A bit lighter in the wallet but probably still none the wiser

We never learn. We never learn our lesson and continue to amaze ourselves over the lengths we will travel to invent excuses to pick (and bet!) against USC in their bowl games. Let’s see, what was it this year? Oh, yeah – the Trojans would come out flat and play generally uninspired football because this was their 4th straight trip to Pasadena and as Bill Plaschke of the L.A. Times duly noted, the Trojan senior class had never taken a plane ride to a bowl game… honestly, just how many times can you get up for the Lowry’s Beef Bowl?

Oh, and ignoring B-Daddy’s advise that season openers and bowl games where Pete Carroll and his staff have multiple weeks to prepare for an opponent are near-mortal locks, we drifted into point spread delerium over the wizened and wizardly perception of head coach, Joe Paterno and all the laudatory praise that was heaped upon him and his program by USC’s coaches and players. It was going to be different this year.

And at the end of the day, it was just another Rose Bowl. Just another Rose Bowl where another plodding team from the Midwest (with a young Italian fellow at free safety, no less) gets run over, through and mostly around by an over-qualified USC that tried its darndest to allow Penn St. a backdoor cover (+10 pts.) by taking the entire 4th quarter off and still won by two touchdowns, 38-24. Oh for two crappy quarters up in Corvalis way back in September and what might have been.

(btw, the Figurehead was in fine form in yesterday’s broadcast though we missed those classic late 3rd quarter/early 4th quarter panoramic shots of the setting sun against the San Gabriel mountains as that usual January 1st Pasadena postcard to the rest of the nation was most likely obscured by the fog and haze that returned to the Southland after a week of spectacularly clear weather.)

And how about that Big 10? Wow. Is there any way Ohio St., the lone remaining team from a conference that is 1-5 in its bowl games thus far with an average margin of defeat of 17 points can graciously bow out of its Fiesta Bowl match up against Texas on Monday and save the Big 10 any further embarrassment?

And for all the shots that were taken at the Pac-10 this season (some of which were volleyed from these very pages), the conference goes 5-0 which excluding the USC game involved 4 upsets and which also garners them victors of some ESPN fabrication, the Bowl Challenge Cup.

And did you all enjoy that scintillating scrum in the Orange Bowl between Va. Tech and Cincinnati won by the Hokies 20-7 last night and which featured plenty of tight low angle shots to, hopefully, hide a completely empty upper level (strangely, attendance was reported as 73,602. Those must have been some very long lines at the concession stands).

There was only one reason to watch that game and that was to listen to booth analyst Charles Davis who has a regular gig on the NFL Network’s College Football Now and who is one of the brightest, sharpest and most insightful minds working in all of football. Fox had the game and we are glad they are getting out of broadcasting the BCS bowl games and letting ABC/ESPN take over after the 2010 regular season. All their production techniques and graphics are lifted directly from their NFL games and it simply does not cross over well to the college game.

And speaking of the NFL, Mongo dialed this up after the Rose Bowl and though we had not heard it in probably 25 years or whenever it was they discontinued it, we recognized it immediately as one of the great intro music pieces in television history. It’s the Figurehead along with Jayne Kennedy and Jimmy the Greek at the Big Sombrero prior to our Los Angeles Rams' only NFC championship victory, a 9-0 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in January of 1980.

In with a Bang.... (Updated)

The following is an update to a post from last August, the original which can be found here.

Over the past 20 years there have been 9 coaches to win a national championship within the first 3 years of taking over at head coach of their respective college program, and outside of one, Pete Carroll at USC, that coach never won another one (Urban Meyer won it two years ago so we will have to wait and see, Les Miles (pictured) won it last year and we feel comfortable will never win it again and Pete Carroll won it in his 3rd and 4th seasons. The rest of the lineup is as follows:

Lou Holtz – Notre Dame ’88 (3rd Year)
Gene Stallings – Alabama ’92 (2nd Year)
Lloyd Carr - Michigan '97 (3rd Year)
Bob Stoops – Oklahoma ’00 (2nd Year)
Larry Coker – Miami ’01 (1st Year)
Jim Tressel - Ohio St. ‘02 (3rd Year)

Obviously, each data point has a different backdrop and context from the others…. Holtz continued to field national championship caliber teams after ’88, though the last 3 years were mediocre (23-11-1) by Tying Irish standards. Stallings also, had very good on-field success after his lone championship, though he stepped down in ’96 after an exhaustive 2 yr. investigation of the ‘Bama program which did result in sanctions. Michigan coach Lloyd Carr, though, has not only not won another national title but was perceived as heading a program in gradual decline and was fired, er, stepped down at the end of last season as a result.

Also in the 90s, one has examples conversely of this alleged phenomena where ironically it was two ball coaches that had been at their respective schools for years before winning their first championships in the persons of Bobby Bowden at Florida St. and Dr. Tom Osborne at Nebraska. In fact, those two pretty much owned the decade by combining for 5 National Championships.

Things get a little juicier with this next set. Tressel won in his 3rd year and had a chance to win the title in the last 2 consecutive years before being upset by Florida and Urban Meyer, a 2nd Year guy at the time and then Les Miles of LSU, a year 3 guy. No shame, that.

Larry Coker is the poster-old man for this post. After winning the championship in his very first season with the ‘Canes, his win totals declined thereafter until he was dismissed two years ago. And though by no means is he in the hot seat, Sooner Nation, is getting a little anxious for Bob Stoops to get back to the BCS title game... or least show-up at a BCS bowl game where they have lost their last 4 of which they appeared.

Again… not sure if there are enough data points to lead to anything more conclusive than perhaps that each of the above won primarily with the last guy’s recruits.

We would be remiss if we did not hand out an Honorable Mention-type award as well: Kirk Farentz of Iowa has seen his win totals in steady decline after winning the Big 10 title in both '02 (4th season) and '04 (6th season). And both Ralph Friedgen of Maryland and Chuck Amato as HC at NC State who were fired at the end of the ’06 season, shared similar career arcs starting at the beginning of the decade in the ACC.

It will be interesting to see how Tressel, Stoops, Meyer and Miles, coaches who man one of the 7 or 8 mega-programs in the nation, fare in the coming years.

O Happy Day.

Time was, one had to wait until the 4th of July to get his college football fix. No longer, as Memorial Day marks the roll out of many of the college football preview issues. Lindy's was first out of the chute that we saw this past weekend and looky-there: its Mongo's namesake gracing the cover of the mag.

For whatever its worth, Lindy's has Georgia squaring off against USC for the big crystal football. Should make for some interesting discussions within Mongo's extended Clan.

We'll have more on all this later.