Misery Index Week 1: Pungent in Piscataway

Dan Wolken | USA TODAY Sports

Show Caption Hide Caption Campus Conclusions from Week 1 of college football USA Today Sports' George Schroeder reviews the lessons learned from Week 1 of the college football season.

As the Misery Index enters its third season, you’d like to think we are all a bit older and wiser, less prone to overreaction, more prepared for the ups and downs of seasons and life cycles of college football programs.

You’d like to think we are more understanding that coaches can only do so much to control the actions of 18- to 22-year old amateur athletes and that even men who make millions of dollars to draw up football plays don’t always have answers for everything.

You’d like to think time and perspective has moved us beyond the venomous, social media-fueled, knee-jerk emotional roller coaster and into a more enlightened state of fandom where we realize what we’re watching is just a silly football game.

You’d like to take a deep breath and think about all those things as we head into another season and resolve as a fan to do better And then, you realize, you root for Rutgers.

After one of the worst offseasons in memory when it comes to issues outside the field of play, Rutgers stands as the symbol for what can go wrong in a college football program when inept people are in charge.

If you feel good about being a Rutgers fan right now, you are almost certainly not of this planet.

Never mind that the State University of New Jersey had a basketball coach a few years ago who was verbally abusing basketball players, a man the very competent former athletics director knew needed to be fired after seeing video evidence compiled by a former assistant. Never mind that politics and bureaucracy and a disinterested president overruled the concerns of that athletics director, who was then thrown under the bus by said president when the tape predictably ended up in the hands of ESPN.

Never mind that his replacement, Julie Hermann, had been accused of doing and saying some pretty distasteful things herself as a volleyball coach at Tennessee in the late 1990s. Never mind that Rutgers then turned around and hired a basketball coach who had not completed his degree from Rutgers. Never mind that Hermann has subsequently been caught in a number of public relations embarrassments, from making a tasteless joke about Jerry Sandusky in a staff meeting to telling a journalism class it would be “great” if the The Newark Star-Ledger newspaper went out of business. Never mind the accusation made by the family of a former Rutgers player, Jevon Tyree, that she mishandled or flat-out ignored a claim had been bullied by an assistant coach. (An independent investigation exonerated Rutgers officials but essentially concluded nobody knew what really happened.)

Never mind all of that and let's just deal with the here and now. Let’s just deal with the fact that head football coach Kyle Flood stands accused of inappropriately contacting an adjunct professor on behalf of one of his players who was facing academic ineligibility, who was then dismissed Saturday along with four of his teammates who were charged late last week with various crimes stemming from incidents back in the spring. Aggravated assault. Home invasion. Robbery. Incidents that bring up a whole host of new questions about why those players — key players, many of them — were merely suspended and practicing with the team all this time and what Flood knew during the months between.

All told, Rutgers is the worst athletic department in a power conference and it’s not particularly close. The place is a mess and the football team, which beat Norfolk State 63-13 on Saturday, can do nothing to change the perception that it represents the absolute worst of big-time college sports. And if the results of an investigation into Flood’s conduct reveal the worst, he could be fired any day.

Having said that, Happy Football Season, everyone!

(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.)

1. Rutgers: Does it even matter at this point whether Rutgers goes 10-2 or 2-10? The issues facing the program are much bigger, and that's a tough spot to be in as a fan. Victories are supposed to feel good and be celebrated, but the way Rutgers has operated means that the only story anyone will talk about this season is the turmoil within the athletic department and Flood’s future. That’s too bad for the players, who deserve better, and the fans, who have done nothing wrong.

2. Texas: The Misery Index fears the Longhorns will be a frequent guest in this space for the foreseeable future, given the way their 38-3 loss at Notre Dame transpired Saturday night. You can’t win games in this era of college football — and particularly in the Big 12 — if you can’t score. And Texas can’t score.

Part of this, of course, should absolutely be shoveled at the feet of former coach Mack Brown, who made a series of poor recruiting decisions that left the Longhorns bereft of the kind of skill players they should have every year simply by accident. (For all the flak Brown caught for failing to recruit Robert Griffin III or Johnny Manziel, choosing Tyrone Swoopes over J.T. Barrett might be the biggest recruiting gaffe of the last decade.) But there’s a larger concern here, and it speaks to a philosophical point we wrote about in the preseason.

Texas is selling itself now as a team in the middle of a transition into the kind of offense seen across the Big 12, although it seems to be in dispute whether the Longhorns are really running a spread in the same vein as guys who came from the Texas high school ranks. If they’re simply running the same West Coast offense they had before, only doing it without huddling, that’s not just false advertising, it’s coaching malpractice.

And it begs the question once again: If Texas is trying to be just another version of Baylor, why did it hire Charlie Strong in the first place? And why did Strong bring veteran West Coast offense guru Shawn Watson with him from Louisville? This is an identity crisis that goes beyond one game or even one season. Meanwhile, Texas fans have every reason to fear that the results at Notre Dame — the Longhorns averaged 2.2 yards per play — are going to be the rule rather than the exception this season.

3. Vanderbilt: This is not an X-and-O problem. If you watched Vanderbilt lose to Western Kentucky 14-12 in Week 1, that much was obvious. Second-year head coach Derek Mason, who anointed himself defensive coordinator after going 3-9 last season, can scheme defensively just as competently as he did at Stanford.

The Commodores’ defense held the Hilltoppers to 246 yards and looked like a pretty solid unit that will be good enough to keep them in a lot of games this season. But what Vanderbilt fans now have to grapple with is whether Mason has the intangible “it” factor as a head coach to get a group of young men to play above their heads in the same way James Franklin routinely did during his three seasons. Vanderbilt does not have great offensive talent, but it really never has aside from one or two individual stars that seem to come along every few years.

Vanderbilt’s inability to move the ball in any consistent way against Western Kentucky — a team ranked 123rd in total defense last season — is alarming to the point where you wonder if the Commodores can beat any opponent on their schedule besides Austin Peay (upcoming non-conference games at Houston and Middle Tennessee do not seem like such a great idea at the moment). Meanwhile, each week makes the Vanderbilt run of success under Franklin look more and more like a three-year anomaly rather than a building block to turn this program into the Stanford of the SEC.

4. Penn State: Speaking of Franklin, he is quickly becoming one of the most polarizing coaches in college football. If you look at his first four years as a head coach on a macro level, it is an absolute fact that he has overachieved each season given the talent at his disposal and the circumstances he has dealt with.

And yet when fans look at each season and each game up close, it is easy to find warts: Uninspired playcalling, routinely questionable clock management, frustrating inconsistency. You can’t really say the honeymoon is over in State College after Saturday’s 27-10 loss to Temple, but let’s just say Penn State fans are no longer ordering room service. Penn State doesn't lose to Temple. Not now, not ever.

That doesn’t mean it can't happen because we all saw that it happened last weekend, and it wasn’t even that big of a surprise if you follow the sport closely. But it’s certainly not acceptable, regardless of the sanctions and depth issues Franklin is still grappling with and an offensive line that looks like it needs at least another year to play at an acceptable FBS level.

It’s not so much that Penn State fans are impatient but rather that performances like Saturday give them reason to be skeptical, particularly when they’re conditioned to believe that an elite-level talent like Christian Hackenberg is supposed to cover up a multitude of sins. Hackenberg’s development at quarterback will continue to be a matter of debate — he completed just 11 of 25 passes for 103 yards — but there’s no denying that Penn State’s offensive line is still just as much of a mess as it was last season, which doesn’t bode well for the next 11 games.

5. Central Florida: When you’re trying to hang onto the cachet of that Fiesta Bowl win against Baylor long enough to score an invitation to the Big 12, losing a season opener to Florida International probably isn’t the best idea.

Not that the power conference end game is everything for UCF — heck, they can’t control whether the conference of One True Champion expands any more than Oklahoma President David Boren can — but it is something of a back burner issue for fans of every program trying to get in that derby (we’re looking at you, Cincinnati, Memphis, Connecticut and Brigham Young). And the appearance of having a football program on the way up rather than the opposite does have some intrinsic value.

This never figured to be a memorable season for the Knights one way or the other, but the season-opening loss does set off some alarm bells as head coach George O’Leary approaches age 70. O’Leary, as USA TODAY Sports reported last week, has his sights set on becoming the full-time athletics director at UCF and stepping down as football coach after this season.

The plan would then be to hand the reins to offensive coordinator Brent Key, a longtime O’Leary assistant and former player at Georgia Tech. That arrangement might work well in theory, but what does it mean for UCF in reality, particularly at such a sensitive time? If it doesn’t go well, Knights fans will have much more to worry about than losing to Ron Turner.

6. Washington State: Despite his feel-good second season in which he beat Southern California and took the Cougars to a bowl game, Mike Leach’s record at Washington State is 12-26 after Saturday’s loss to FCS member Portland State.

But here’s the really scary thing for Washington State fans: If he can’t fix it, who can? Bottom line: The Cougars don’t have any real excuse for losing to an FCS team in Leach’s fourth season.

It’s not their facilities, which are marvelous. It’s not their head coach, who is accomplished. It’s not their schedule, which has been manageable. And given the way Leach talked about his team in the preseason, it shouldn’t be the talent level. But something is missing, and the Misery Index grants Washington State fans free reign to freak out over the state of this program now that 2015 is already on track to be a disappointment.

7. Colorado: The non-conference trip to Hawaii is among the most alluring setups for a major football program. The idea is to go get a relatively easy win, be able to play a 13th game (an obscure NCAA rule) and enjoy a couple days of paradise with your players, fans and administration.

Of course, that requires you actually winning the game, which Colorado was unable to accomplish in a 28-20 loss. Forget the specifics of what happened at the end — and yes, Colorado fans will forever complain about how quickly the ball was spotted by the officiating crew and the inability to get off one final play that might have given the Buffaloes a chance to tie the game.

But if you take a step back, Colorado probably should be better than a life-or-death struggle at Hawaii if the program is progressing as quickly as Mike MacIntyre hoped. It’s not, and that's a problem as the Buffaloes face one of the most difficult Pac-12 schedules in league history, facing Oregon and Stanford in crossover games as well as the loaded South division. Colorado’s bowl-less streak of seven seasons appears likely to become eight.

8. Southern California: Few were as critical of head coach Steve Sarkisian’s drunken appearance at the program’s “Salute to Troy” preseason event as USC fans themselves, which is a refreshing departure from the typical mindless fandom the Misery Index sees on a daily basis. But the truth is USC fans know more than anyone that Sarkisian, whether he actually has a drinking problem, most certainly has a propensity to act like a 21-year-old frat boy problem.

And that feeds into the narrative that Sarkisian’s teams will chronically underachieve because they lack the focus, discipline and seriousness to make it through a taxing 12-game schedule without a couple of unnecessary hiccups. So while the Trojans did what was expected in waxing Arkansas State 55-6, it's a victory that does little to calm the nerves about what’s in store this season. And it certainly doesn’t help that USC fans now realize what they’ll have to deal with in UCLA freshman quarterback Josh Rosen for the next three years.

9. Idaho: Paul Petrino, once considered the more likable and reasonable of the Petrino brothers, really shouldn’t be in the news at all. He coaches at Idaho for goodness sakes, and if Idaho becomes a national story that usually isn’t good news for Idaho or its fans. But Petrino put himself under the microscope in the preseason by allegedly berating a reporter who covers the team and needing to be restrained from a possible physical confrontation (an allegation he denies) over what appears to be run-of-the-mill program critiques.

Meanwhile, Idaho lost its opener to Ohio 45-28, and faces the possibility of getting kicked out of the Sun Belt Conference after this season. That’s right, recent comments from Sun Belt Commissioner Karl Benson indicate the league is thinking seriously about whether it wants to continue its football-only relationship with Idaho and New Mexico State after adding Coastal Carolina last week as a 10th all-sports member.

The league’s agreement with those two geographically mismatched schools is up for renewal after this season, and it would seem that losing an affiliation with the Sun Belt could force Idaho to drop down to the FCS level because scheduling would become just about impossible otherwise. Maybe it would be a blessing in disguise for Idaho to play in a division where it could actually compete, but in the short-term, it would be an undeniable blow to the school’s ego.

10: Brigham Young: Is it possible to be miserable after one of the great wins in school history? It is at BYU. Shortly after the “Mangum Miracle” — a 42-yard touchdown pass from backup quarterback Tanner Mangum to Mitch Mathews as time expired to deliver a 33-28 victory at Nebraska — head coach Bronco Mendenhall revealed that starting quarterback Taysom Hill was lost for the season with a lisfranc fracture foot injury.

Hill is, without question, one of the most beloved players in BYU history (athletics director Tom Holmoe Tweeted that Hill was his favorite athlete to ever wear a BYU uniform) and also one of its most tragic as his career has been robbed by season-ending injuries three times. Hill, when healthy, was one of the most dynamic players in the country, but his potential will likely go unfulfilled unless he decides to come back for a fifth season at age 26.

Hill is one of the most intelligent college athletes the Misery Index has ever had the opportunity to be around, and he will have plenty of options beyond football to make an impact in the world if he decides to hang up his cleats. But for now, BYU fans have to be feeling profound sadness over the way his career has unfolded and the amazing things he was capable of that they weren’t able to see.

Honorable mention (miserable, but not miserable enough): Stanford, Kansas, North Carolina, Utah State, Indiana, Wyoming.

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