If the College Football Playoff semifinals share a fundamental similarity, they own a basic difference as well.
The Orange Bowl and the Cotton Bowl are both revenge games for the lower seeds: Oklahoma will try to wash away the bitter taste of a 40-6 loss to Clemson in the 2014 Russell Athletic Bowl, and Michigan State will attempt to erase the memory of its 49-7 loss to Alabama in the 2011 Capital One Bowl. That’s one of the foremost common threads which runs through each semifinal.
If you want to find a core difference between these two games, consider the coordinators at the four programs. The two games offer different portraits, especially when viewed through the lens of the Coaching Carousel.
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In the most recent spin of the carousel — not entirely over, but mostly done — Brent Venables and Lincoln Riley, the foremost coordinators for Clemson and Oklahoma, enjoyed a victory lap as Broyles Award finalists. Riley took another step when he was given the award over Venables and three other candidates, one of which was Alabama defensive coordinator Kirby Smart.
Riley was mentioned in conjunction with the South Carolina job. Venables’s name often seems to crop up in connection with head coaching jobs. Missouri gained at least a little notice as a possible landing spot. However, the two star coordinators in the Orange Bowl both stayed put. They are so integral to what Bob Stoops and Dabo Swinney want to do at Oklahoma and Clemson. They have made the Orange Bowl a study in coordinator continuity during carousel season. If other bowl games are marked by transitions in the booth (or on the field, depending on where coordinators prefer to play their trade), Sooners-Tigers has been defined by stability. There won’t be any distractions attached to the first of the two College Football Playoff semifinals.
Yes, one could say that in a certain sense, Sooners-Tigers is still a manifestation of coaching turnover leading to improved results: Riley and Clemson co-offensive coordinators Jeff Scott and Tony Elliott are in their first seasons on the job.
Riley promptly restored Oklahoma’s offense, lifting it to a championship level and recalling the Bob Stoops salad days in Norman. The Scott-Elliott combo certainly needed time to settle into a rhythm, and Clemson’s defense held the Tigers together in the first half of the 2015 season. That said, Scott and Elliott have certainly answered “The Chad Morris Question” in the negative: No, the Tigers would not sorely miss Morris after he left to take the head coaching opening at SMU.
Yet, viewed through the prism of the Coaching Carousel, OU-Clemson features coaching staffs which aren’t going anywhere.
For Michigan State-Alabama, it’s a little bit different (to say the least) on the Alabama side of the divide.
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At Michigan State, the co-coordinator arrangement at Clemson has been replicated on defense. Harlon Barnett and Mike Tressel have sustained what Pat Narduzzi established in East Lansing. For Alabama, however, the defensive side of the ball has introduced the kind of situation one should expect at top-flight programs heading into bowl games, including and especially playoff semifinals.
Last season, Ohio State offensive coordinator Tom Herman was headed to Houston as the Cougars’ new head coach, but he stuck around to call plays for Urban Meyer in the College Football Playoff semifinals and championship game. That arrangement worked out just fine for the Buckeyes, who won the Sugar Bowl and then stormed past Oregon a week and a half later to win the program’s second national title this century. The possible distractions presented by an out-the-door coach did not materialize; an elite head coach — one of the two best in the sport today — was able to keep an operation running smoothly.
The only coach who can stand on the same turf as Meyer — in terms of quality, sustained high-level success, and various other measurements of coaching acumen in the 21st century — is Saban. Like Meyer last year with Tom Herman, Saban wanted his star assistant to stay for the playoff. Like Meyer, Saban gets what he wants: Kirby Smart, before going to Georgia to coach the Bulldogs, will orchestrate the Crimson Tide’s defense in JerryWorld against Michigan State.
If Ohio State, Meyer, and Herman made things work last season, we’ve certainly seen other episodes of hanger-on coordinators failing spectacularly in championship games. The most prominent example concerns the very man Smart is replacing at Georgia: Mark Richt, whose Florida State offense was shut out by Oklahoma in the 2001 Orange Bowl, that season’s BCS title game. Richt stayed under Bobby Bowden instead of immediately setting up shop in Athens. Whenever the subject of “exiting coordinators staying on for championship games” is discussed, the worst-case scenario is Richt against OU.
Alabama, Saban and Smart will try to do what Ohio State, Meyer, and Herman pulled off the season before. If they can succeed, the College Football Playoff era will almost certainly continue to feature instances in which star coordinators stick around for the semifinals. That will become a pronounced pattern, and we won’t have to wonder whether future coordinators-turned-head-coaches will stay or go. They’ll stay.
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Clemson-OU is a case study of continuity.
Alabama-Michigan State offers the Kirby Smart question, one season after the Tom Herman tipping point.
The two College Football Playoff semifinals offer very different portraits of coordinators, coaching situations, and intangible concerns before the biggest same-day games of the college football season.
