In comes former Arkansas State head coach Hugh Freeze to try and fix the mess in Oxford, Mississippi.
Last year was Houston Nutt’s final chance holding the clipboard at Ole Miss, and once it was announced that Nutt wouldn’t be back, the Rebs got crushed in three consecutive games, including embarrassing losses to LSU (52-3) and – even more shamefully – to in-state rival Mississippi State, 31-3 in the Egg Bowl.
The Oregon Ducks have become a true national power in college football over the last three years. Chip Kelly had no previous head coaching experience, but he has proven to be an excellent hire for Oregon. Kelly has taken the program from a solid yearly winner to a team capable of playing for a title each year.
It’s hard to believe the Colorado Buffaloes won the NCAA Football Championship in 1990. This program is a proud program that has really fallen on hard times in the last few years. The Dan Hawkins experiment didn’t go as planned, and now Jon Embree has been left to pick up the pieces.
A few years ago it seemed Mike Riley had the Oregon State football program moving in the right direction. The team was knocking off some highly ranked opponents and going to bowl games on an annual basis. The past couple years have been big disappointments. In 2011, the Beavers only managed three wins all season long.
South Carolina was knocking on the door for a long time, with a good-but-unspectacular SEC East team under “the Ole Ball Coach” Steve Spurrier.
Last season saw the Gamecocks kick the door in, with an 11-win season that included victories over Florida, Georgia and Tennessee (for the second straight year, actually) and a drubbing of #21 Nebraska in the Capital One Bowl.
While it is a tragedy to college football fans that the storied Texas-Texas A&M rivalry has come to a close, there will be plenty of excitement around College Station in 2012 with A&M’s move to the SEC. The Aggies will play in the West division; they move to a conference and division that – with all due respect to Texas, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State – is more ferocious than the Big 12.
MSU head coach Dan Mullen has already been a miracle-worker, without even scraping near a BCS bowl; he has made the Bulldogs relevant in the suffocating SEC West division and has re-energized a fanbase that was sorely in need of it.
The last time the UCLA Bruins won the Rose Bowl was 1984. The Bruins haven’t even been a part of the Rose Bowl since 14 years ago. Rick Neuheisel promised to take the program back to the top, but that never panned out. Jim Mora was brought in to try things a different way in Westwood.
Connecticut has always been known as a basketball school. The Huskies had a brief successful run under Randy Edsall a few years ago, but the past couple years have been small steps backward for this football program.
It seemed Syracuse had entered the national stage when they dominated nationally-ranked West Virginia 49-23 last year in October. The win took the team to 5-2, and they looked like a team that could win the Big East. Instead, Syracuse confusingly lost its last five games to go 5-7 and miss out on a bowl berth.
After a seven-year absence the Temple Owls are back in the Big East. Temple never dominated the MAC the way many thought it could, but the last couple years Temple started to look like a program that could make a serious move. Unfortunately, Temple has to replace several key letter winners this year.
The Todd Graham era at Pittsburgh lasted less than 12 months. Graham left Pittsburgh after one season to be the Head Coach at Arizona State. Pittsburgh Panthers fans were not fond at all of the way Graham left, and you can’t blame them one bit.
The boys from Baton Rouge had a flawless 2011 season before rival Alabama shut them out in the BCS title game, 21-0. For the balance of the campaign, LSU had a defense that might have been the only unit more imposing than Alabama’s.
The Hogs have really taken a step forward in the last several seasons, but this off-season has been shrouded in controversy (not unlike many other scenarios in the world of college football). The lying and sex scandal that precipitated the firing of head coach Bobby Petrino should hopefully not affect the product on the field in Fayetteville in 2012, but who knows? At the very least, Arkansas could miss Petrino’s aggressive play-calling.
For the fourth time in the last five years the Cincinnati Bearcats finished with double digits in wins in 2011. The Bearcats went just 4-8 in Butch Jones’ first year, but they went 10-3 and beat Vanderbilt in the Liberty Bowl at the end of the season. Cincinnati made a big move in 2011, but they return just 11 starters from that team.
The Gators, long an SEC powerhouse, must rebound from a disappointing 2011 season. Until 2010, Florida (under former head coach Urban Meyer) made appearing in BCS bowls its calling card, winning a national title in ’08 against Oklahoma and a Sugar Bowl in ’09 versus upstart Cincinnati.
