Dan Wetzel's College Football Podcast: Dissecting the sport's biggest villain and worst fan base (so far)

It’s the time of the college football calendar when in certain places, the excitement and promise of the start of the season has worn off. Some teams just look bad. Some coaches are going to get fired. Some conferences are going to get bashed. Some teams are going to boot away victory the same way they always did.

And Jameis Winston is going to be Jameis Winston.

So who better to welcome to the Podcast than Dan Wolken of USA Today, author of the Misery Index, which ranks the ten most miserable fan bases in America each week. Not the worst teams, just the ones whose fans are most miserable at what just happened and/or what appears inevitable.

[Also: Listen to all of Dan Wetzel's podcasts here]

The Index is just four weeks into the season and already the University of Michigan tops it for the second time. That’s how miserable things are in Ann Arbor. This time they earned it for a bottoming-out loss to Utah in a rainstorm, and then things got worse when it came out that Coca-Cola was essentially giving away free tickets to this Saturday’s game.

So Michigan was a big topic this week, particularly the unease between the fans and athletic director Dave Brandon. Brandon has tried to install all sorts of promotions and gimmicks to the department while hitching himself to Brady Hoke, who has shown few signs of competence over the last four seasons.

Jameis Winston becoming the biggest villain in the sport is also discussed at length.

Why does Florida State enable him? Is there any reason to think he can lay low for the rest of the season and should he return for another season?

One tangent was on whether he can possibly be an NFL quarterback and wouldn’t he be better off focusing on baseball, where his kind of personality is more at home than trying to change and be a steady, reliable starting QB?

Wolken was at the athletic director meetings in Dallas when the podcast was taped, so he was asked how the Ray Rice video is changing (if at all) how player discipline was being handled. Such as, would Winston have been able to play last year while under Tallahassee's police investigation into sexual assault charges?

And how impressive is it that Oklahoma and coach Bob Stoops made the effort to view the tape of an assault involving star recruit Joe Mixon before the Ravens and the NFL bumbled the Rice case by not doing the same?

* The possible rise of Arkansas as it heads into a big showdown with Texas A&M on Saturday.

* How good is Gunner Kiel and can he sling Cincinnati to an upset at Ohio State?

* Can UCLA play up to its preseason expectations in a major game Thursday at Arizona State that could determine the Pac 12 South?

There’s a lot more jammed in there. Check it out here or on iTunes. As always, it’s free.