After nearly nine months of slumber, the Misery Index is not only back on the marquee like the old Cracker Barrel logo, we’ve moved to a fancy new neighborhood.
If you’re a longtime reader who followed us from the old digs, thank you. And if you’re completely new to this weekly college football feature full of schadenfreude and pithiness, we can guarantee you’re going to love it here.
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Because as much as college football has changed since we started this more than a decade ago, one thing will always remain the same: There is no experience in sports like the anguish of rooting for a program that isn’t living up to expectations while all your rivals revel in your misfortune.
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Our job is to find those moments of misery every week, but the truth is we don’t have to look very hard most of the time.
Thanks to teams like Alabama.
Let’s start with the good news: It’s awfully nice for the young people who never saw what Mike Shula’s teams were like to get a slice of nostalgia.
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Or maybe nausea.
Folks, we’re opening the 2025 season with a true Misery Index banger, maybe even an all-timer. A mere 14 games into the post-Nick Saban era, Alabama football is in crisis.
Did the Crimson Tide hire the wrong guy?
That’s the question the school will have to confront — urgently — in the wake of a 31-17 loss to Florida State.
Kalen DeBoer may have a $70 million buyout, but is that any more expensive than the university whose reputation is more closely tied football than anywhere in the country slipping into “Just Another Program” territory so quickly on the heels of Saban’s historic run?
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Alabama didn’t just lose an opener, it got de-pantsed in a way that shows there’s fundamental weakness in the program. And it all points directly to the head coach.
It would be one thing if Alabama just didn’t execute offensively or turned the ball over a bunch and lost on a fluke, but that wasn’t what happened. Florida State made the Tide look soft and slow, and it showed up at the line of scrimmage, where the Seminoles had 230 rushing yards while Alabama got very little out of the ground game (74 yards on 29 attempts) and did a poor job protecting quarterback Ty Simpson, who was running for his life way too often.
Mind you, Florida State was 2-10 last year. If Mike Norvell could fix those issues in one offseason, why couldn’t DeBoer level up after a year in which inexplicable losses to Oklahoma and Vanderbilt kept Alabama out of the College Football Playoff?
If anything, the Tide took a step backward Saturday to a fourth loss as a double-digit favorite in 14 games under DeBoer.
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That’s an objectively bad trend. And it’s why Alabama reigns as America’s most miserable fan base in Week 1.
Conference Champions of Misery
ACC: There hasn’t been much good to say about Stanford football in several years, but former Cardinal and NFL great Andrew Luck’s position as general manager is worth following. From top to bottom, this is a Luck production. It was his decision to fire former coach Troy Taylor in March after an investigation into workplace behavior, his decision to install Frank Reich as the interim coach this season and it will be his decision on who to hire next. Given Stanford’s disadvantage in the transfer environment due to academics and its odd fit in the ACC, this was always going to be a rocky road. But Stanford’s 23-20 loss at Hawaii (which took place Aug. 23) on a last-second field goal was a reminder that this program may not have even hit rock bottom yet. Rescuing this mess may be the hardest job Luck will ever have.
Big Ten: What a month for Northwestern. After paying former coach Pat Fitzgerald an ungodly (and undisclosed) sum to settle his lawsuit for wrongful termination following the hazing scandal that blew up in 2023, the Wildcats went down to New Orleans and lost 23-3 to Tulane. Oh, but that’s not all! They were also on the wrong end of a public relations broadside from Tulane coach Jon Sumrall, who lit into Northwestern for refusing to let the home team wear white jerseys to honor the 20-year anniversary of the 2005 team that wore them after Hurricane Katrina. “I’m not trying to be a jerk, but don’t disrespect the city of New Orleans,” he said. Just from an institutional reputation standpoint, Northwestern fans could use any kind of win — and soon.
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Big 12: Dave Aranda was very much on the hot seat midway through last season at Baylor, but a six-game win streak (albeit against some of the league’s lesser lights) earned him one more year. The moral of the story is that coaches who are well-liked by their colleagues — and Aranda has a great reputation within the Baylor athletic department — will get the benefit of the doubt. (It’s especially impactful at Baylor for the head football coach to be a good human being, given that someone who held the position before him doesn’t have the same reputation.) But, of course, the trajectory of the program always wins in the end. And Aranda’s mission to revamp Baylor’s defense, as outlined in detail by Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger, didn’t look great in Week 1. After allowing 308 rushing yards on 51 attempts in a 38-24 loss to Auburn, the mad scientist might need to go back to the lab to save his job once again.
Group of Five: We often get an FCS-over-FBS upset early in the season, but Army fans across the world couldn’t have expected that it would be their team this time. Not only is Army coming off an American Conference championship and has generally played excellent football in the Jeff Monken era, the Black Knights hadn’t lost to an FCS team since 2015. Was a 30-27 double overtime loss to Tarleton State simply a fluke or a sign that the high of winning a conference title last season isn’t going to last very long?
Headset Misery
Kalen DeBoer: Though he’s about to find out how bad a person’s quality of life can get while making $10.25 million to coach football, the heat should be equally distributed to athletics director Greg Byrne. Hiring DeBoer after two-year stints at Fresno State and Washington with no experience translatable to the cauldron of SEC and particularly Alabama football was all Byrne. This wasn’t a Board of Trustee or booster hire. For better or worse, this one is on the AD. Sure, after watching DeBoer lead the Huskies to the national title game in 2023, it made some sense. But at the same time, that entire season was played on the knife’s edge with a series of Houdini-esque escapes thanks to the brilliance of quarterback Michael Penix. Maybe it will work out in the end, but right now, this is looking like a $70 million mistake. If the money behind Alabama demands a change, will Byrne be the one who gets to make it?
Colorado head coach Deion Sanders made some critical clock management mistakes in the closing minute of a loss to Georgia Tech on Friday. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
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Deion Sanders: If you are trailing by a touchdown with 67 seconds left, call a swing pass that gets stopped behind the line of scrimmage on first down and don’t use one of your two remaining timeouts IMMEDIATELY, you deserve the wrath of the clock management gods. Even worse was second down, when Coach Prime’s team snapped it with 45 seconds left and he refused to call timeout again as the clock bled to 29 seconds for third-and-1. Losing 27-20 to Georgia Tech can be forgiven, but going home with two timeouts in your pocket cannot.
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Steve Sarkisian: Do we need to re-evaluate his reputation as a play-caller? When Texas has faced really good defensive coaches lately, it’s seven points against Ohio State, 14 against the Buckeyes in last year’s CFP semis, 17 against Texas A&M last Thanksgiving and 34 across two games against Georgia last year. He didn’t do much early in Saturday’s 14-7 loss at Ohio State to get Arch Manning into a rhythm in his first real test as a starter, and at this point it’s almost predictable how flummoxed Texas gets in the red zone regardless of quarterback. That was a winnable game for the Longhorns, but some mediocre play-calling by Sark — especially in short-yardage situations — let Ohio State off the hook.
Dabo Swinney: At kickoff, it felt like old times in Death Valley East with a primetime national TV game, the spine-tingling run down the hill into Memorial Stadium, a brand name opponent in LSU and a Clemson crowd at full orange froth. These were the moments that made Clemson a national power from 2015-2020, and they almost always delivered on the big stage. But when’s the last time Clemson won a game of that magnitude? (Sorry, but SMU in the ACC championship last year doesn’t count.) Notre Dame in the 2020 ACC title game? Yeah, it’s been awhile. Clemson’s XX-XX loss to LSU – and LSU was the better team by a pretty significant distance – will do nothing to change the narrative that Swinney’s program has lost some juice.
Scott Frost: Returning to UCF, where he rode the magic carpet to a 13-0 record and self-claimed national championship in 2017, made all the sense in the world. But that doesn’t mean things will ever go back to the way they were. In fact, by returning to the place he had such great success, Frost will always be compared to an impossible standard – just like he was at Nebraska. UCF won Frost’s Act II debut but needed a late fourth-down stop and an interception to hold off Jacksonville State, 17-10. If that’s an indication of where UCF will stack up in Big 12 play, it’s not going to feel like 2017 for very long in Orlando.
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Moments of Misery
Tim Tebow got booed by Tennessee fans: OK, so maybe it wasn’t the most thoughtful choice by the Aflac Kickoff organizers in Atlanta to bring the 2007 Heisman Trophy winner in to deliver a pregame prayer before a game involving Tennessee given that his Florida teams went 4-0 against the Vols. If you have ever met Tennessee fans, you know they’d hold a grudge against the Almighty itself if it delivered that much on-field pain.
The Oregon mascot got decapitated: Hopefully no young children at Autzen Stadium will have to go to therapy in the future as a result of watching “The Duck” stumble coming out of the tunnel before playing Montana State, causing his head to pop off and roll around on the field as the young man wearing the suit high-tailed it back to the tunnel in a panic. Like, he couldn’t just pick it up and put the head back on instead of leaving it on the field like it was a murder scene? As Mike Tyson once said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth by artificial turf.
Brian Kelly overthought the situation: Was there a worse coaching decision all weekend than LSU going for it on fourth-and-2 with 15 seconds left in the first half against Clemson rather than kicking a chip shot field goal? Though LSU won anyway, holding on for a 17-10 victory, it’s hard to defend going for it there. Down 10-3 at the time and without a timeout remaining, LSU would have needed to spike the ball quickly and might have had one or two shots to the end zone if it converted. Instead, LSU didn’t even get lined up right pre-snap and Clemson easily sniffed out a screen to the boundary. There would have been absolutely nothing wrong with taking three points there, and Kelly’s gamble didn’t make any sense situationally.
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Arch Manning screamed in the tunnel: OK, so it probably wasn’t the most dramatic reaction we’ll see all year with losing players coming off the field. But his agony was palpable after a forgettable 17-for-30 passing performance for 170 yards, a touchdown and an interception in Texas’ 14-7 loss. If you’re trying to extrapolate what this means for his future, the safer bet is he’ll be fine in the long run and that his debut as the full-time starter will be a good learning experience. But it was a reminder how poorly served Manning was by the hype machine around him — including the fact that millions of people were watching him in commercials while he struggled to complete passes — when he had no real track record of playing at a Heisman level.
Jon Sumrall went a bit too far: One more word about Jerseygate. While we don’t doubt that the Tulane coach used Northwestern’s refusal to wear dark uniforms as rocket fuel to get his players hyped up, nor do we doubt the sincerity of trying to honor the school’s 2005 team, his postgame spiel felt a little performative and unnecessary. While you could argue that Northwestern should have just taken the path of least resistance and honored the request, it was 88 degrees and muggy in New Orleans. Northwestern choosing to wear the dark jerseys as a courtesy would have arguably been putting your own team at a disadvantage. If the shoe were on the other foot, would Tulane have agreed to that?
