CFN 2010 Tournament of Tumult
Bracket No. 4
Tournament of Tumult Brackets
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Looping
Throwing Motion Bracket
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Being Fortunate Enough To Spend Five or 20 Minutes Bracket
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Wonderlic 22 Score Bracket
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Circumcising Filipino Boys Bracket
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1st Round Results
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2nd Round Results
By
Pete Fiutak
Circumcising Filipino
Boys Bracket
1. 2004 BCS Rankings
Amazingly enough, 2004 was the only year when there’s was a real, live debate about who the two best teams in the country were when there were no negatives to point to. In 2003, for example, there was a mega-brouhaha over which two teams would get in between Oklahoma, LSU, and USC, but all three had a loss. 2004 was something different because USC, Oklahoma, and Auburn were all unbeaten.
After getting hosed over the year before, being ranked No. 1 by the humans but third in the BCS standings, there was no way, no how USC was going to be the odd team out of the mix; the pollsters were going to make absolutely certain of that. The Trojans were a firm No. 1 when the first BCS rankings came out, Miami was second, Oklahoma third, and Auburn fourth. The Canes ended up losing to North Carolina and fell out of the race as the pecking order went USC, Oklahoma, and Auburn in Week 3 of the BCS standings (October 30th) both in the BCS and in the human polls. And nothing changed from then on.
Now, it might be crazy to leave the SEC champion out in a three-team race, but that’s precisely what happened with the main talking point being a 33-3 Auburn win over The Citadel, who wasn’t a D-I school. The Tigers were loaded with offensive talent, led by Jason Campbell, Cadillac Williams, and Ronnie Brown, but they weren’t necessarily pretty or dominant like USC and Oklahoma were. USC had a couple of close games, but for the most part Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush and company blew through the slate, while Oklahoma had allowed fewer than two touchdowns in seven of its last ten games and destroyed Colorado 42-3 in the Big 12 Championship.
Basically, it was a case of no right answers as all three teams deserved to be in. This was supposed to be the catalyst for a playoff, but because there weren’t any mega-controversies in the ensuing years, and there hasn’t been a problem with three unbeaten BCS conference teams since, it has been harder for BCS naysayers to win the debate.
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PLAY-IN GAME
16A. Mitch Mustain
This was the big coup for Arkansas in 2006. Hog football was supposed to go to another level after signing star receiver prospect Damian Williams and everyone’s top quarterback prospect, Mitch Mustain. Mustain played for a year, and then Houston Nutt unleashed Darren McFadden and the Wildcat offense and all of a sudden, the 2005-2006 Gatorade National Player of the Year wasn’t necessarily needed. Offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn left for Tulsa, and after plenty of he-said-she-said bickering, Mustain transferred to USC along with Williams.
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16B. Bobby Petrino
Considered the Larry Brown of college football coaches because he always had one foot pointing towards the next job, Petrino was known for not being a guy to count on for the long haul. There was the infamous secret meeting with Auburn officials while Petrino was still coaching at Louisville, and then came the Atlanta Falcons stint where he bailed out on a sinking, Michael Vick-less ship and has now become the poster boy for why college coaches fail at the next level. With Atlanta still feeling burned, video of Petrino doing the Woooooo Pig Sooey chant became headline news late in 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7x3x6QHlrA
8. The Bush Push
In one of the greatest college football games of all time, USC’s juggernaut of a 2005 team was about to be derailed in South Bend. Brady Quinn led the Irish to a late touchdown and a 31-28 lead, but there was just enough time on the clock for USC to come back. SC's final drive was bogging down, but Matt Leinart called an audible on 4th-and-nine and connected with Dwayne Jarrett for a 61-yard pass. Three plays later, USC got to the two and was able to stop the clock on a Reggie Bush run for a first down, but there weren’t any timeouts left. Leinart scrambled and dove to the end zone, flipped over, and was stopped just short of the goal line. Fans and players rushed the field as time ran out, but few saw the ball get knocked out of bounds giving USC 2nd-and-goal from the one with seven seconds left. With USC head coach Pete Carroll and the coaches signaling to spike the ball, Leinart took the snap and twisted and turned his way into the end zone helped by an illegal shove from Bush, forever known as the Bush Push. The Trojans went on to lost to Texas in an epic national championship game, while Notre Dame ended up losing to Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl. As the season turned out, had the Irish beaten USC, it almost certainly would’ve been playing Texas in the Rose Bowl for the national title.
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9. Reggie Bush’s Alleged Financial Benefits
According to various reports, the USC star took illegal (according to the NCAA’s rules) benefits from marketing agents in the form of financial payments, travel, and other benefits. However, even with all the evidence and all the allegations, nothing has stuck, the NCAA hasn’t done much to budge on the investigation, and fans of other schools hit by sanctions over the years (like Oklahoma and Alabama) are going crazy wondering why the Trojans haven’t been hit with anything … yet.
5. The Tyrone Willingham Letter
Willingham was the victim of his own early success after his Irish started out 8-0 getting every right bounce, every great break, and every close win. A tough loss to Boston College was the only blemish before getting blown away by Carson Palmer and USC 44-13 and Phil Rivers and NC State in the Gator Bowl. After starting 10-1, the Irish went 11-14 under Willingham, the talent level was perceived to be getting worse after some mediocre recruiting classes, and an infamous letter signed by several boosters and alumni asking for his dismissal didn’t help. Willingham was fired before the 2004 Insight Bowl, and while there wasn’t any hint of any reasoning for anything other than poor performance, there were some who questioned otherwise. Skin color didn’t have anything to do with the firing, but it entered the equation after Charlie Weis was given an extra year to turn things around that Willingham didn’t. As it turned out, Weis benefitted from having players like Brady Quinn and Jeff Samardzija, in 2005.
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12. Charlie Weis vs. Navy
Being unable to beat USC is one thing, struggling to turn things around and being unable to get to a bowl game is another, and at Notre Dame, losing to Navy is whole other level of bad. In the unwritten rules of being the Notre Dame head coach, rule No. 1 is that you don’t lose to Navy. Rule No. 2 is that you don’t lose to Navy. No. 3? Don’t … lose … to … Navy. In 1963, Navy, led by Roger Staubach, beat a bad Irish team 35-14. 43 games and 43 wins later, Notre Dame had a wee bit of a stranglehold on the rivalry. And then came the 2007 season and a 1-6 start, but fortunately, Navy was up next. Notre Dame was bad, but it couldn’t lose to Navy after 43 years? After all, there were two weeks to prepare after the loss to USC and Navy had one of the nation’s worst pass defenses. It could and it did as the Midshipmen came up with a stop on an Irish two-point conversion attempt in the third overtime to win 46-44 and break the streak. That Irish team was bad, but the 2009 team appeared to have things turned around starting out 6-2 before hosing the Midshipmen. Navy ran to a 23-21 win, Notre Dame lost four straight, and Charlie Weis was fired.
4. The Forcing Out of Bobby Bowden
Bobby Bowden will go down as one of the greatest head coaches in college football history. What he did with Florida State to make it a superpower of the highest order, and his consistent run of greatness winning ten games or more from 1987 to 2000 with two national titles and 11 straight bowl wins. However, the last decade didn’t bring the same level of success, even though most programs would be ecstatic to go 74-42 with five bowl wins while keeping alive the string of 28 straight bowl appearances. The team needed to scramble last year just to get to 6-6 and a bowl game hurt by a major slip defensively and the loss of star QB Christian Ponder. With Jimbo Fisher waiting in the wings in a succession plan, Bowden was pushed out the door so the program could move on. While it could be argued that the move helped recruiting, FSU brought in a great haul in February, it was a clunky end to a legendary career. Bobby Bowden was, and is, Florida State in so many ways … what hope is there for the rest of us?
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13. Fisher DeBerry
Air Force head coach Fisher DeBerry had done wonders with the program. Even though the program didn’t have the same talent level of other programs, mostly because of military requirements, DeBerry cranked out interesting team after interesting team. But everything started to become unraveled because of DeBerry’s controversial positions including his emphasis on religion and his Christian beliefs, singling out those who didn’t go to church services. That was nothing compared to the firestorm that ensured after his comments in 2005 claiming that Air Force couldn’t compete with TCU because it didn’t have enough “Afro-American players” who “run extremely well.” He retired in 2006, but many thought he should’ve been fired earlier.
6. Vacated Wins
It has become the NCAA’s new thing. Since the governing body has no interest in really punishing college football programs (Auburn was the last one to get hit hard, and that was in the early 1990s), wiping wins off the record books has become the slap on the hand used to discipline the naughty programs. While it’s all silly, since the games have been played and few truly care about the official record books if it meant a win on the field and a fun memory, the vacated win punishment could open a Pandora’s box. Alabama and Oklahoma were forced to vacate wins, and each appealed and fought the punishment, but Florida State was a different case with the NCAA taking away 12 wins off of Bobby Bowden’s record because of an academic scandal that should’ve been an internal university matter. So how far will this go? Historians, if they wanted to, could point out dozens of wins that should be vacated and championships that should be forfeited in both football and basketball.
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11. Rhett Bomar
Adrian Peterson was the crown jewel of the 2004 Oklahoma recruiting class, and while he was No. 1 on everyone’s list of talented, Rhett Bomar was No. 1A. With all the tools, he was compared from every top quarterback from Troy Aikman to John Elway, and it was a really, really big deal when he spurned Texas to Oklahoma, famously saying he chose the Sooners because he wanted to win. Just when he appeared ready to blossom into a superstar in 2006, he got nabbed for taking money from a car dealership for a no-show job and got booted from the program. While he ended up becoming a star at Sam Houston State (and eventually, OU blossomed with a young guy named Sam Bradford taking over two years later), the Sooners took a hit as the NCAA forced them to vacate the entire 2005 season because of Bomar, but eventually gave back the eight wins. (A quick story sidenote. We were ghost writers for a few annual magazines in 2006 and went heavy, HEAVY, on the belief that Bomar was about to become one of college football’s breakthrough players. The news of his booting from OU broke just as the preview magazines were going to press. One was able to make the changes in time, one wasn’t.)
3. Bill Callahan & Steve Pederson
Frank Solich was a Nebraska guy. He played fullback for the Huskers in the 1960s, was a key assistant in the program for years, highlighted by his work from 1983 to 1997, and he got the honor of taking over the loaded program after Tom Osborne retired. He did a decent job over five years going 58-19, highlighted by a 12-1 1999 season. However, that wasn’t good enough as a 2001 season that finished with a national title loss to Miami was followed up by a horrendous 7-7 campaign. He did a decent job in 2003 on the way to a 9-2 record, but the fear was that Nebraska had slipped from the ranks of the national title-level superpowers. And that’s when athletic director Steve Pederson decided it was time to make a major change.
Nebraska had been known for the most consistently dominant offense in all of sports. For decades, the Big Red Machine running game was unstoppable, but Pederson didn’t want to “let Nebraska gravitate into mediocrity,” and he fired Solich and hired former Oakland Raider head man Bill Callahan to bring in a high-flying, pro-style offense. The move didn’t work.
Callahan didn’t appeal to the average Cornhusker fan who was used to Nebraska farm kids being the foundation. Instead, Callahan, who wasn’t seen as a Nebraska guy, went heavy on JUCO players from all across the country to work his West Coast offense, which would’ve been fine if the team had won. Instead, Nebraska went 5-6 in 2004, 8-4 in 2005, and 9-5 in 2006. Osborne swooped in, Pederson was canned, and Callahan was soon let go. Bo Pelini is just now starting to restore the glory.
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14. Iowa State head coach Gene Chizik & Auburn head coach Gene Chizik
After doing a phenomenal job as the defensive coordinator at Auburn from 2002 to 2004 and as the co-defensive coordinator at Texas in 2005 and 2006, Gene Chizik got the Iowa State job and was expected to turn the Cyclones into a defensive monster. Instead, his teams were a disaster going 5-19 in two years, failed to beat a team that finished with a winning record, beat South Dakota State and Kent State in 2008 for the two wins of that year, and lost to Northern Iowa and Kent State in 2007. Coming off a ten-game losing streak and after doing absolutely nothing to turn around the program, Auburn hired him away and set off a firestorm of criticism from those wondering why Turner Gill, the hot head man of the moment, wasn’t given a better chance, and why a coach who had been so bad could get a job this good. The jury is still out despite a decent 8-5 2009 season with the Tigers.
7. Mike Leach
Always entertaining and always interesting, Leach created a monster of an offense that year after year put up video game-like passing numbers as he helped make Texas Tech football relevant and a factor in the Big 12. Not only did he come up with a tremendous 84-43 record, he won Big 12 Coach of the Year honors in 2008 as his Red Raiders tied for the Big 12 South title. But the success came with a bit of a price as Leach was among the most outspoken head coaches of the last several years, ranted after a loss against Texas in 2007 and blamed the officials for being biased, blamed the loss to Texas A&M last year on the players’ “fat little girlfriends,” and ended up getting fired for allegedly sticking WR Adam James in a closet after he complained about having problems following a concussion. While the final issue was overblown from all sides, and Texas Tech partly appeared interested in firing Leach because of contract issues, the Leach era will be remembered for the problems off the field as it was for the pyrotechnics on it. Now things will get uglier with the lawsuits about to kick in.
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10. Mark Mangino
A wildly successful offensive coordinator at Oklahoma, Mark Mangino was hired in 2002 to put some life into a struggling Kansas program. After a rough 2-10 start, KSU got to a bowl in 2003, made some noise in 2005, and worked to get better and better until the breakthrough 2007 season. The Jayhawks went 12-1, beat Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl, and Mangino was everyone’s coach of the year. After a solid 8-5 2008, KU started off 5-0 last year before losing seven straight in an epic collapse. Making matters worse were the rumors and complaints about Mangino being verbally abusive, and while the problems might be seen as quirky if the team was rocking, the issues were magnified on a losing streak. Mangino was fired, kicking off a discussion of the fine line between motivation and abuse.
2. Nick Saban’s Contract
After doing a decent job at Michigan State, Nick Saban was hired by LSU in 2000 and revived the program into a superpower with two SEC titles and a 2003 national championship in five years. Always seen as a pro head coach after his time in the NFL as an assistant, he was given the keys to the Miami Dolphins in 2005. The team stunk, there was no talent, and the outlook appeared bleak even after going 9-7 in 2005 and 6-10 in 2006. The realization kicked in for Saban that he was more of college coach than a pro one, and when Alabama came calling, he bailed on the NFL leaving plenty of bridges burnt by those who thought he failed to live up to his commitment. Bama wanted its guy, and it got him at a NFL coaching price of $4 million per year, which made coaches all over the country happy as it ushered in the era of the mega-contract for college coaches and triggered a escalation clauses for some. What was seen as outrageous in 2007 is now considered a bargain after the Tide went 33-8 in the last three years with a national title and the talent in place to bring in more. The original contract was worth $32 million over eight years, and he recently signed a longer term deal going through 2017.
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15. Colt McCoy’s Shoulder
Alabama had a tremendous team in 2009 and was coming off a dominant 32-13 win over Florida in the SEC Championship. Texas wasn’t quite as impressive, but it was 13-0, was every bit as talented as Bama, and according to various insiders in the Longhorn program, appeared ready to come up with its best performance of the year in the BCS Championship. The team was more relaxed having gotten to where it had been pushing to get to, and then it was time to shine. All the dreams and goals went kaput early on as Colt McCoy was knocked out for the game with an injured shoulder. Bama was favored to win anyway and probably still would’ve come up with the championship, but there will always be plenty of wondering about what might have been had McCoy stayed healthy.
Tournament of Tumult Brackets
-
Looping
Throwing Motion Bracket
-
Being Fortunate Enough To Spend Five or 20 Minutes Bracket
-
Wonderlic 22 Score Bracket
-
Circumcising Filipino Boys Bracket
-
1st Round Results
-
2nd Round Results