USA Today - Misery Index

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2. Tennessee: He constantly cites analytics. He monitors his players' sleep patterns. He pumps out recruiting videos and scours the rulebook for loopholes that allow him to create additional scholarship space every year. Butch Jones is the coaching king of little things that add up to a whole bunch of nothing when you’re standing on the sidelines in the heat of an SEC game and you’re judged not on what you know but what you do and how much nerve you've got.

You can look for every edge, but unless you can process what’s happening right in front of you and prove to your players that you’re coaching to win, all the other stuff doesn’t matter. And now Tennessee fans are hip to the scam. This is not a dumb or entitled fan base. This is a group that has spent their passion and money trying to make up for the mistakes made by their administration when Phillip Fulmer was fired in 2008, only to get dumped on pretty much every day since.

In an alternate universe, Tennessee would have swallowed its pride after the Lane Kiffin experiment and brought David Cutcliffe home. Stability. Class. Coaching acumen with no need for gimmicks. Those are the things Tennessee football should be about and could have been about under Cutcliffe. Now we’re sitting here and the Vols are 1-21 post-Fulmer against their primary rivals Alabama, Georgia and Florida.


USA TODAY
Tennessee's Butch Jones should coach with common sense, not off a card

Meanwhile, Jones has played not to lose against Oklahoma and Florida this season and cost the Vols two huge victories. Even worse, he refuses to admit his mistakes and instead cites charts and analytics for baffling decisions any ninth grader with an XBox wouldn’t make. With Arkansas, Georgia and Alabama coming up, Tennessee’s season is suddenly teetering.

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6. Arkansas: Mark this down. Arkansas is going to ruin someone’s season. For all the underperformance we’ve seen in September, the essence of what the Hogs were supposed to be is still hiding in there somewhere. We saw a glimpse of it Saturday when the Razorbacks ran for 232 yards against Texas A&M but collapsed at the end, losing 28-21 in overtime.

The bad news is they are now 1-3 and their season is essentially over from the standpoint of fulfilling expectations. That’s done. Based on the remaining schedule it’s going to be a real struggle for Bret Bielema to make a bowl game. And though fans may be calling for his head, you can go ahead and forget about that. Based on the extension he signed after last season, Bielema would be owed $15.4 million if he's fired before Dec. 31, 2017. That number is reduced to $11.7 the following year.

In other words, unless Jerry Jones, the Tyson chicken people or the Wal-Mart folks are in the mood to write some really big checks, Arkansas and Bielema are tied to each other for a while. Pretty good for a guy who is 2-15 in the SEC. And when Arkansas inevitably knocks off Alabama or Ole Miss or LSU and delivers a big hit to the SEC’s national championship hopes, it’s only going to hurt that much worse because Arkansas fans will know it could have been so much better.

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10. Auburn: It barely makes a ripple anymore when Auburn loses, which it did meekly on Saturday 17-9 at home against Mississippi State. In his last 10 games against FBS competition, Auburn coach Gus Malzahn is 3-7. In the 15 before that, he was 13-2. So something has gone terribly wrong, which makes one wonder whether he should recognized history and bounced out of Auburn in 2013 after getting some, um, fortunate bounces on his way to the national title game. Too late now.

Auburn has proven to be a hard place to sustain success, but even understanding that, nobody could have predicted the wheels would be flying off the Gus Bus this quickly. Though the defense appears to be getting better under Will Muschamp, the offense — Malzahn’s baby — is broken.

After this week’s quarterback change, redshirt freshman Sean White threw for 188 yards while the running game produced a pretty pedestrian 201 yards on 50 carries. Auburn couldn’t finish drives, either, stalling four times inside the red zone. It’s just a mess right now, and the pressure is on Malzahn to fix it. In a state where football means everything and Alabama is still Alabama, you do not get a lot of leeway to absorb bad years. Just ask Gene Chizik.

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