Weekend winners (other than Tennessee fans who now are done with Butch)
Gus Malzahn. This one is pretty clear. Dude simply had to have a win over Georgia or Alabama this November. Had to. (And we undervalued that desperation in our picks, which 3-3, that included backing the top-ranked Bulldogs in Jordan-Hare, which was rocking.) Wins like this also are testament to how much Malzahn’s team care about their coach. And the 40-17 thumping of a Georgia team that was not only previously unbeaten, the Bulldogs had dominated everyone since a one-point loss at Notre Dame, puts Auburn firmly in the college playoff talk, even with two losses.
The Miami program. Maybe we should have know all along that the “supposed” Tennessee turnaround under Benedict Jones was a fraud. Miami showed us what a turnaround looks like on Saturday night. No. 3 in the country came to town and was humiliated. The place was hopping and the kids were jubilant. That’s a turnaround. Not a Hail Mary to be a down Georgia team or a miracle to beat a back-tracking Florida bunch or feeling good about ‘competing’ against an Alabama team a few years ago that was having an off day. Miami is back; Tennessee is back to square one. (More on the Vols in a moment. Lots more.)
Those supplying the snacks and the Goody’s headache powders to the college playoff committee. Sweet buckets of upsets and landslides, what to make of the college football rankings with all the surprises – in terms of winners and one-sided scores. Know this No. 1, No. 3, No. 9 and No. 12 all lost by double digits and by a combined 127 points for Pete Carroll’s Sake. We can breakdown the scenarios tomorrow before the committee convenes and announces its rankings, but here’s one view that the teams that control their destiny are Alabama, Auburn and Georgia in the SEC, Clemson and Miami in the ACC, Oklahoma in the Big 12 and the Wisconsin in the Big Ten, which went from dead and buried before the avalanche of uncompetitive upsets opened the door for the Badgers, who have profile dates with Michigan and THE Ohio State left to continue to harden their unbeaten resume.
Adrian Clayborn. The Falcons had been starving for a pass rusher on the other side of last year’s NFL sack leader Vic Beasley. They spent a No. 1 on Tak McKinley to try to fill that spot. Who knew that journeyman Clayborn was the answer. Sunday the forearm Iowa star recorded six sacks, becoming only the fourth man in NFL history to get to that point, as the Falcons handcuffed a Dallas team without Ezekiel Elliott and Tyron Smith, arguably the game’s best left tackle not named Joe Thomas. Clayborn joined the elite group that includes Derrick Thomas (who did it twice people), Owi Umenyiora and NFL Hall of Famer Fred Dean, who did it in 1983 against New Orleans. (Side note: Also of import in the stat category from the A-T-L on Sunday, Matt Ryan got to 40,000 passing yards in his 151st game, becoming the quickest quarterback to that milestone. Drew Brees held the previous mark, getting to 40K in 152 games. Ryan also moved into the top 20 in all-time passing yards with 40,073. He will likely pass Johnny U (40,239), Joe Montana (40,551) and Kerry Collins (40,922) before the season’s completed.)
The New Orleans Saints. Wow, that offense has exploded since jettisoning Adrian Peterson to the desert. Mark Ingram and Alvin Kamara have formed a terrific duo, and the Sanits have won seven straight after dropping almost half a hundred on the Bills Sunday. Wow. And that Saints offense put up 47 without a Drew Brees TD pass. Let that sink in.
Los Angeles Dodgers starting pitcher Josh Beckett, left, celebrates with catcher Drew Butera after striking out Philadelphia Phillies’ Chase Utley looking for a no-hitter baseball game, Sunday, May 25, 2014, in Philadelphia. Los Angeles won 6-0.Weekend losers (other than Butch)
The SEC’s chances to get two in the playoff. In truth, it was going to have to fall perfectly to get two in, but in addition to Georgia’s throttling at Auburn, the way Miami destroyed Notre Dame devalues Georgia’s hallmark win to this point, too. Plus, Clemson’s win over Auburn in September now looks a lot too, which means a close Miami win over Clemson – if AU wins the SEC – could mean two ACC teams may have a claim for spots considering the Clemson head-to-head advantage over Auburn. Is there still a chance for the SEC to get two invitees? Yes, but, man, an eventful weekend changes everything.
Former World Series MVP Josh Beckett. Beckett got a snoot-full and tackled a country musician on stage this weekend. Side note: Josh Beckett is the red-neck Jason Day, right?
NFL leadership. Seriously, we are here. The NFL’s over-the-top “Honor the Military” song and dance this weekend felt forced and at time hypocritical considering all the hand-wringing and lack of direction about the protests during the anthem. Now comes word that the NFL is looking at avenues to force Jerry Jones, Roger Goodell’s biggest critic, out as the Cowboys owner. So, according to reports from a couple of dudes have their ears to the ground in NFL circles, other NFL owners are looking at ways to force Jones to sell. Man, considering Jones has been the most outspoken of that elite group about the protests and the effects on the product, that move would be another giant leap down a negative path of publicity. Or think of its this way: Can you possibly imagine a way that anyone on this planet could turn an egomaniac like Jones into a sympathetic and bullied character? Welp, here it is.
Vontaze Burfict. Speaking of leadership – and this is not even discussing the farce that has become the NFL’s in-game concussion protocol – but for a league that keeps a keen eye on how much celebrating goes on after a score and whether celebration is or is not potentially offensive to Joe Q. Public, at what point is Burfict’s privileges of playing in the NFL revoked? Dude has an in-game rap sheet longer than Bonnie and Clyde. Sunday he got booted for making contact with a referee, a complete and utter no-no in every sport. He has been accused of dirty play by no fewer than four opponents, was suspended for the first three games of this season and last season for illegal hits, appeared to kick a Steelers player last month. (Nice win for the Titans over the Bengals Sunday, though. Tennessee is 6-3 after its fourth straight win facing a short week before a Thursday trip to play against a Steelers team that can no longer trust its quarterback. Man, Big Ben was wretched Sunday.)
Stanford band. The football team got the top-10 hijinks started on Friday night. A 30-22 upset of Washington, which was No. 9 and carrying the last playoff candle for the Pac-12, was led by Bryce Love, who had three TDs and more than 160 yards rushing against one the stingiest defenses in America coming into the game. Also, at halftime the sarcastic and irreverent Stanford band presented a “Salute to America” that included playing the Russian National Anthem while spelling out U.S.S.A. Hey, if you want to play that disrespectful nonsense on Trump’s birthday, well, you bunch of left-coast liberals can do what you want. But to play that crap on Veteran’s Day weekend should cost someone their job in this view. Now compare that to the fantastic tribute that the LSU band did Saturday during halftime of the Arkansas game.
Butch Jones cheers after Ty Chandler returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown. The Indiana State Sycamores visited the University of Tennessee Volunteers at Neyland Stadium in NCAA football action of September 9, 2017.Bye-bye Butch
And it’s done.
Butch Jones is finally out as the Tennessee football coach. Whether you’re like me and think it happened a month too late, well, that’s irrelevant now.
Now if we are to believe that Butch was pushing hyperbole when he yelled “I’m coaching for my job” Saturday night in Columbia, Mo., well, that’s scary. Yes, Saturday night’s performance in which the Tigers put up 50 points and more than 650 yards of offense on a Tennessee team that was as uninspired as a Jones news conference, was bad enough to seal anyone’s coffin this side of Dracula. But if that decision rested primarily on whether Butch’s Bunch delivered an acceptable performance against a Missouri program that Tennessee should beat 90 percent of the time considering resources, tradition, investment and talent, then UT AD John Currie has some questions to answer.
Currie said in Sunday’s meeting with the media, “Late last night it was evident this was probably the direction we needed to go for the best of all concerned. Pssttt, John, that’s been evident since Georgia left town.
Regardless, it’s done and it had to be done. This was a model that was broken, and there are tons of opinions on it.
Whether it’s the velvety touch of TFP ace sports columnist Mark Wiedmer, who treats Butch with kid gloves and rightly notes that now this becomes Currie’s program and this hire will likely define his tenure. (And depending on the success or lack of it for this hire, it will go a long way to determine the length of Currie’s tenure, too.)
Or a pretty interesting look at first impressions from Knoxville News Sentinel columnist John Adams, who points out that there were some hints during Butch’s introductory news conference that his skills were selling his program and himself, especially to recruits, while his shortcomings were his thin-skin and his trust in a broken system.
We will tip our visor to Butch the Recruiter. Dude brought talent to K-town, especially considering the void that was left by Derek Dooley. That’s undeniable. And in truth, that’s it when it comes to his strengths as a coach. Sure, if you want to talk about off-the-field stuff and the academic improvements, well, rightly or wrongly, that’s the garnish on a fancy, high-priced dinner. Name a single time you went to a high-priced meal and thought, “Man, that is the best looking parsley I’ve ever seen. This is well worth the money.”
Sure, if the parsley is completely spoiled or rotten or has ants on it, then yes, it could ruin the meal, but there is no garnish that will keep a football coach employed. (Heck if that’s the case, then Mark Richt would never have been fired.)
No, in terms of making $4-plus million a year to win on Saturdays, Butch’s only really SEC-level skill was recruiting. The rest was average to bordering on terrible, and he touched on it in that first news conference that Adams references.
Despite telling everyone who would listen, Butch’s staff decisions were awful. Name an assistant under Butch that went on to a better gig? Hard, right? In a lot of ways, I believe his mediocre staff is because of Butch’s thin-skin, and his desire to either get the credit or not be somewhat overshadowed – inside the program or in the fan base’s view – by excellent assistants really hurt that staff.
Butch’s in-game coaching – let’s go all the way back to the chart for the two-point decision at Florida – was simply terrible. But most importantly, Butch’s think-skin doomed him. The noise, which all very-goo-to-great coaches either ignore or chastise, became overwhelming for Jones.
He tried to battle it with awful one-liners or cliches or catch-phrases that were nonsensical can naive. There are too many to list here. He tried to confront the noise with the dreadful “fake news” junk that in retrospect was every bit as silly and dumb, if no where near as serious, of course, as Jim McElwain throwing out the faux death threats that sealed his fate in Gainesville.
And now to learn those catch-phrases and the “I got your back” slogan from the season-opening escape over Georgia Tech were as hollow as the Turnover Trash can.
Currie said he gave Butch the chance to coach the rest of the season. Butch said not thanks. Who has whose back, again Coach?
Now comes word that Butch has called at least one UT commitment and told that player to find a new place. Uh, coach, is that being a champion of life or a champion of spite?
Either way, the numbers are staggering, no matter the statement from SEC meetings that coming into this season that only three SEC teams entered 2017 on back-to-back nine-win seasons. Yes, that Florida and Tennessee were the two not named Alabama, is eye-popping now that the Gators and the Vols are looking for their next coach. In truth, though, that more than the eternal chase to be more Saban like, is that the process and the product is more important than the result.
Butch left K-town with a winning record, but that as deceiving as most of the pictures of single people on social media. The simple truth is this Tennessee team is terrible with little reason to believe that next year would be better. Heck, and we know you have seen this stat, but UT currently is riding a losing streak to every SEC team. (Here’s the most recent results for the Big Orange against every SEC team:
Alabama – L 45-7
Arkansas – L 24-20
Auburn – L 55-23
Florida – L 26-20
Georgia – L 41-0
Kentucky – L 29-26
LSU – L 38-7
Missouri – L 50-17
Miss State – L 41-31
Ole Miss – L 34-3
South Carolina – L 15-9
Texas A&M – L 45-38
Vandy – L 45-34.)
Simply put Tennessee – the program, the students, the state and the fans – deserved better than what Butch could ever deliver, and the sooner that Currie believed that the better.
Now we’re here.
This and that
– Speaking of Butch, and we know this will be a monster topic on Press Row today, and the lists of potential candidates are everywhere. It’s hard for me to get into the Gruden stuff again, to be honest. We think he’d be a home run, but man it’s tough to see giving up where he is for the amount of work that lies ahead. (Plus, we also think he’d likely prefer the NFL.) Now for the folks who think this is not a great, A1, top-10 or top-15 job are wrong. And we do believe that Currie is going to have a starting point of $5-plus million for the next hire, because let’s be honest, it’s hard to see a tortured fan base getting jazzed by another Group of Five “hope he pans out on the grand scale” hire. The reaction of the fan base on social media to Currie smiling at the suggestion of Gruden’s name screams to every Johnny Vols Fan craving a home run hire. My off-the-cuff “leader in the clubhouse” truly would be Dan Mullen. I think he’s second-best coach in the league and has made Mississippi State into a consistent winner – something that very few of us thought was possible in the toughest division in college football.
– We offer this as a cautious reminder and with the full caveat that in our first week as a sports writer we wrote about a high school scrimmage between skins and shirts, but left the ‘R’ our of shirts. It made the paper. From this week’s files of pay copy editors more: The headline on the A1 centerpiece story of the Florence Times Daily was “Party divide over sex clams.”
– Nice late win for the Titans, who have fashioned a pretty strong four-game winning streak. Another streak ended for Tennessee on Sunday, though, as Titans kicker Ryan Succop missed a 48 yard FG, ending his NFL-record streak of 56 consecutive made field-goal attempts inside of 50 yards. The next closest streak of its kind was 46 by Matt Bryant (2013-15).
– Former Baylor School golfer Keith Mitchell rode the roller coaster that is golf this weekend. he made his first cut as a card-carrying PGA Tour member on the strength of an opening round 66. He made more than $14K after shooting an eye-popping, eight-birdie 65 Sunday, putting him among a trio of players with the second-best final-round score. In between, though, was 78 on Saturday in difficult conditions and a 75 Friday.
– Our picks were a mixed bag, losing the Southern Miss-Rice game by half a point, and underestimating the home energy in Starkville and Auburn. We finished 3-3 on the week and sit at 37-23-1 against the spread this year.
– We spoke of Miami earlier, and we loved this quote from Hurricanes quarterback Malik Rosier: “They used to call us convicts, but we’re like first in the country in community service. I don’t think convicts do that – willingly at least.” Well-played sir. Well-played, indeed. (Side note: In all the Catholics vs. Convicts stuff, we saw a stat that Notre Dame has had more players arrested in the last five seasons than Miami, so there’s that. Perception in the eye of the beholder, huh?)
– John Fox now has the worst challenge in the history of football challenges. The Bears coach threw his red hanky for the guys in the booth to review a play in which a player was ruled out of bounds before crossing the goal line. It would have set up a first-and-goal at the 3. Fox reviewed, and the player did not step out of bounds, but the player did fumble before getting into the end zone. Rather than first-and-goal or a TD, Fox’s challenge led to a fumble through the end zone and a turnover. Not-so good times.
– Couple of NBA notes: Boston has won 12 straight, which is saying something since they lost a legit NBA All-Star for the season when Gordon Hayward broke his leg in the opener. Second, yes, Lonzo Ball has a ton of shooting issues, but dude became the youngest player to record a triple-double over the weekend.
Today’s question
Weekend winners and losers. Go.
Who do you think is the front-runner to replace Butch?
As for Nov. 13, well, Jimmy Kimmel is 50 today. Whoopi Goldberg is 62.
As for a quick Rushmore, let’s go here. Metta World Peace – artist formerly known as Ron Artest – is 38 today.
Rushmore of sports stars who officially changed their names. Go.
And here’s hoping you enjoyed Day One of A.B. – After Butch.