It’s far enough into the college football season now that losses have real season-shaping consequences.
Conference races are taking shape, contenders are starting to separate from pretenders, a couple of coaches have already been fired and they won’t be the last.
Week 4 of the college football season was a painful one for a number of teams, and these are the seven fan bases with the biggest grievances and gripes after the weekend.
Last week, after a loss to Georgia Tech, Clemson coach Dabo Swinney swiped back at the fans and touted his record of success over the years. This week, he took a different tone as his Tigers were humbled yet again.
“This is a bad, bad feeling. Terrible,” Swinney said, after a 34-21 loss to Syracuse that marked Clemson’s largest home loss against an unranked opponent since 2001, per ESPN.
Clemson, which opened the season ranked No. 4 in the AP top 25, is now 1-3 for the first time since 2004 after losing as a 17.5-point favorite.
Any thoughts of a return to the College Football Playoff look to be dashed, and it’s still September. Who could have seen this coming? Certainly not Clemson fans that are now questioning whether Swinney is capable of getting the program back to the standards he set for it.
Some might have seen Illinois’ No. 9 national ranking and wondered how legitimate it was, but after a 10-win breakthrough last year, a lot of returning talent on the roster and a strong 3-0 start, Illini fans were certainly thinking their team could be this year’s Indiana and make a run at the College Football Playoff.
And then they got run over by, literally, this year’s Indiana as the Hoosiers poured it on in a 63-10 shellacking in which they outgained Illinois 579 yards to 161.
Illinois dropped to No. 23 in the AP poll and looks like it never belonged near the top 10 in the first place.
Cal fans have been mounting frustration with head coach Justin Wilcox for years, believing the program is trapped in perennial mediocrity. After all, how many coaches are still standing after five-straight losing seasons?
Well, just as Bears fans were letting themselves believe this could be a truly special season after a 3-0 start, a big non-conference win over Minnesota last week and the emergence of impressive freshman quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele. Cal went and lost 34-0 at San Diego State on Saturday night.
The Bears were a double-digit favorite yet couldn’t get anything going as they rushed for just 65 yards and Sagapolutele tossed two interceptions.
Cal has one of the most advantageous schedules in the country without a presently-ranked opponent on the slate the rest of the way, but getting demolished by a middling Mountain West team really dampens the outlook and puts Wilcox firmly back in the crosshairs of fan fury.
Luke Fickell seemed like a slam-dunk hire when Wisconsin landed him after his highly-successful tenure at Cincinnati, and yet it seems only a matter of time now before the Badgers will be looking for his replacement.
After going 7-6 and 5-7 the last two years, this shaped up as a make-or-break year for Fickell, and the early returns aren’t encouraging.
Wisconsin lost 27-10 at home to unranked Maryland on Saturday to drop to a very empty 2-2, as the Badgers have now been blown out in their only two games against Power Four opponents.
There are a lot of daunting matchups on the Big Ten schedule — Maryland isn’t usually considered one of them. This was a game the Badgers and their coach badly needed to win.
The reality is that Oklahoma State fans have probably moved beyond anger and on to other sentiments by this point, but the hits just keep coming.
The Cowboys lost 19-12 at home to Tulsa on Saturday to drop to 1-2.
It was Tulsa’s first win in Stillwater since 1951, and Oklahoma State has now won just one of its last 12 games.
Mike Gundy has done great things over his two decades leading the Cowboys, but the end is near as the program has clearly bottomed out at this point.
This is certainly not what North Carolina fans thought they were getting when the program made the splash of the offseason and hired NFL legend Bill Belichick.
The Tar Heels (2-2) have now played two games against Power Four opponents, and they’ve been trounced in both of them — the latest humbling coming Saturday in a 34-9 loss at UCF.
North Carolina was down 27-3 before finding the end zone for the first time, and it’s now plainly apparent that Belichick is not going to be a quick fix for the program in Year 1. Whether he sticks with it and can build the Tar Heels back up is yet to be seen, but any hope that he would be an immediate success in his stunning move to college football has quickly faded.
Arkansas held an 18-point lead in the second quarter against Memphis on Saturday, but let that slip away in a 32-31 loss while managing just a field goal after halftime.
Memphis is a good team and undefeated at 4-0, so it’s not to say that the loss itself is damning in any way. But frustrating? Absolutely.
Arkansas is in its sixth season under coach Sam Pittman, and it has been the definition of mediocrity in that time, while winning more than seven games only once. And so far this year, the Razorbacks have dropped both their games against Power Four opponents (Ole Miss being the other) while having every chance to win both of them.
So the anger for Arkansas fans is more about what continued missed opportunities and Pittman’s inability to get this team and program over the hump. The schedule doesn’t get any easier moving forward, and at 2-2 this is now looking like more of the same for Pittman and the Razorbacks.
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