Misery Index Week 6: Brian Kelly, LSU embarrassed by No. 8 Tennessee with big loss

There were simpler ways for Brian Kelly’s career to proceed than getting made fun of for fake Southern accents and dance moves with recruits that set a new standard for cringeworthy videos on the Internet.

Even if it was never going to result in a national championship, he had a good thing going at Notre Dame. The Irish had their recruiting niche, they could engineer a schedule to put them in contention for the College Football Playoff every year, and their teams were largely appreciated for what they accomplished. Notre Dame is a very tough job, but Kelly was so good that he often made it seem pretty easy.

Since Day 1 at LSU, though, Kelly has been like a newly divorced dad hitting the same bars he used to frequent 20 years earlier only to figure out that most of the patrons are younger than the leather jacket he pulled out of the closet that night. The stench of trying too hard to be LSU instead of Notre Dame is clinging to Kelly like four days without a shower in the Louisiana heat.

But when it spills over from Twitter memes to on-field decision-making, that’s a problem. And in LSU’s 40-13 loss to Tennessee, Kelly’s identity crisis set the stage for a blowout that didn’t need to happen.

Tennessee, to be clear, is a better team than LSU. The Tigers would have struggled to win this game under any circumstances, much less with a special teams unit that allowed the Vols to start their first two drives inside the LSU 30-yard line.

But it wasn’t a lost cause. The Tigers were only down 10-0 when Kelly made his first shaky decision, deciding to go for a fourth-and-4 instead of taking the field goal. It didn’t work.

Then down 13-0, he went for another fourth down, this time just shy of the 50-yard line. It didn’t work and gave the Vols another short field that they converted into a touchdown.

Then, fortunate to be trailing 20-7, Kelly decided to try his luck one more time at the end of the half despite facing fourth-and-10 from the Tennessee 45. It was unnecessarily desperate and costly, as Tennessee had enough time to tack on a field goal.

“We’re getting out-coached,” Kelly said during the halftime interview, which was at least an honest admission. But Kelly isn’t getting paid $9.5 million a year to be out-coached. In fact, he was hired specifically to fix the coaching part of an LSU program that was floundering under Ed Orgeron.

Personnel issues were always going to limit how good LSU could be this season, but it shouldn’t have been outside of Kelly’s grasp to put a sound, well-coached team on the field. Instead, LSU has trailed by double digits in four of its five games against FBS opponents, with the only exception being New Mexico.

LSU has won some of those games, but the consistent issues early in games suggests real problems with preparation and execution. And in the SEC, there aren’t a whole lot of games against Boston College or Virginia to figure things out. If you’re not ready, you’re going to get exposed.

Kelly is learning that the hard way so far at LSU, where the lights are bright, the expectations are huge and the fans are unforgiving. That’s why LSU is No. 1 in this week’s Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which fan bases are feeling the most angst about their favorite program.

Week 6 winners and losers: Oklahoma sinks to new low, UCLA riding high

Saturday recap: What you need to know about college football’s Top 25 games for Week 6

Four more in misery

Oklahoma: The only frame of reference most Oklahoma fans have for what’s happening to their team right now is the John Blake era, a three-year stretch in the late 1990s when the Sooners were very bad. But bringing up those tough times should be considered an over-the-line insult — to Blake, that is. At least Blake’s teams, as awful as they were, had a few decent wins. At least Blake’s teams managed to score a point against Texas. At least Blake’s teams usually got blown out by historically good opponents like Nebraska or legitimate top-10 teams at the time like Texas A&M.

But Brent Venables cannot claim any of that in his first season. Oklahoma’s October — which now includes a 49-0 loss to Texas on the back of a 55-24 loss to TCU last week — puts this program in a situation that is so absurdly, incomprehensibly bad that fans have every right to question whether athletics director Joe Castiglione made a major mistake after Lincoln Riley's surprise departure.

The Misery Index is not there yet because the sample size on Venables as a head coach is still too small. His reputation as one of the best defensive coordinators of the modern era was well-earned at Clemson. But there are no positives to be found in being shut out for the first time since 1998 and losing by the largest margin ever in the history of the Red River Rivalry. It’s a real mark of shame for this program.

Plus, Riley is winning quickly at Southern California with a 6-0 record. Oklahoma State looks like the best team in the Big 12. And a much tougher SEC schedule that Oklahoma isn’t even close to ready for will be on their doorstep before they know it.

Virginia: For all the attention on Venables’ rough first year, another former Clemson assistant might be doing an even worse job in his head coaching debut. Though Virginia is typically under the radar, it was not a broken program when Bronco Mendenhall stepped away for personal reasons after last season. The Cavaliers weren’t great, but they were good enough to beat the teams they were supposed to beat. That’s not happening this season under Tony Elliott, who waited patiently for the right opportunity but has now found himself coaching a team that is appreciably worse than it was last year for no obvious reason.

Virginia should not be 0-3 in the ACC, but that’s where things stand after a 34-17 home loss to a Louisville team that has been incredibly disappointing itself and didn’t have the services of starting quarterback Malik Cunningham due to injury.

Whatever Virginia is doing on offense under Elliott does not seem to suit senior quarterback Brennan Armstrong, who was supposed to be one of the best in the country but now has five touchdowns against seven interceptions. Last year, his ratio was 31-to-11. He was also sacked six times by Louisville. Elliott will get time, but those grisly numbers alone are enough to be skeptical about the kind of offense he's trying to run with this team.

Iowa: Kirk Ferentz has been a very good coach at Iowa, but not nearly good enough to run the nepotism racket he has pulled off for the last five years by installing his son Brian as offensive coordinator. It’s a joke, it’s an outrage and it’s an administrative failure that nobody from athletics director Gary Barta on down has the stones to confront head-on. Remarkably, Brian Ferentz technically has to report to Barta to comply with the school’s nepotism policy. That means Barta, if he were doing his job, would have likely pulled the plug on this arrangement long before Iowa’s offense hit rock bottom this season.

How can anyone in a position of power look at Iowa, which ranked 130th in FBS in yards per game before this week’s 9-6 loss to Illinois, and feel like the program is being well-served by having its offense get stonewalled week after week by any opponent with a pulse? Six points, no touchdowns, against Illinois. Seven points, one touchdown, against Iowa State. Seven points, no touchdowns, against South Dakota State of all teams. Iowa puts top-shelf defenses on the field year after year. There are going to be ups and downs, but this isn’t normal. Kirk Ferentz is a football coach, not a king. It's time to treat him as such.

Florida State: On paper, a 4-2 record seems about right. Given where Florida State has been the last few years, it’s progress. But in a one-game window, the Seminoles committed two of the worst and costliest mistakes you’ll ever see in a 19-17 loss at NC State. On the first play of the fourth quarter, Florida State punter Alex Mastromanno started to take off and run when a little bit pressure got in his face. Once he avoided the block, though, he should have kicked the ball. Instead, he started running forward and crossed the line of scrimmage before punting it, which carries a loss-of-down penalty. That pretty much handed NC State a field goal to cut the deficit to 17-16.

Then, despite an avalanche of mistakes in the fourth quarter, Florida State was on NC State’s 22-yard line with a chance to win on a field goal or touchdown. Despite having 40 seconds left — plenty of time to run more plays — quarterback Jordan Travis went for it all in one shot. The only person close to his pass in the end zone was an NC State defender, ending the game with an interception. The Seminoles have suffered a lot of frustrating losses lately, but none more gutting than this one.

Miserable but not miserable enough

Arkansas: The journey from frisky underdog to overachiever to disappointment is fairly common in the SEC, so the real test for the sanity of a fan base is what happens when adversity finally hits. Arkansas has reached that stage after a 40-17 loss to Mississippi State, which was the Razorbacks’ third in a row after a 3-0 start. Surely Arkansas fans prefer the Sam Pittman era over the outright embarrassment they’ve been subjected to over the last decade, but winning consistently in the SEC requires more than good culture. The Hogs have backslid defensively this year, giving up big numbers to mediocre teams like South Carolina (417 yards) and Missouri State (409 yards) not to mention the good ones like Alabama (555 yards) and Mississippi State (568 yards). This is the first time it feels like Pittman’s honeymoon is over.

Rutgers: One of the more remarkable stats in college football right now is that Rutgers’ last home Big Ten win came on Nov. 4, 2017. That’s 21 consecutive conference losses in Piscataway, and not all of them have been to good teams. In fact, Rutgers’ latest loss on Friday, 14-13 to Nebraska, came against a very bad team. Greg Schiano returning to Rutgers was supposed to spell the end of these streaks, a return to a baseline level of competence and competitiveness. While there has been improvement, it’s not good enough when you cough up a 13-0 lead to the Huskers while rotating quarterbacks and committing three turnovers.

Memphis: It is clearly not impossible to blow a 32-19 lead with four minutes remaining because we all saw the Tigers do it on Friday night against Houston. But that doesn’t make it any more acceptable. Allowing a 12-play touchdown drive (including a pair of long fourth-down conversions), failing to grab an onside kick and then completely falling apart defensively in the final minute for a 33-32 loss is the kind of debacle that will cling to third-year coach Ryan Silverfield like a barbecue sauce stain that never quite fades away. The Tigers have been good enough over the last decade that they should aspire to more than being a mid-pack AAC team, but that’s what they are these days.

Nevada: It’s pretty rare for coaches to change jobs within a conference because, in general, the original school will do whatever it takes to avoid the indignity of losing someone to a peer school. Nevada did not want Jay Norvell to leave for Colorado State after averaging 7½ wins over the past four years but simply could not match what the Rams could offer him from facilities to salary and every other resource necessary to build a winner. But if Nevada was going to get any revenge, it was likely to be this year with Colorado State looking like the worst team in FBS through the first part of the season. Instead, Nevada is doubling up on the embarrassment after a 17-14 loss to Norvell’s team, which had been outscored 164-43 in its first four games.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Brian Kelly, LSU embarrassed by No. 8 Tennessee after big loss