LSU’s athletics director, Scott Woodward, has a reputation in college sports as a big game hunter.
Whenever he has a chance to hire a coach in pretty much any sport, Woodward is going to unleash the money whip and land an established star. The agents love him. The coaches have been enriched by him. But the fans? Well, at LSU these days, they might say he has utterly failed in his No. 1 job of putting Tiger football in position to win national championships.
Kelly, at the time, had completed his 12th season at Notre Dame and seemed like he’d maxed out what he could do there. The theory was that LSU, with greater resources and recruiting reach, would give a well-established, successful coach the opportunity ascend to even greater heights and potentially win a national championship.
Instead, the reality for Kelly is that he’s a fairly pedestrian 26-10 at LSU and will likely finish outside the top-10 for a third consecutive year. Aside from an overtime upset over Alabama in 2022, LSU under Kelly generally wins the games it’s supposed to win and loses a couple more games than it’s supposed to lose. The end result is that LSU is nothing more than a solid top-half-of-the-SEC program under Kelly, but that’s not what Woodward paid him $95 million over 10 years to achieve.
LSU is supposed to compete for titles. It hasn’t come close yet under Kelly, an erudite northerner who raises the floor through sheer competence but looks like an awkward cultural fit in Baton Rouge. In the end, Kelly has the same problem at LSU that he had at Notre Dame. He just doesn’t win very often against teams with equal or better talent.
No matter how good of a coach you think Kelly is, Woodward made a mistake. And it’s not his first misfire in a really high-profile, high-stakes situation.
To be fair, Woodward’s track record at Washington, Texas A&M and now LSU has yielded some impressive results. At LSU, for instance, hiring Kim Mulkey in women’s basketball and Jay Johnson in baseball resulted in quick turnarounds and national championships.
But everyone knows an AD’s career is judged mostly by their football hires, which is where things have gotten sideways lately for Woodward. At A&M, he was responsible for the unprecedented 10-year, $75 million contract that lured Jimbo Fisher from Florida State. That didn’t work out very well. And now at LSU, Kelly is struggling to justify why Woodward was so determined to convince him to leave Notre Dame.
Here’s the fundamental problem with Woodward. Does he really have a set of values that guide his decision-making, or does his leadership style revolve around making a big splash and proving to fans and his fellow ADs that he has the juice to be a mover and shaker?
Right now, it’s looking like the latter. And the more the Tigers struggle to win big games, the more alarming it gets gets. That’s why LSU is No. 1 in the Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which fan bases are feeling the most angst.
Four more in misery
Georgia: The CFP committee is going to give the Bulldogs more latitude than any other team in the country, which is probably appropriate because they’ve played the toughest schedule in college football. Assuming Georgia wins its last three games, all at home against Tennessee, Massachusetts and Georgia Tech, they’re going to cruise into the playoff at 10-2 — as they should.
However, if you apply the eye test to Georgia, it might cause bouts of blindness. The Bulldogs just aren’t a very good watch.
Georgia fans know what a championship team looks like, and this isn’t a championship team. Georgia’s 28-10 loss at Ole Miss brought all the Bulldogs’ problems to the surface from quarterback play to turnovers to a defense that is prone to getting pushed around. Georgia gained just 245 offensive yards against the Rebels while losing the turnover battle 3-1 and struggling to the run ball. It wasn’t an anomaly – aside from Georgia’s great performance against Texas on Oct. 19, those issues have been par for the course. Are Georgia fans spoiled? Yes. But it doesn’t take a sense of entitlement to see that this is Kirby Smart’s worst team in several years.
Florida: This has been a season of bloodlust in Gainesville. Not only do Gators fans want head coach Billy Napier gone, they’re equally done with the athletics director who hired him. But Scott Stricklin’s statement Thursday that Napier would be returning for 2025 presumably ends that debate. Napier will be back, and apparently Stricklin’s job is safe too. On Friday, however, Florida’s student newspaper The Alligator reported on disturbing allegations against men’s basketball coach Todd Golden that led to a Title IX investigation. Suddenly, the entire athletic department looks like it’s going up in flames.
It’s impossible to say what this is all going to mean for Florida’s athletic leadership, especially when the university is looking for a new president who would presumably make some of these decisions. Meanwhile, asking fans to have faith in another year of Napier gets awfully difficult after a 49-17 loss to Texas. Yes, the Longhorns are a much better program right now, but Florida failing to be competitive after Napier’s vote of confidence will only inflame a large number of Gators fans who believe wholesale changes are necessary to compete in the SEC anytime soon.
Michigan: We haven’t talked much this season about the fact that last year’s national champions have become also-rans in the Big Ten who will be fortunate to end up 6-6. Why not? Is it because Jim Harbaugh left for the NFL? Because so much talent walked out the door? Because Sherrone Moore is a first-year head coach who deserves some latitude as he learns on the job?
Come on! This is Michigan for goodness sakes. And when a 20-15 loss to Indiana counts as one of the Wolverines’ better performances of the season, there might be a bigger underlying issue that deserves some attention.
At 5-5, Michigan can secure bowl eligibility in a couple weeks if it beats Northwestern. But even that doesn’t seem like a guarantee, as Michigan’s quarterback situation has sunk so far that August 31 against Fresno State is the last time the Wolverines have scored 30 or more points.
Alabama-Birmingham: The only question here is whether the Blazers’ administration and fan base can round up the $4.1 million in buyout money necessary to end the Trent Dilfer experiment. Already viewed as a lost cause who is desperately in over his head as a college coach, Dilfer’s 31-23 loss to UConn is on a different level of absurdity. Leading 23-10 heading into the fourth quarter, UAB gave up three touchdowns in four possessions while its offense accounted for 42 yards on 21 plays and turned the ball over twice. UAB is now 2-7, and Dilfer’s record is 6-15 overall in two seasons. And it’s worth remembering that this wasn’t a dumpster fire program when Dilfer took it over. In fact, the Blazers were 7-6 in 2022 under interim coach Bryant Vincent, who is now 5-4 at Louisiana-Monroe. But UAB athletics director Mark Ingram couldn’t resist the lure of a big name former NFL quarterback, even though Dilfer had no college coaching experience. UAB will be paying the price for years.
Miserable but not miserable enough
North Carolina State: The only thing that has distinguished NC State in this decade is its ability to win eight or nine games every year under Dave Doeren. In fact, from 2017 through 2023, the Wolfpack failed to hit that benchmark just once. Doeren has been a model of consistency at a program that gets a little lost in the shuffle against college basketball and the NHL in North Carolina’s Triangle region. NC State fans enjoy being the football overachievers, especially when the rival Tar Heels seem to perennially disappoint. But what happens when Duke is the best team in the state? That seems to be the case after a 29-19 Blue Devils victory in Raleigh, which leaves NC State at 5-5 and needing to beat either Georgia Tech or North Carolina to make the postseason. ACC expansion has masked how far below par this NC State team is as their only conference wins so far are California and Stanford. But losing to Duke and Wake Forest this year, both at home, has exposed that this is Doreen’s weakest team in quite some time.
Florida Atlantic: Tom Herman kept a very low profile for a couple years after he was fired by Texas, but re-emerged in Boca Raton hoping to resuscitate a coaching career that once seemed destined for stardom. Instead, it has gone the opposite direction. The Owls are the worst team in the American Athletic Conference, punctuated by a 49-14 loss to an East Carolina program that fired coach Mike Houston a couple weeks ago. FAU’s defense has been catastrophic all season, and at 2-7 this season with wins over Florida International and Wagner. Hiring a coach on the rebound after power conference failure worked once at FAU with Lane Kiffin, but Willie Taggart (15-18) and Herman (6-14) have shown it doesn’t guarantee success.
Oklahoma State: Last week as he tried to explain his mindset during the worst season of his career, Mike Gundy found another way to anger the Cowboys’ fan base by saying that those who criticized his program were “the same ones that can’t pay their own bills.” Gundy released an apology on X on Tuesday night while the world was paying attention to election results. Then after a few days, he proceeded to lose to TCU 38-13 in another embarrassing, uncompetitive result that suggests he’s lost his locker room. Oklahoma State is now 3-7 this season and winless in the Big 12. It’s a disaster, especially for a team that was picked to contend for the conference title. Gundy has wiggled his way out of controversy and impolitic remarks in the past, but this one feels different. Insulting fans in the midst of a season like this will never play well and may be unforgivable.
Iowa State: It was always a bit far-fetched for the Cyclones to make the CFP. Picked sixth in the Big 12 preseason poll, Iowa State is on track to overachieve regardless of what happens over the season’s final three games. However, things are regressing to the mean rather dramatically in Ames. After starting 7-0, Iowa State has now lost two in a row including Saturday’s 45-36 loss to a pretty poor Kansas team. Barring some good fortune down the stretch of the regular season that gives a chance to win the Big 12 championship, Iowa State won’t make the 12-team playoff. And this comprehensive loss to Kansas, in which the Cyclones fell behind 38-13 early in the second half, is a real dream-killer. Had Iowa State won this game, its fans could have legitimately thought about a spot in the Big 12 championship game. Now, they know the reality that Iowa State just isn’t good enough.
(This story was updated to change a video.)