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Author @TheCoachBart
We’ve all been there. Your buddies tell you to go to a certain restaurant because the burgers are great, or the steaks are amazing, and you won’t be disappointed.
We’ll stick with burgers in this example. So you get a Friday night and you’re all stoked to go find out about this place and dive in. Then, you go there, and there’s no one there … already a precursor of a terrible experience. And the service completely sucks, like they need an air horn at each table to understand when you need to order. And the burger is pretty ordinary as well. The only thing not ordinary is the price. Basically, think Bagger Dave’s.
You leave feeling cheated and underwhelmed. Well, that’s what the next list is … the five most underwhelming teams in college football in 2014. Maybe they’ll turn it around next year, or maybe your friends were wrong all along.
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Vanderbilt: The Commodores are a mixed bag of “really intelligent people” and “wait, Skip Bayless went there?” I mean, the President of Puntland (I swear, you can’t make this stuff up) is an alum, which is the most apropos thing of all time. The entire point of football is to score more of the points than the other team, no matter how you go about doing that. Vanderbilt was alone in its own class of terrible in this instance: 104th in the country in scoring defense, giving up over 33 per game, and 116th in the nation in scoring offense, getting just over 17 per game. Oh, and 93 percent of the time you got in their red zone? You scored, good for 121st in the country. That’s sort of not good, like force feeding yourself three Big Macs and then doing 700 push-ups in a sauna.
Kansas: You know how Dorothy would know she’s not in Kansas anymore? It has nothing to do with creatures wanting to meet a wizard. It’d be that she’s playing football and the opponent is either scoring on or stopping her team. Kansas in 2014 was the special kind of inept only afforded to one in college football. The Jayhawks were the only sub-100 Power 5 team in both scoring offense (115) and total defense (106). Add to that the fact that the Big 12 had a staggering two other teams below 120 (!!!) in total defense, and you figure at least they’d have scored a bit. Nope. Kansas in 2014 was good on neither, and especially bad at both. Stone washed jeans and Zubaz pants look on at Kansas and sort of cringe.
Texas Tech: The Red Raiders are pretty special. They’re like a pretty girl with zero personality that rolls out of bed in pajama pants, hair up, and a stained tee shirt not even trying to play to her strengths. TTU was a filthy-bad 123rd in the nation in scoring defense but a fairly mediocre-good 52nd in the nation in scoring offense. So you’d think maybe they’d use that decent offense to keep that horrid defense off the field. Nah, they were 123rd in time of possession, too, meaning they score quickly to get that bad defense back out there. Of course, when your former defensive coordinator is allegedly giving out signals, that can’t help. Of course, that was all BEFORE the Red Raiders gave up 82 to TCU. So …
SMU: I hate banging on non-Power 5 teams because in this system, the deck is stacked against them so badly and they’re already at a gross financial disadvantage. They almost play by their own set of rules, a very watered down version. But in FBS college football, you should be able to basically fall out of bed and score more than 11.1 per game on offense. Seven games this year saw SMU finish with fewer than 10 points. And on defense? Yeah, the Mustangs gave up over 41 per game on average. That’s a special kind of awful. From the last day of August to the first week of October, the team scored 12 points. Total.
UConn: What happened to UConn? Times were, the Huskies were at worst indifferently mediocre. At best, a contender to win the long-embalmed version of the Big East. As of 2014, they just sort of stink. They finished 122nd in the nation in scoring offense and 116th in turnover margin. Add to that the fact that in their last three games after they defeated their lone FBS opponent of 2014 (Central Florida), they lost by 41 to Cincinnati, 41-10 to Memphis, and then gave SMU its lone win — that SMU team being one that scored over 20 points all of three times all season. Can Kevin Ollie do football, too?
