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You know, Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out on Nov. 19. Imagine how many Arkansas State and Rice players will have their consoles at their team hotels after their road games that night.
Redeaux: Has Orgeron grown up?
Louisiana lifer, former Lane Kiffin assistant and 2019 national champion Ed Orgeron is back at LSU.
He’s a “special assistant to recruiting and defense” for Kiffin, rejoining the school that fired him just two years after that championship. (FWIW, it’s only a one-year deal.) With men’s hoops coach Will Wade also back in Baton Rouge after being canned for NCAA stuff in 2022, much of the gang is back together.
Considering Orgeron is again working for a head coach not exactly known for excessive amounts of interpersonal wisdom, it’s worthwhile to remember how Orgeron’s time as Tigers head coach ended.
Back we go to this thorough Brody Miller story from shortly after Orgeron’s firing. Read it, and you walk away with an image of a coach who won it all for his dream school, then let his ego inflate as he aggressively cashed in his local celebrity (which included publicly hitting on the wife of an LSU admin), sounded dismissively out of touch to his players amid their political fears and lazily hired over-the-hill assistant coaches.
That all followed what’d seemed like an inspiring overhaul by the coach who’d once been in over his head at Ole Miss.
In the 2000s, after leaving Pete Carroll’s USC staff, Orgeron went 10-25 with the Rebels while coming across as a raging hothead. He then softened his image while taking over for Kiffin as USC’s 2013 interim. Upon landing the job with his beloved Tigers, he seemed to so many of us like a changed guy, a lovable hothead.
Maybe he was. Maybe coaching arguably the greatest team ever changed him back to what he’d been before. Or something. A lapse for roughly an entire year? I don’t know. I’m not a telepath or a psychologist. All I know: Kiffin plus Orgeron was a wacky-memes duo in 2013, but doesn’t sound so fun right now.
Elsewhere: LSU athletic director Verge Ausberry admits Ole Miss made the right call by telling Kiffin to be either in or out for the Playoff.
Quick Snaps
❤️ It shouldn’t be on kids to lead the rest of us. Candace Buckner on the NAACP’s call for college athletes to risk millions in protest.
💰 “If you don’t commit within a week and you take an official visit elsewhere, that number that I presented to you is now half.” A valid negotiating tactic during the portal, but when talking to recruits in the summer? It ain’t that serious.
📰 News:
Clemson defensive tackle Hevin Brown-Shuler is expected to miss the 2026 season while he undergoes treatment for Hodgkin lymphoma. Encouraging prognosis.
“Texas Tech QB Brendan Sorsby’s eligibility lawsuit vs. the NCAA has a new presiding judge, and he’s not a Red Raiders graduate like the last one.” Houston law this time.
The revived Poinsettia Bowl is working on pairing the Pac-12’s champ against a former Pac-12 team, Brett McMurphy reports. An Apple Cup rematch would technically be possible.
Steve Sarkisian is saying a lot of stuff lately. He indicated his Texas roster isn’t making as much money as you’d think, while saying other SEC rosters are approaching $50 million. (He also salvaged his relations with the basket-weaving community by clarifying his Ole Miss complaint and seemingly sneak-dissed Texas Tech’s schedule.)
Bloat: A Playoff full of mid
We’ve told you about the best (to a certain extent) teams that would’ve made a 24-team Playoff. But how about all the teams?
Going back to 2014, 80 different schools would’ve made it at least once. The majority of FBS getting title shots? Tulsa in the house? San Jose State? Even Arkansas? First thing about this frantic 24-team push that’s sounded any fun at all.
Then again, Alabama and Ohio State would’ve made it literally every year. The far majority of their regular-season games — along with those of Clemson, Georgia, LSU, Michigan, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Oregon and the Utah Utes (!) — would’ve been about little more than seeding. Not quite as fun.
That’s from David Ubben’s breakdown of the hypothetical 24-team fields from the last 12 years.
A few teams that would’ve profited greatly: Iowa, Oklahoma State, USC and those Utes. It’d feel good to have Playoff memories of the best recent iterations of these typically solid programs, right? They would’ve gone from zero total entries to roughly seven each. However, we wouldn’t have needed to sprawl all the way to 24 to fit them into the Playoff story, since these schools would’ve made 12-team brackets one, two or three times each.
The program with the most to gain from 24, rather than 12, would’ve been NC State, which more or less always ranks No. 18 in late November.
And on that note: No offense to the eternally steady Wolfpack, but … they’re kind of the archetypical example of the competent, flawed teams we’d be cramming into brackets in order to get up to 24.
Imagine any three-loss Dave Doeren squad of the past decade being a double-digit underdog at Oregon in December. You are now picturing the viewing novelty of most of the 24-team Playoff’s opening round.
The idea of endless Wolfpack forever might be how we get The CW to join the bidding for the rights to those first-round games, actually. More on that part below. (Again, nothing personal against NC State. Or Arkansas. Meanwhile, Raleigh natives are currently blaming Doeren for the local NHL team’s playoff loss last night.)
Full 12-year breakdown of 24-team brackets.
More expansion stuff:
“Your November content, your competitiveness is way up, your stadiums are looking great.” The Big Ten’s commissioner argues further expansion would improve the regular season.
Agree with Joe Rexrode: The power of Michigan-Ohio State alone isn’t worth risking in exchange for a few more Playoff blowouts.
Georgia’s president floats an SEC-only Playoff. Brilliant idea. Each conference can have a series of games to crown its own champion. We’ll call it “a regular season.”
“See how fun it is to play baseball and softball and track when it’s just the 20 of you.” Iowa State’s AD has had it with the Big Ten and SEC acting too royal for everyone else.
Bret Bielema has taken over for the late Mike Leach as the coach arguing for the biggest bracket. If the idea of more NC State didn’t supercharge your blood enough, can I interest you in three recent Playoff trips by Illinois?
Mandel’s mailbag
Technically no mailbag this week by Stewart Mandel, but I did want to spotlight this part from his story on the ESPN-Fox proxy battle over the size of the Playoff:
💬 “It looks pretty simple, right? Fox wants in on the CFP for the first time, and ESPN wants to keep the tournament to itself.
“But there’s more to it than that. Less than three years ago, the CFP’s entire rights came on the market — and Fox did not even bid. No one did except ESPN, which paid $1.3 billion annually to re-up through 2031-32.
“But now we’re to believe there’s going to be a bidding war for one early-December weekend of games involving teams ranked Nos. 9 through 24?
“‘You’re essentially just bringing in more teams with less and less chance of competing for the championship,’ said media analyst John Kosner. ‘The media value will grow a bit, but it might not grow to the level schools hope.’
“But the networks may be less concerned with the value of the additional games than with the effect Playoff expansion could have on the 14 weeks of programming that precedes it. And on that, too, ESPN and Fox could not see things more differently.”
Don’t ever tell me business people are all especially brilliant. Reading the whole story will drive you further up the wall. And who doesn’t love getting a little exercise?
Let’s leave on a happier note! Big Memorial weekend in women’s sports, including softball Super Regionals fully getting going tonight (after No. 7 Tennessee beat No. 10 Georgia 3-1 in Knoxville’s opener last night) and lacrosse semifinals today, plus Sunday’s title match, possibly between former dynasty Northwestern and burgeoning dynasty North Carolina.
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