Todd Berry did a nice job with the Warhawks of Lousiana-Monroe in his first year with the team in 2010. The Warhawks had only nine returning starters overall, but the team showed marked improvement from 2009.
Howard Schnellenberger is a legendary and colorful coach who has been at some big schools through the years. He is now in his 11th season at Florida Atlantic.
Steve Roberts was at Arkansas State for nine seasons. The Red Wolves seemed to really be on the upswing with Roberts at the helm until the last two seasons.
The Western Kentucky Hilltoppers haven’t been at the FBS level for long. In the school’s first four years at the highest level in college football, they beat just one FBS team.
Over the past few seasons, South Florida has been predictably… well, not world-changing, but decent. The Bulls have churned out eight-win seasons since 2008.
This season has some potential for awkwardness in Morgantown, after sought-after former Oklahoma State offensive co-ordinator Dana Holgorsen comes over and becomes the coach-in-waiting; Stewart will be nudged out after this season.
Todd Dodge was a wildly successful high school coach in Texas, but the experiment with him as the top man at North Texas was a huge disappointment. North Texas went just 6-37 in Dodge’s 43 games as head coach.
Expectations were high for Middle Tennessee State in 2010, but the team just never got things going. Star quarterback Dwight Dasher was suspended for the first few games, and then when he came back he didn’t play like a star.
In a normal year, the Nebraska Cornhuskers joining the Big Ten would easily be the biggest news in the conference. This year it has taken second fiddle to all the problems at Ohio State.
The Wisconsin Badgers took a big step last year, but now it is time to see if they can build on last year’s success. Wisconsin went 11-2 in 2010, and they narrowly missed winning the Rose Bowl.
No team has been in the news more than Ohio State in the past offseason, and in this case that isn’t a good thing at all. Rewind back to last December and the Ohio State Buckeyes were flying high with an 11-1 record.
As weird as it sounds, more than two wins in 2011 will be an improvement for the Washington State Cougars who went just 2-10 overall and 1-5 in conference play last season. But it won’t get any easier with the newly realigned PAC-12 that puts them in the North with powerhouses Stanford and Oregon.
Despite a spectacular year from quarterback Jake Locker, the Washington Huskies managed to barely finish the 2010 season with a better than .500 after a 19-7 win over the Nebraska Cornhuskers in last year’s version of the Holiday Bowl.
Edsall comes to College Park after building the program at the University of Connecticut basically from the ground up. He was the 2010 Big East Coach of the Year and looks to assert a Terps team that has an excellent underclassmen quarterback, but not much else.
Cutcliffe has made some progress with the Blue Devils, though with a team that went 3-9 last year, progress is a relative term.
The Cavaliers had some good years in the middle of the last decade, but they’ve had a bowl-less drought since 2007. Coach London is now in his second year in a bid to bring UVa back to respectability in the conference.
