Misery Index: Matt Rhule is running out of answers as another Nebraska season spirals out of control

The Nebraska job is getting to Matt Rhule. A week ago, he started his press conference with a 20-minute soliloquy/opening statement that felt like a therapy session. He spends ridiculous amounts of time arguing with the referees. Now, after firing Dana Holgorsen on Saturday, he’ll soon be on his third offensive coordinator in four seasons.

But it’s hard to tell who’s going off the deep end quicker in this relationship — the head coach or a fan base that is finding new ways to be aghast at their program, which has gone from 5-0 to 5-4 and failed to crack 20 points in any of those losses.

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The latest indignity, the one that demanded Rhule sacrifice a staff member, was a 24-13 loss to Illinois. But in firing Holgorsen, Rhule tacitly admitted how screwed up his whole process has been from the time he’s gotten to Lincoln.

Holgorsen, who came from the Mike Leach offensive tree at Texas Tech, was never going to be a great fit in the Big Ten. Rhule hired him anyway. He was also going to be a square peg in a round hole building an offense around Dylan Raiola, a quarterback with limited mobility. Rhule hired him anyway. Then when Raiola transferred to Oregon, they rebuilt it around Anthony Colandrea, who has a lot of running ability. A little more than a week ago, Nebraska announced that Colandrea had signed to return to Nebraska for a fifth year in 2027. Then they turned around and fired Holgorsen, ostensibly meaning Rhule’s next offensive coordinator hire will once again have to fit around a quarterback rather than the other way around.

That is, if Rhule stays in Lincoln.

Though Nebraska fans have dealt with many losing streaks over the last couple decades, this one is hitting them differently. (In retrospect, the Bo Pelini era looks pretty good, eh?) And what makes it different is Rhule’s contract.

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After Penn State fired James Franklin a year ago, Nebraska chose to extend Rhule through 2032, saddling the school with a buyout in the $60 million range. Because of Rhule’s close relationship with Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft (they worked together at Temple) and ties to the school (Rhule went to high school in State College and played at Penn State), he was going to be their No. 1 choice. Nebraska felt at the time the program was on the right track and didn’t want to go into coach search mode so they made the long-term investment to keep him.

It now looks like the wrong decision, but that’s in the past. The question is what Nebraska can do to now to either triage the situation or extricate the school from it.

Fans are mad at everyone, and they’re going to be very loud about it the rest of this season. They could potentially even end the school’s famous sellout streak going back to 1962, which has long been a point of pride for the Cornhuskers.

After what he did at Temple and Baylor, Rhule looked like a can’t-miss hire moving up to a program with Nebraska’s resources. But like the five Nebraska coaches before him, Rhule hasn’t been able to figure out the place or get the breakthrough win that would calm everyone down.

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Instead, the pressure goes up week by week, and Rhule wears it poorly, without articulating a plan to get things fixed. It’s hard to see how any of this gets better this season. And if Rhule is back in 2027 because the contract is simply too prohibitive, the school should prepare for an onslaught of unhappiness from its fan base.

Until then, Rhule is just going to continue stressing himself and everybody else in Nebraska out, making the Huskers the most miserable fan base in America in Week 10.

Conference Champions of Misery

ACC: Let’s talk about NC State. The Wolfpack lost to Duke, 41-3, which does not move the needle much at this point given Dave Doeren’s firing a couple weeks ago. NC State fans are either still celebrating that he’s done or have completely moved on to basketball season. But at some point in the next several days, it’s practically a lock that NC State will hire Philip Rivers as head coach. Rivers, 44, is an NC State legend and an eight-time Pro Bowler in the NFL. He also has no coaching experience other than at a private high school in Alabama. NC State fans should equally be excited about the potential of this marriage and terrified of the track record. Lots of schools have tried hiring coaches who didn’t have the experience necessary to run a college football program. None of them have really worked, including the most recent example of Trent Dilfer getting fired after going 9-21 at UAB. NC State is going to do this because some influential donors feel it in their hearts, and because it’s probably less costly than hiring someone else and because athletic director Boo Corrigan doesn’t really have enough juice there to squash it. NC State is one of those places that has always been in the “sleeping giant” category, but Rivers isn’t a sleeping-giant hire. It’s the kind of hire you make when you don’t feel very confident about the kind of coach you can attract on the open market and are going to make a big bet on star power. Maybe it will work and maybe it won’t, but the odds are against it and NC State fans should go into this with eyes wide open that it might be a disaster.

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Big 12: Collin Klein was the perfect hire on paper to lead Kansas State back to contention in this league. He played quarterback there under Bill Snyder, spent seven years on staff including a couple as offensive coordinator, then went to Texas A&M where he called plays for a team that made the College Football Playoff a year ago. But at least in his first season he’s given fans some reasons to be concerned about his readiness for the big chair. At 1-5 in the Big 12, Kansas State is down at the bottom with Colorado and Kansas, which is not where this program has grown accustomed to being. But without great recruiting geography or resources, Kansas State’s secret has always been mostly about the coaching, from Snyder working miracles to the underrated Chris Klieman never finishing worse than 4-5 in the conference. Going from coordinator to head coach is a big adjustment, and maybe it’s simply going to take Klein some time to find his footing. But if he’s not eventually giving Kansas State an edge in the coaching chair, it’ll be tough to get back to even the Klieman level of winning consistently.

SEC: The thing Florida fans will appreciate most about Jon Sumrall is that he sounds like one of them in his passion for the game and how much it bothers him when the team doesn’t perform well. He owns it, doesn’t make excuses and says all the things fans want to hear after they’ve just gotten their guts ripped out. At the same time, many Gators fans were skeptical of hiring another coach from the Group of Six level (Sumrall came from Tulane) and have seen this season completely spiral on them the last couple weeks, most recently with a 23-7 loss to Oklahoma. At 5-4, Florida isn’t really overachieving or underachieving what was expected, but the way the season has played out is frustrating. After such a hot start, including wins over Auburn, Ole Miss and Texas, the Gators have also been blown out by Missouri and South Carolina, weren’t competitive at all against Georgia and now gained just 203 yards of offense with two turnovers at home against Oklahoma. Afterwards, Sumrall talk about how ticked off he is, which is fine. But the adjustment he’s going to have to make is getting SEC-level players to feel that as well when they’re all getting paid a lot of money. It’s one thing to imbue that attitude into your team at Troy or Tulane, where he coached previously, but something might be getting lost in the translation.

Group of Six: It’s never a good sign when an athletic director has to issue a statement of apology hours after a game because of an apocalyptically bad result. But after a 60-10 loss at home to Tulsa, that’s exactly what Tulane’s David Harris did, calling the performance “unacceptable” and “particularly alarming.” What the statement doesn’t do, however, is point to any imminent change at the program level, which may make some fans madder than if Harris had said nothing at all. Because if Tulane was going to fire Will Hall right away, it would have done so instead of releasing a statement that ultimately amounts to a whole bunch of nothing. The issue for Harris, who hired Hall despite a 14-30 record at Southern Miss from 2021-24, is that he will have to convince donors to step up and rectify a bad decision. So far, at least, it seems Tulane might have some issues figuring that part out.

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Headset Misery

Ryan Day: Even though Ohio State was disappointed by losing in the CFP quarterfinals a year ago, the entire season was a bit of a victory lap where Day could finally open up about how winning a national title had removed a huge burden from his life. This year, he’s learning how quickly that “get out of jail free” card expires at a place like Ohio State. It would be unfair to say Day is back on the hot seat after a 41-28 loss to Oregon because there’s no evidence it’s true. But it’s not necessarily untrue either. When you’re the Buckeyes coach, the championship glow burns out quicker than a birthday candle, and the demand to at least be in that mix again and again never relents. Ohio State is probably not going to make the playoff this year, but the hard part about evaluating its 6-3 record is that it has lost two straight games with a freshman backup quarterback who probably isn’t ready to lead a team to playoff glory. At the same time, why would the Buckeyes’ defense completely collapse as a result? Yes, every part of a football team is connected, and the timing of losing quarterback Julian Sayin to injury right before playing USC and Oregon couldn’t have been worse. Still, the nature of those defeats gives the impression that something is off in Columbus, and the atmosphere could get even spicier than it was before Day’s national title breakthrough.

Pete Golding: In retrospect, this was a pretty tough situation at Ole Miss for Golding to manage. Last year, it was pure honeymoon after Lane Kiffin walked away from Ole Miss to take the LSU job, leaving Golding to soak up all the glory from a CFP semifinal run without any of the scrutiny. But in the long-term reality portion of the marriage, Golding is now in front of a fan base whose expectations were raised by the Kiffin era. And losing 42-7 to Georgia is the kind of result that feels like the more traditional version of Ole Miss fans had forgotten about the last several years. With their third loss, the Rebels are pretty much eliminated from CFP contention, and that’s going to seem like a big missed opportunity when you convinced two of the most dynamic offensive players in America in Trinidad Chambliss and Kewan Lacy to come back and play a full season for Golding. At the same time, a lot of folks underrated the possibility that Ole Miss wasn’t going to be as good as a year ago due to the players Kiffin took with him to LSU. There also needs to be a discussion about why the Ole Miss defense has regressed so badly from the last couple years when Golding was focusing exclusively on that side of the ball.

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Barry Odom: Nobody is going to feel sorry for a coach whose worst-case scenario is coaching at a school for a few years, losing a bunch of games and walking away with nearly $30 million. But we see coaches all the time in college who are so eager to move up the ladder that they end up taking the wrong job. Why did Odom go to Purdue in the first place? It would be a fair question to ask himself after a 34-29 loss to Maryland at home, which is all kinds of bad on every conceivable level. Odom is now 5-16 as he nears the end of his second season at Purdue with just two Big Ten wins. When your program is in that state, you can’t blow the kind of opportunity the Boilermakers had this week, facing a bad Maryland team that has already fired Mike Locksley and had lost 13 conference games in a row. Purdue has shown some signs of improvement this year, but losing to the Terps is just a season-killer and a reminder how tough it is to sustain momentum when you’re trying to claw out of such a deep hole. Odom, who was fired in 2019 after four seasons at Missouri, had to drop down to the Mountain West to rebuild his career and did such a good job at UNLV, going 19-8 in two seasons there, that he became a power conference candidate again. In retrospect, it might have been a better move to hold on for one more season in Las Vegas and return to a place where you’re not constantly pushing a boulder uphill.

James Franklin: No coach in the history of college football has done more lobbying for small university towns to improve their aviation infrastructure for the benefit of football teams. At Penn State, Franklin famously complained about having to bus 90 minutes to Harrisburg for a trip to the West Coast because the runway wasn’t long enough in State College to accommodate a plane with that much fuel. Now at Virginia Tech, Franklin is once again in a town where flying in and out isn’t easy, with most commercial traffic going to Roanoke about 40 miles away. Asked this week about in-state recruiting, Franklin’s mind immediately went to … the airport situation. “We also have to go nationally,” he said. “That’s where having an airport right on campus is going to be important. We’re going to be very aggressive in doing that.” At this point, Franklin is like Paul McCartney playing “Hey Jude” and “Let it Be.” The set list is always going to include one or two of his greatest hits. Franklin, however, will need to do a lot better than a 51-28 loss to SMU before they build him an airport.

Moments of Misery

Holy War heartbreak: BYU’s second-half drive chart in a 28-20 loss at Utah reads like a football death sentence. Interception, punt, punt, interception, interception. “If you know anything about this rivalry, that is not the way to win it,” BYU coach Kalani Sitake said. Unless BYU can get really lucky and find a way into the Big 12 championship game, the Cougars’ playoff hopes are going to endure a really nervous few weeks. Yeah, the win over Notre Dame will help, but is 10-2 good enough without a conference championship? Meanwhile, BYU fans may have to watch their rivals reach the CFP before they do, which causes all kinds of uncomfortable dinner conversations in a state where allegiances are split down the middle. Then again, it was right there for BYU this time. Among quarterback Bear Bachmeier’s four interceptions was an unfortunate mistake in the end zone when the Cougars had third-and-goal at the 2-yard line. If Bachmeier makes that play, the entire course of the season, the playoff chase and the Beehive State rivalry might be different.

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Frog follies: TCU’s season has been one long fourth-quarter nightmare. Even at 4-5, the combined margin of defeat is 25 points. Their most lopsided loss of the year was 21-13 at UCF. When you’re right there in every single game but lose more than you win, no moment feels safe. And so it was with 1:45 remaining at Arizona when the Wildcats scored a touchdown but missed a two-point conversion that would have tied it. At TCU this season, that’s still plenty of time for something to go wrong. Right on cue, disaster struck when Arizona went to the pooch kickoff and TCU’s Ed Small let it fall through his breadbasket. When Arizona recovered at the TCU 26, it was already in field goal range. It got a little closer and delivered a dagger to win 29-28 and ratchet up the talk that TCU may run off Sonny Dykes at some point in the near future.

Tiger trouble: After Missouri’s 34-20 loss to Texas, Drinkwitz tried to do the thing where he wanted everyone to know he thought the officiating was terrible but didn’t want to say it directly so that he wouldn’t get in trouble with the SEC office. “If I say what I want to say, I’m going to get fined until I don’t have any retirement, and I’m not gonna do that,” he said. “I’m not gonna blame the officials. That would be disrespectful to Coach [Steve] Sarkisian and his team.” You can’t blame a man for wanting to hold onto his money, but Missouri fans would have appreciated a good, old-fashioned officiating rant even if it would have cost Drinkwitz a little bit of the $10 million a year he makes. Because from a Missouri perspective, it sure seemed like the big video replays and close calls almost all went against them, including a bizarre fumble by Texas quarterback Arch Manning late in the third quarter that looked like an incompletion but actually turned into a 12-yard gain for the Longhorns. Was it a bad call or just bad luck? It’s hard to tell whether linebacker Brian Huff knocked the ball from Manning’s hand or whether he had already started his throwing motion, but the call went Texas’ way at a key moment. An incompletion would have made it fourth down with Texas trailing by seven. Instead, they scored to tie the game and dominated from there.

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: Sports.yahoo.com