scott.