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Forde-Yard Dash: These elite college football programs could go hunting for new coaches

Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college football (puffy coats sold separately in Houston, apparently at great expense):

[More Dash: Rivalry week picks | OSU-Michigan | Worst teams]

FIRST QUARTER

BIG COACHING DOMINOES READY TO FALL?

For most of this season, it looked like coaching turnover was going to bypass the big boys. Louisville and Kansas are one thing; established elite programs are another.

Now it looks like there could be changes coming higher up the food chain.

Urban Meyer (1) cannot continue working like this at Ohio State. He cannot spend parts of every significant game doubled over, hands on knees, looking like coaching is literally killing him. He cannot let himself persist this way, and his family cannot let him, and the OSU administration cannot let him, either.

Maybe this is something that can be addressed in the offseason, but as colleague Pete Thamel has reported, the brain cyst that has been the alleged source of these issues isn’t going away. Compound that physical condition with the fact that Meyer always has been a tightly wound ball of stress even during good times, and there is ample reason to suspect he needs to step away from the job of leading the Buckeyes.

As it stands, watching Urban in the pressure-packed Saturday rivalry game against Michigan is already an uncomfortable proposition. His sideline angst has become a distracting melodrama of its own – and that was when Ohio State was playing inferior competition. The Wolverines are not inferior, and are fully capable of exerting extreme stress on Meyer.

It very much feels like time to move on, and get well, in Columbus.

Ohio State coach Urban Meyer looked in pain for long stretches of the Buckeyes’ victory over Maryland. (AP)
Ohio State coach Urban Meyer looked in pain for long stretches of the Buckeyes’ victory over Maryland. (AP)

If Ohio State opens, only the best and brightest need apply. But all eyes should be on USC (2) as well, which appears to be rapidly approaching the point of no return with coach Clay Helton. If this Trojans team compounds its loss to rival UCLA with a loss to rival Notre Dame Saturday for a 5-7 season, retaining Helton would be a tough sell no matter what the cost.

That would open a pair of Cadillac jobs, at places with long histories of winning national championships. Every college coach not named Nick Saban, and a few NFL coaches, would have to at least consider the possibility of what it would be like leading the Buckeyes or Trojans.

That prospective list would include Penn State’s James Franklin (3), who is one win away from a fifth nine-win season in his eight as a head coach. (That includes two nine-win seasons at Vanderbilt, still one of the modern miracles of coaching.) The timing is right for Franklin to at least consider a move, with three-year starting quarterback Trace McSorley at the end of his stellar college career.

Franklin could give USC the opportunity to break its insular hiring cycle, starting anew with a program outsider who can appeal to the mother lode of Southern California talent while running the program with more authority than Helton has been able to muster. And if he left Penn State, that’s another elite job that comes open and presumably knocks down another domino somewhere else. Add in the possibility of college coaches becoming more attractive to the NFL, and the high-end turnover could be much greater than anyone saw coming as recently as a month ago.

PAC-12 IN FLUX, CONT.

The Pac-12’s roiling football angst isn’t confined to USC’s massive underachievement. Unless Washington State gets a lot of help, the league will miss the College Football Playoff for the second straight year and third time in five years, increasing the distance between the Pac-12 and the rest of the Power Five.

And now comes the conference’s sixth coaching change in the past two seasons: Mike MacIntyre (4) was fired at Colorado Sunday. If Helton goes down, that will mean more than half the jobs in the league will have turned over in 2017 and ’18. Last year the list was Oregon State, Oregon, Arizona, Arizona State and UCLA.

The Pac-12 needed most, if not all, of that turnover to upgrade the coaching in the conference. That underscores the fact that few programs have been able to hit upon the right guy at the right time, and to make it work for the long haul.

In the case of MacIntyre, he looked like the right guy in comparison to the disastrous hire that preceded him, Jon Embree. But the reality is that outside of the stunning 10-4 season in 2016, his team has finished last in the Pac-12 South in each of his other five seasons on the job. The job-killer loss for MacIntyre was at home to woeful Oregon State last month, when the Buffaloes blew a four-touchdown lead to a team that hadn’t won a league game since 2016.

RETURN OF THE HAT — GREAT HIRE OR CHARLIE WEIS ALL OVER AGAIN?

The first sign that Les Miles (5) to Kansas may not be a match made in rebuilding heaven is the playing surface at Memorial Stadium. It’s artificial turf, which eliminates one of Les’ primary eccentricities – there will be no in-game grass eating.

From Miles’ standpoint, he has the luxury of going from a place where the expectation is “Beat Alabama” to a place where the expectation is “Beat Anyone.” Merely taking Kansas to its first bowl game since 2008 would be greeted as a heroic achievement. But here’s what goes along with modest expectations: modest program strengths.

Les was rarely at a talent disadvantage at LSU. He will rarely be at a talent advantage at Kansas. (Though he does inherit one particularly nice piece in running back Pooka Williams, a steal out of New Orleans who is fifth nationally in all-purpose yardage.) Is he a good enough coach to out-scheme the superior teams in the Big 12? Is he, at age 65, a sufficiently persuasive and energetic recruiter? Is he capable of attracting the strong staff he would need to a football backwater like Kansas?

Kansas fans look back nostalgically on the Mark Mangino Era because of the 2007 miracle season, when the Jayhawks went 12-1 and won the Orange Bowl. But outside of that season, Mangino was nine games below .500. This is a program that has lost nearly 100 more games than it has won historically. It’s hard to win there, and a retread hire seems like an iffy ticket back to relevance.

Worst case: Les Miles 2.0 resembles Charlie Weis 2.0. Weis was fired from a Cadillac job, went two years without a head-coaching gig, then hired at Kansas. Miles was fired from a Cadillac job, went two years without a head-coaching gig, then hired at Kansas.

The Weis reboot at Kansas was a colossal failure, an expensive 6-22 mistake that everyone could see coming from a thousand miles away. Miles on his worst day is a better head coach than Weis on his best day, but seeing him reprise his success at Oklahoma State earlier this century – or even a faint approximation of his success at LSU – seems like a long shot.

FOUR FOR THE PLAYOFF

The Dash’s weekly appraisal of the College Football Playoff, if today were Selection Sunday.

Cotton Bowl: top seed Alabama (6) vs. fourth seed Michigan (7)

The Crimson Tide gave everyone a fleeting Mother of All Upsets fantasy Saturday, being tied with FCS Citadel at halftime. Unimaginably, Citadel even kicked a field goal for the lead early in the third quarter, but it was wiped out by an illegal procedure penalty and the second kick was no good. The fantasy vanished after that, and Alabama rolled on toward what looks like the least competitive Iron Bowl since Gus Malzahn took over at Auburn in 2013.

The Wolverines were hardly dazzling themselves, slumbering past Indiana, 31-20 after trailing at halftime. That performance may have been a tacit acknowledgement that playing Ohio State this week had preoccupied Michigan, but it also served to slow the runaway hype surrounding this team. That result, combined with Notre Dame’s result, move Jim Harbaugh’s team much closer to fifth in The Dash’s playoff rankings than third.

Orange Bowl: second seed Clemson (8) vs. third seed Notre Dame (9)

The Tigers have rather quietly become a defensive juggernaut. They lead the nation in fewest yards allowed per play (3.77) and fewest yards allowed per rush (2.15), and are tied for the lead in sacks (3.64 per game). Thank a monster defensive line for all those things, and wish South Carolina good luck when it visits Death Valley Saturday.

The Fighting Irish were solidly in the playoff field before playing Syracuse, but beating down the Orange 36-3 only enhanced the résumé – to the point Notre Dame could perhaps afford to lose at USC Saturday and still make the field, in certain situations. But the Irish aren’t showing any signs of weakness heading into that game, and will have the chance to lock up the first playoff bid in Los Angeles.

The playoff field currently looks like five teams separated from a second tier of five, which means Georgia (10) is just on the outside of the bracket and well ahead of the rest of the Dash Top Ten, which is as follows: Oklahoma, Washington State, LSU, Central Florida, Ohio State.

It’s high time to move UCF ahead of the wobbling Buckeyes, and it’s time to at least consider moving Washington State ahead of Oklahoma. The undefeated Knights’ 31-point pounding of Pittsburgh looks pretty good today, now that the Panthers have clinched the ACC Coastal and risen to 7-4. Wazzu, meanwhile, on a seven-game winning streak, can point to the Sooners now giving up 40 or more points in three straight games – a first in program history.

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