Misery Index Week 13: Grimacing in Gainesville

Dan Wolken | USA TODAY Sports

The Misery Index was invented, in some ways, as a vehicle to poke fun at wild mood swings and the ability of fan bases to draw irrational conclusions from snapshot results. And every week, college football teams and fans have provided plenty of fodder for this space.

But there's nothing irrational about the anger of Florida fans right now.

What happened Saturday – a 26-20 loss to Georgia Southern – should not have happened. There is no excuse for it. There is no explaining it away. It was an embarrassment, and there should be consequences.

Whether those consequences include athletics director Jeremy Foley pulling the plug on Will Muschamp remains unclear. Less than two weeks ago, Foley said he was "a thousand percent convinced" Muschamp was the right man for the job and essentially guaranteed his hand-picked would return for a fourth season in 2014. Given how injuries have wrecked Florida's season, that stance was reasonable, even if you didn't agree with it.

But the Georgia Southern loss could – and probably should – change those percentages a little bit.

Florida had never lost to a school in the Football Championship Subdivision before Saturday, and it's not like Georgia Southern has been burning it up at that level this season. In fact, Georgia Southern went 4-4 in the Southern Conference this season with losses to Wofford, Samford, Appalachian State and Furman. The Eagles, who are transitioning to the Football Bowl Subdivision, have 70 scholarships available this season and have suffered numerous injuries themselves.

It also has to be alarming to Foley how many empty seats there were in the Swamp, a stadium Muschamp's team didn't even fill all the time last season when it went 11-2. Financially, it's a no-win situation. Either Foley will have to swallow a hefty buyout to get rid of Muschamp or face the prospect of entering next season with a significant dip in enthusiasm (read: ticket sales and donations).

Plus, Foley has to carefully consider what this disaster of a season means in recruiting, especially measured against what Florida State is doing this season. Can the Gators afford to fall even further behind?

At minimum, Muschamp was going to have to make significant changes to his coaching staff, especially on the offensive side of the ball. But will that be enough to satiate a fan base that is now out for blood?

Stay tuned.

(Disclaimer: This isn't a ranking of worst teams, worst losses or coaches whose jobs are in the most jeopardy. This is simply a measurement of a fan base's knee-jerk reaction to what they last saw. The way in which a team won or lost, expectations vis-à-vis program trajectory and traditional inferiority complex of fan base all factor into this ranking)

(Disclaimer No. 2: By virtue of firing their coaches, Connecticut and Southern California are hereby excluded from this and future editions of the Misery Index since fans can now look forward to a new regime taking hold in 2014.)

(Disclaimer No. 3: Southern Mississippi has been granted emeritus status for the Misery Index until it wins another game. At 20 consecutive losses and counting, putting the Golden Eagles on this list would be cruel.)

1. Florida: Digging into the box score a little bit makes the Georgia Southern loss even more alarming. Florida got out-gained 429-279, even though the Eagles attempted three passes. Three! They were all incompletions, too. Basically, the Gators got dominated at home by an FCS team. It's just that simple. Now, clearly the cumulative effect of injuries and a five-game losing streak can wear on a team. One would not expect the Gators to be as mentally sharp for Georgia Southern as they were for South Carolina last week.

Still, once you realize that Georgia Southern came to play, doesn't pride kick in? Shouldn't Florida, leading 10-7 at halftime, come out in the third quarter with a totally different mind-set and better plan of attack? Instead, the game just spiraled on them, and the Gators trailed 20-10 entering the fourth quarter.

2. Arkansas: Since joining the Southeastern Conference in 1992, Arkansas has never gone worse than 2-6 in the league. That record book, however, is about to get rewritten. Unless Arkansas pulls a massive upset Friday at LSU, the Hogs will go winless in the SEC and finish 3-9, branding Bret Bielema's first season an unmitigated disaster.

That doesn't mean it's hopeless, of course. Bielema has a track record, and goodness knows he did not inherit a great situation in the wake of the Bobby Petrino/John L. Smith debacle. It will take time to fully evaluate whether this is a good fit or not. But one SEC win would have helped the entire mood going into the offseason, and the Razorbacks had a chance to get it against Mississippi State on Saturday with a 10-0 lead at halftime. Instead, they lost 24-17 in overtime.

Bielema, who spent much of the last offseason yapping at the rest of the SEC, would be well-served to spend this offseason recruiting and figuring out how to win some games with the little talent he has.

3. Oregon: The working theory was that Oregon and its smaller, faster, skilled players just don't match up well against a powerful team such as Stanford. Given that the Ducks lost twice in a span of 23 games – both times to Stanford – it sounded good and made sense. Then came Saturday's 42-16 shellacking at Arizona.

What to make of this one? In many ways, Arizona is a mirror image of Oregon, and it certainly doesn't fit the mold of a team such as Stanford. In the end, maybe it's really simple. Oregon laid an egg. It played arrogantly. It coached arrogantly. It wasn't as good as all those blowouts early in the season made people believe.

And maybe it's also time to acknowledge that Mark Helfrich isn't Chip Kelly. Though Helfrich has maintained continuity in all the crucial areas of the program, there is an unquantifiable element to coaching success that encompasses things like leadership, communication, motivation and preparation. It might only matter one or two times a year, but that's the thin line between contending for a national title and going to the Alamo Bowl.

4. Michigan: If Ohio State does what's expected next weekend and lays waste to the Wolverines, don't be shocked if there's a big push by the fan base to get rid of Brady Hoke. Is Michigan getting better or getting worse? Is it putting itself in position to compete long term with Urban Meyer, or is it losing ground?

Those are the only questions that should matter to Michigan fans, and you'd be hard-pressed to find much evidence that the Wolverines are on track to do those things. In the latest chapter of Michigan follies, the Wolverines turned a 21-7 halftime lead at Iowa into a 24-21 loss. Even worse, Michigan ran for 60 yards and was outgained 407-158. That is not how an elite program should play, but it's been par for the course this season at Michigan.

Fans have every right to deserve better. At minimum, Hoke needs to make significant staff changes. Hoke isn't one to back down from expectations. As he likes to say, "It's Michigan." But that may be the very thing that gets him in the end.

5. Tennessee: Honeymoon's over, Butch. Though first-year coach Butch Jones was going to basically get a free pass for anything that happened this season with a talent-deprived Tennessee squad, there were two things he needed to make it a success: Get to a bowl game and beat Vanderbilt.

Both of those goals, however, went out the window Saturday night when Vandy quarterback Patton Robinette ran for a 5-yard touchdown with 16 seconds left to give the Commodores a 14-10 win in Knoxville. It also marked the first time since 1925-26 that Tennessee has lost to Vanderbilt in consecutive years and clinched the Vols' fourth consecutive losing season. That's a lot of pain for a fan base that still isn't used to the new normal in the SEC. This is not the late 1990s anymore when Georgia, Alabama and LSU all had bad coaches and programs such as Mississippi and South Carolina were barely trying, making it much easier for Tennessee and Florida to separate from the pack and go head-to-head for conference titles almost every year.

Still, it's sort of hard to believe that a school with Tennessee's resources and football ambition has fallen this far. Jones has recruited like a madman, but he better hope this class pans out because it's clear the Vols still have a long way to go.

6. Utah: Another underrated casualty of conference realignment was Utah's national relevance. The Utes got a generational opportunity when the Pac-12 called, but like TCU, the transition out of the Mountain West has been rough. Instead of competing for conference titles and winning BCS bowl games – something Utah did twice in a five-year span as a MWC member – the competition level in the Pac-12 has pretty much sent the program into no-man's land.

After a respectable debut in 2011 (which happened to be one of the weakest years ever in that league), the Utes have won four Pac-12 games the past two seasons. Utah will likely beat Colorado next weekend and finish 5-7 for a second consecutive year, which is not going to please fans who watched the program go 33-6 during its final three years in the Mountain West. You'd think head coach Kyle Whittingham would get some slack due to the transition, but the pressure on him is certainly starting to rise.

7. North Carolina State: Given the coaching change and loss of 12 starters, a dip could have been expected for N.C. State this season under Dave Doeren. But falling completely off the cliff? That's not the way it was supposed to go for Doeren, who heads into the season finale against Maryland still looking for his first Atlantic Coast Conference win.

Even worse for N.C. State, though, was Saturday's 42-28 home loss to East Carolina, a game the Wolfpack trailed by 28 until scoring a couple cheap touchdowns in the final minute. That loss sent N.C. State to 0-4 against in-state rivals this season, which is a good way for Doeren to put himself in the crosshairs of a fan base that believes it should be better at football than North Carolina, Duke, Wake Forest and ECU.

8. Boise State: The sidebar to Florida's struggles, which emanate from the offensive side of the ball, is that Muschamp has gotten disastrous results from Brent Pease, the former offensive coordinator at … Boise State. Meanwhile, the Broncos haven't been so happy with the way that transaction has worked out either. Though getting to a BCS bowl game has long been off the table, Boise was hoping to qualify for the Mountain West Conference championship game and get another shot at Fresno State, which beat the Broncos 41-40 back on Sept. 20.

After Saturday's 34-31 loss to San Diego State, however, Boise (7-4) needs major help next weekend to get to the conference title game. In other words, this year is officially a bust for the Broncos. The question going forward is this: Does Chris Petersen believe he has topped out at Boise, where it's hard to keep assistants and he'll always be chasing the standards he set a few years ago when the program was going to BCS bowl games? If so, it looks like he will have a bevy of attractive opportunities to leave (Southern California? Texas? Florida? Nebraska?).

He has said no before, but Boise State fans have plenty of reason to fear that this time he'll say yes.

9. Northwestern: Another week, another Big Ten loss for the Wildcats. At least it wasn't the soul-crushing variety this time, just a run-of-the-mill 30-6 beatdown by Michigan State. Still, it's hard to understand why Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald elected to punt twice in the second quarter on Michigan State's side of the field instead of going for either a manageable fourth-and-8 or fourth-and-6.

Sometimes, when you're in this kind of tailspin, you need a big momentum play to change things up. Why not take a risk? What did Northwestern have to lose? Obviously, when you're in a game against a great defense, field position matters. But there's a fine line between prudence and coaching scared, and Fitzgerald came off looking too conservative.

Anyway, it's a moot point now. Northwestern is 4-7 overall and 0-7 in the Big Ten, and that's too bad for a team that nearly everyone had pegged in the top 25 to start the season.

10. Temple: There's not much consolation in being the best 1-10 team in the country, but Temple is most certainly the best 1-10 team in the country. Though you are what your record says you are, the Owls have had some absolutely agonizing losses this season: By 1 to Fordham, by 2 to Idaho, by 3 to Rutgers and by 3 to Central Florida (a couple of them on miracle-type finishes).

Then came Saturday when Temple looked like an absolute cinch to get win No. 2, leading 21-0 against Connecticut at halftime. Then Temple went Temple, doing all kinds of ridiculous stuff (committing a pass interference penalty on fourth-and-goal, for instance) to let UConn back in the game. In the end, a 59-yard interception return by UConn's Yawin Smallwood with 4:20 remaining gave the Huskies a 28-21 victory. It was the sixth time this season Temple has blown a second-half lead.

Also receiving votes (miserable, but not quite miserable enough): Air Force, Rutgers, Wake Forest, Virginia, Georgia, Purdue, Kentucky, Hawaii.