Dumpster Fires of the Week: Less Miles
This edition starts with sad news concerning our favorite head coach, Less Miles (trademark pending). Then, for a change, we shift to a variety of blue bloods who pretty much got their faces kicked in Saturday. No Kansas or Wake Forest or Illinois this week.
Dumpster Fires of the Week: Week Four
1. LSU
When you fire your head coach and offensive coordinator in the middle of the season, you are No. 1 on the Dumpster Fire list.
Miles was done in because he never really developed an effective passing quarterback. LSU sent running backs, offensive linemen and wide receivers en masse to the NFL recently, but the Tigers never had a truly effective offense to counter teams with an effective run defense.
Miles’ abstract understanding of time also caught up with him. His team appeared to win a game, but then lose it in the final seconds.
Miles barely survived last year, and the LSU power brokers decided enough was enough. To be honest, they probably did Miles a favor by preventing him from being dominated again by Nick Saban and possibly Huge Freeze.
LSU looks like an 8-4 team with at least three first-round draft picks.
2. Georgia
Seriously, Bulldog fans, you fired Mark Richt for this? Getting smashed by Ole Miss by more than 30 points? Isn't Kirby Smart supposed to be a defensive genius?
Offensively, UGA is struggling with freshman QB Jacob Eason running a similar pro set to Richt’s scheme.
Overall, this all looks very Coach Boom-like right now, and that’s not a good thing. Smart inherited a very talented team – save for the QB mess that cost Richt his job – and they may turn it around. But right now, 8-4 is looking likely for the young Dogs.
3. Sparty
Just last week, it looked like the winner of the round-robin contest between Michigan, Michigan State and Ohio State could punch a ticket to the College Football Playoff. Instead, Mark Dantonio makes his first entry onto this list with a terrible game at home against Wisconsin.
Sparty, fresh off of drubbing Notre Dame, was manhandled and dominated by a well-coached Badger squad. We are just not used to seeing Dantonio’s team getting outworked and outplayed like that. Wisky used Sparty's big-game formula of hard-nosed defense and winning the turnover battle. The Badgers ran away from Sparty in the second half, as this game was never in doubt.
4. Notre Dame
So far this week, Brian Kelly has fired his defensive coordinator and practically thrown his entire team under the bus in a press conference. What caused Captain Red Ass to act like this? Losing at home to Duke.
Last week, the Blue Devils lost to Northwestern, a team that lost to Western Michigan and Illinois State. So Duke is not exactly ACC division winner material this year.
Duke shredded the ND defense, while Fighting Irish QB DeShone Kizer made some horrible throws that to great WTF faces from Kelly on the sideline. The final blow for the ND defense was the game-winning drive by Duke that bled the clock and vaporized ND’s timeouts. That forced a hurried, ineffective final drive by the Irish.
ND is 1-3 and still has undefeated Miami and Stanford coming up.
5. Penn State
Getting pounded by Michigan is probably karmic retribution for Penn State’s plan to “honor” Joe Paterno this season. The program's inability to move on from JoePa is shocking, and I hope Penn State enjoys even more losses by wide margins. The only way PSU could show more blindness on this whole issue would be to hire Art Briles as the inevitable replacement for increasingly ineffective James Franklin.
-Atlantasooner