Misery Index: Here’s to the most miserable college football fan bases … the ones who thought this was their year
As we reach the end of another Misery Index season, where we put our finger on the pulse of college football fan base anger and schadenfreude each week, it’s worth turning the clock back three months.In late August, before toe met leather for the first time, we collectively believed Penn State was poised to compete for a national title, Clemson was back and LSU finally had the right combination of offense and defense to win the SEC. We believed LaNorris Sellers was a Heisman contender for South Carolina, DJ Lagway was going to save Billy Napier’s job at Florida, and that Arch Manning was going to revolutionize the quarterback position.AdvertisementAnd we were wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. The best thing about sports is their unpredictability, which often makes us feel dumb. But you know what’s worse than being wrong? Being the fan of a team whose preseason prediction of glory went bad.With that in mind, the final Misery Index of 2025 will pay tribute to not just one school but the entire group of teams whose expected greatness did not work out for one reason or another.Preseason No. 1 Texas? Though the Longhorns recovered to finish 9-3 and get on the fringe of the playoff conversation, their chances of living up to this ranking were doomed by the inexperience of their quarterback and offensive line.AdvertisementNo. 2 Penn State? One of the weirdest three-week implosions of the modern era, leading to James Franklin’s firing.No. 4 Clemson? The returning talent looked good on paper, but Dabo Swinney’s loyalty to his guys — both players and coaches — has doomed this program for five seasons.No. 9 LSU? Apparently, if you listen to LSU insiders, Brian Kelly was too busy playing golf to actually coach his team.No. 11 Arizona State? Good effort to finish 8-4, but with multi-game injuries to quarterback Sam Leavitt and elite receiver Jordyn Tyson, they never had a chance of returning to the CFP.No. 13 South Carolina? Losing offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains to Appalachian State and replacing him with Mike Shula was a major whiff by head coach Shane Beamer.AdvertisementNo. 15 Florida? Everyone in the world knew that Billy Napier should have stopped calling plays and focused on being the head coach — with the exception of Billy Napier. Now he’s out of a job.No. 17 Kansas State? Your mind could not invent more ways to lose close games than Kansas State experienced this season.Clemson’s Dabo Swinney and South Carolina’s Shane Beamer haven’t had the best seasons. (David Jensen/Getty Images) (David Jensen via Getty Images)Keep that in mind next August when the preseason polls come out. Being in the top 20 doesn’t guarantee success. Being off the radar isn’t a death sentence. Especially in this era of college football, where rosters change significantly from year to year, all we know for sure is how much we don’t know.AdvertisementThe only guarantee is that week after week in college football, a new group of fan bases will experience the disappointment of unmet expectations, bad coaching decisions and jealousy over their rival’s success.That’s why we do this. And that’s why we’ll be back in nine months to anoint the country’s most miserable fan bases in 2026.Conference Champions of MiseryACC: What kind of odds could you have gotten on Florida State going 5-7 after it opened the season with a 31-17 victory over Alabama? If you think back to Week 1, that wasn’t just a win for the Seminoles, it was a tailkicking of the highest order against a team that may well win an SEC championship. On that afternoon, Florida State looked like a program that fixed everything from the 2-10 disaster in 2024. But as we soon learned, it was a mirage. The Seminoles were just not very good, punctuating their mediocrity with a season-ending 40-21 loss to Florida. Fans of this program have every right to be furious, not just at the Mike Norvell-led coaching staff that oversaw this disaster but at the administration that announced it’s keeping him in 2026, largely because it doesn’t want to spend tens of millions of dollars to replace him. After four losing seasons in six years, there’s no more margin for error in 2026.AdvertisementBig Ten: On Oct. 30, Nebraska announced Matt Rhule’s two-year contract extension, ending speculation that he was a candidate to take over at his alma mater, Penn State. Since then, quarterback Dylan Raiola broke his leg, speculation bubbled that he’s preparing for a transfer, his younger brother Dayton decommitted from the 2026 recruiting class and the Huskers lost three of their last four games including blowouts against Penn State and Iowa. Other than that, it was a perfect end to the season in Lincoln — perfectly awful. After clear forward steps in 2023 and 2024, this was really the first time it felt like Nebraska’s progress stalled under Rhule. Given the contract extension, the Huskers’ late-season swoon — including a 10th loss to rival Iowa in their last 11 meetings — isn’t going to give him any more credibility with the fan base. It would behoove Rhule and the administration that doubled down on him to get this thing right soon.Matt Rhule may have signed a recent extension with the Nebraska Cornhuskers, but the team’s late slip is cause for concern. (Scott Taetsch/Getty Images) (Scott Taetsch via Getty Images)Big 12: In the new era of college sports, programs that make coaching changes expect a quick return on investment. With that in mind, the Big 12’s retread coaches this season flopped harder than the John Carter movie that lost $200 million at the box office. We’re looking at you, Scott Frost and Rich Rodriguez, who combined to go 4-14 in the conference at UCF and West Virginia, respectively. With UCF’s geography and West Virginia’s passion, it’s a major problem for the Big 12 when those two programs are at the bottom of the standings. As they head into 2026, there are big questions around both coaches. If you set aside UCF’s remarkable 2017 season, Frost is 27-45 as a head coach including his first stint at UCF and Nebraska. Did the Knights make a mistake bringing him back? West Virginia, which finished with a 49-0 home loss to Texas Tech to go 4-8, is banking on the 62-year-old Rodriguez to reinvent himself in an entirely different era than his run of success in Morgantown 20 years ago. Good luck to both of them.SEC: Lasting 13 seasons as an SEC coach is an accomplishment anywhere. It’s especially impressive at Kentucky, where the average tenure was five years for the six coaches who came before Mark Stoops. On top of that, it’s a truly odds-defying run when you consider that there haven’t been a lot of big peaks. Kentucky went 10-3 in 2018 and 2021, but it’s mostly been a long stretch of very solid football that produced eight straight bowl bids for the first time in program history. So why is Stoops now in trouble? Because since NIL became the key factor in building rosters, there’s been obvious slippage. Is that because NIL has blown up Kentucky’s niche of recruiting overlooked players in Ohio and the greater Midwest? Is it because the bottom of the SEC got so much better while Kentucky didn’t? Or has Stoops (and particularly his offense) just gotten stale after so long? A $38 million buyout may save Stoops for another year, but finishing a 5-7 season with a 41-0 loss at Louisville should force some tough conversations about what’s gone wrong and how the Cats can get back to respectability.AdvertisementGroup of Five: Nobody outside the power conferences is putting more money into their program than Memphis. Remember the reported $150-$200 million offer for membership in the Big 12? This is a school whose administration and boosters are serious about football, but the return on investment has become questionable under Ryan Silverfield. While Memphis has won 29 games over the past three seasons, we are well past the point of comparing this program to its losing history in the 1990s and 2000s. The Tigers should be judged against expectations based on their status within the American Conference, which means they should be playing for the league title on a semi-regular basis. The reality is that Memphis hasn’t been in the conference championship game since 2019 when Mike Norvell was wrapping up his tenure before heading to Florida State. While Silverfield has posted a string of solid seasons, he isn’t winning enough of the games that matter to get Memphis into that position. After a 28-17 home loss to Navy, nobody at Memphis is going to be thrilled with going 8-4 overall and 4-4 in the American.Headset MiseryMike Elko: By now, you’ve probably seen the clip of Texas A&M’s coach briefly losing his temper in Friday’s postgame press conference because the sound of a postgame celebration at Texas was overwhelming his train of thought. But there was also probably a little more to his frustration than background noise. The Aggies may have already punched their CFP ticket, but Elko is now 0-2 in what many fans consider the most important game of the season. For all Elko has done to get Texas A&M on track to contend for titles, he might very well have a Steve Sarkisian problem. In two meetings since Texas joined the SEC and resumed the Lone Star Showdown after a 12-year hiatus, the Longhorns have posted a pair of 10-point wins, including 27-17 this time around. That’s not going to feel like such a big deal in a couple weeks when the Aggies are preparing for the CFP and Texas is likely headed to a bowl game nobody cares about. But it’s a trend Texas A&M fans will demand he reverse in the near future.Mike Elko’s Texas A&M Aggies lost their first game of the year on Friday, and the coach wasn’t happy about it. (Alex Slitz/Getty Images) (Alex Slitz via Getty Images)Shane Beamer: After wrapping up one of the most disappointing seasons of any team in the country, Beamer sent a message to South Carolina fans that he was “one-million percent confident” the struggle to a 4-8 record would pay off with a bounce back next season. We know Beamer will be back after a vote of confidence from athletic director Jeremiah Donati, but you can’t ignore what a failure this was after the Gamecocks nearly made the playoff last year at 9-3. So what’s behind the confidence other than blind hope and rhetoric? We’ll see soon enough.AdvertisementJosh Heupel: Tennessee made the playoff last year, officially ending a 20-year period of dysfunction that Vol fans hope they’ll never experience again. But how quickly they forget what life was like before Heupel because they’ve already put him on notice after a 45-24 home loss to Vanderbilt that ended their regular season at 8-4. To be clear, Heupel isn’t in any trouble from the Tennessee administration, and this was always supposed to be a bit of a rebuilding year for the Vols. They finished roughly where they were projected in the preseason. But after allowing 33 points to Oklahoma in a loss, 34 to Kentucky in a win, 37 to Alabama in a loss, 44 to Georgia in a loss and 31 to Arkansas in a win, the defensive slippage is a real reason for concern. Heupel shouldn’t be on your hot seat list in 2026, but he could get there pretty quickly if next season starts with the same energy that led to a tail-kicking by their in-state rival.Deion Sanders: Despite dealing with serious health issues over the last year, the imminent retirement of his athletic director Rick George and having no more athletic sons available to put on the football field, Sanders has projected the image of a coach ready to press through and fix Colorado’s problems in 2026. “If anybody’s built to reconcile and get this back on course, it’s me,” he told reporters after 24-14 loss to Kansas State. “And I will do it if it’s the last thing I do on Earth. Trust me when I tell you. This was the Last Supper.” Coach Prime has never been afraid of bold proclamations about what he’s going to do, but his three seasons at Colorado have yielded 4-8, 9-4 and 3-9 records. Unless he’s got a bunch of four- and five-star athletes ready to come to Boulder next season, it’s fair to be skeptical.Moments of MiseryESPN continued to shill for Lane Kiffin: While America awaits Kiffin’s decision between LSU and Ole Miss, it was notable Saturday how many of ESPN’s top commentators from Kirk Herbstreit to Booger McFarland to Nick Saban were stumping for Kiffin to coach the Rebels in the CFP even if he takes the LSU job. That’s a ridiculous non-starter for a variety of reasons, including the reality that Kiffin would have free reign to recruit Ole Miss’ roster while working for a conference rival in that scenario. The voracity of those pleas on Kiffin’s behalf was suspicious enough that some fans spent hours Saturday researching how many of those commentators are also represented by Creative Artists Agency. (Hint: It’s a lot!)AdvertisementFlorida learned a tough lesson about the coaching carousel: For weeks, Gators fans and so-called insiders insisted Kiffin was Gainesville-bound. But over the last week, several people in the know — including your trusted Yahoo Sports reporters — made it clear that Florida was no longer in the Kiffin sweepstakes and he would either be back at Ole Miss or headed to LSU. Florida’s administration realized where it stood in recent days and started moving on to other candidates, but its fan base freaked out Friday when they finally got the message through credible reports that Tulane’s Jon Sumrall had moved to the front of the line. The Gators’ coaching search could have some finality on Sunday, but missteps by their administration ensured that fans would be mad about hiring anyone but Kiffin. Gainesville is going to be a tinder box for the next several days.Marshall screwed around and found out: Just 12 months ago, after winning the Sun Belt championship to complete his third winning season in four years, Charles Huff left Marshall without much of a fight. Amidst stalled contract negotiations, Marshall basically let him walk to conference rival Southern Miss. How did it all turn out? Marshall lost four of its final five games including a season-ending 24-19 loss to Georgia Southern that closed their season at 5-7. Meanwhile, Huff took a Southern Miss program that went 1-11 last season and got them to bowl eligibility at 7-5. Letting him go to a conference rival is a mistake Marshall may regret for years to come.
已发布: 2025-11-30 05:27:00
来源: sports.yahoo.com
