2012 Pac-12 Football Previews: New Coaches Everywhere, But Top Powers Remain

While the Ducks couldn’t make it back to the national title game, they further established themselves as a national player. College football doesn’t accept many applicants to its upper tier. In fact, if you look at the teams considered national powers, almost all of them have been so for decades. For instance, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Alabama, USC, et cetera, have not seen their fortunes change too terribly much from decade to decade; and even when teams fall from their ruling perch (Nebraska and Michigan, for instance), they are never considered too far from reasserting themselves.

You could make the case that the only programs that have been “accepted” into the ruling class over the last two or three decades have been the Florida schools (Florida, Florida State, Miami) and MAYBE, Virginia Tech. But if Oregon isn’t part of this class by now, they are really, really close. Money and huge success make for a rather impressive resume, and between Phil Knight’s cash and the games Oregon has won with it (the Ducks have finished in the F/+ Top 10 in four of the last five seasons), Oregon’s case is improving by the season.

First things first: welcome back, USC. After two years of mediocre play in 2009-10, and after a two-year postseason ban that prevented them from playing in the first ever conference title game, the Trojans are officially back in the game. They are eligible for the Pac-12 championship, eligible for the BCS championship, and as of the last month of the 2011 regular season, looking like USC again.

We can debate whether college football is better with traditional powers playing at a powerful level (it doesn’t take long to find somebody who will say exactly that), but it would be a waste of time. USC has taken off the invisibility cloak, and early indications are that they will begin the 2012 season as the early national title favorite.

Since then, however, Stanford’s recruiting rankings have improved rapidly. After just a 5-7 season, the 2009 class included eight four-star players and ranked 20th in the country. The 2010 class included five four-star signees and a wealth of high three-stars and ranked 26th. The 2011 class, Shaw’s first after Harbaugh left for the San Francisco 49ers, brought in another seven four-star kids and ranked 22nd. Stanford had established itself as a top 25 level recruiter; and then 2012 happened. Shaw reeled in three five-star recruits (only three schools -- Alabama, LSU and USC -- brought in more than three), 10 four-star recruits, and one of the best offensive line classes college football has ever seen. With the right coach, just about any major conference school can pull in some top 25 recruiting classes here and there; Stanford’s 2012 class, on the other hand, ranked fifth. Fifth!

For years, we have come to accept that schools with higher academic standards will struggle to recruit big-time players; recently, however, coaches like Harbaugh and Shaw at Stanford and James Franklin at Vanderbit (No. 29 class in 2012, No. 16 class thus far in 2013) have begun to destroy that perception. Shaw has turned Stanford’s elite academic status into a strength, a challenge, and it could quite possibly be changing the fortunes of the Stanford football program as a whole. They may very well struggle to win double-digit games in their first post-Luck season, but with four- and five-star talent at seemingly every position on the field and one of the best sets of lines in college football (for years to come), they are incredibly, jarringly well-established for the future. The Stanford we knew is, for the time being, long gone.

Among the primary questions heading into 2012 football season, some of the biggest story lines are on teams getting “called up,” so to speak, and the consequences of doing so.

Can TCU hold its own in the Big 12 after years in the mid-major universe? “Can Texas A&M and Missouri cut it in the SEC?“ And it makes sense, really. Leaving aside the tiny matter of these leaps being in no way equal (to say the least, the Big 12 is a lot closer to the SEC than the Mountain West is to the Big 12), we spend a lot of time developing generalizations about certain conferences and the grind to which others outside of those conferences might eventually succumb.

From 1920 to 1970, Oregon State went to three Rose Bowls, and Oregon went to one. The Beavers had finished in the nation’s Top 15 five times to Oregon’s once. They had produced the 1962 Heisman Trophy winner, Terry Baker. Oregon State’s was far from the most storied program in the world, but since Tommy Prothro’s hire in 1955 through 1970, OSU had finished under .500 only once. It had turned into a consistently solid program if nothing else, and a more successful one than what the Ducks from Eugene were producing 45 miles to the south.

In 1971, an Oregon graduate named Phil Knight commissioned a young college student to create a logo for his burgeoning athletic shoe company.

In 7.5 seasons at Arizona, Mike Stoops pulled off what was truly a rather remarkable feat. No, he didn’t win big. No, he didn’t take the Wildcats to their first Rose Bowl (though he did come relatively close in 2009, losing a three-point heartbreaker to Oregon in what would have given Arizona the bid). But for four straight years in Tucson, from 2007-10, he put almost exactly the same level of product on the field.

Sometimes the offense was better, sometimes the defense got the nod, but the Wildcats ranked 32nd in F/+ in 2007, 35th in 2008, 33rd in 2009 and 38th in 2010. If you want to see what a glass ceiling looks like in college football (or as I put it in last year’s preview, a mesa), here’s a good place to start.

We’re going to start with something I wrote almost exactly one year ago, as we are basically in the same place regarding Cal football:

For the first time since 2006, Tedford’s Golden Bears actually improved in 2011. They had fallen from 13th in F/+ in 2006, to 20th, to 33rd, to 52nd, to 72nd, but they rebounded last fall, ranking 45th and bringing home seven wins. Despite the loss of ace recruiter Tosh Lupoi, Tedford and company inked another exciting recruiting class, and they are in the odd position of ranking 43rd in five-year F/+ and 18th in two-year recruiting. Typically, schools that pull that feat are 100-year powers that can get by on name recognition. California is not that. But here they are, improving but failing to meet the potential of the players they have been signing. In 2012, they will feature a star receiver, an experienced backfield, and a young, exciting defense full of recent blue-chippers. Will that be enough for them to improve once more in a surging Pac-12 North?

Team fires underachieving coach, then plucks new coach from another school. It happens many, many times every offseason. There is typically nothing notable about it unless your school is one of the two involved. But Arizona State’s coaching change mutated into something more. It pulled a third school into its vortex, it eventually helped get an athletic director fired, it convinced a lot of neutral third parties to root quite hard against ASU, and it proved that karma is very, very prescient.

The timeline:

Sometimes perfectly sensible, exciting coaching hires don’t pan out well at all. And sometimes baffling, ridiculous hires end up spectacularly. There is no magic formula for hiring a coach -- if there was, teams would be a lot better at it. Instead, you basically take the most educated guess possible and let luck take over.

If hiring coaches were easy, Oklahoma would have never brought in John Blake. (They therefore probably wouldn’t have replaced him with Bob Stoops three years later.) Texas wouldn’t have brought in John Mackovic (and Mack Brown). Florida wouldn’t have hired Ron Zook (or Urban Meyer). Alabama wouldn’t have hired Mike Shula (or Nick Saban). Et cetera. As I’ve said before, almost all of today’s great coaches coach where they do because their respective school’s last hire was somewhere between poor and awful.

This wasn’t exactly Bill Snyder building something from nothing at Kansas State. It wasn’t Al Golden at Temple or Greg Schiano at Rutgers either. When Steve Sarkisian accepted the job of Washington head coach in 2009, his Huskies were still just nine years removed from a Top Five finish and seven years removed from a bowl appearance.

Still, Washington had gone 12-47 from 2004-08. And they were still really, really bad in 2008, finishing 0-12 and ranking 117th in the country in F/+. And job Sarkisian did in immediately restoring a level of competence to the program (they have ranked 68th, 57th and 64th in F/+ the last three years) was astounding. But now it’s time to find out if Sarkisian is a true program builder or just a reclamation specialist.

It is perfectly understandable why coachspeak is coachspeak, why most coaches are afraid of saying anything interesting to the media, and why personalities like Nick Saban have reached the top of college football. When you open your mouth in front of a microphone, and you extend beyond guarded cliches, the odds are decent that you will say something awkward, something regrettable, or something you’ll have to apologize for later. And since a major college football coach is part-coach and part-politician, it is almost always better to say something bland.

But college football was built on personality. Woody Hayes. Howard Schnellenberger. Barry Switzer. Bobby Bowden. Steve Spurrier. It is one of the many things that makes it a greater game than the sharper, more polished professional version. (And yes, I know Switzer also coached in the NFL. He will always be a college coach.)