(10-20-2019 08:23 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: We may be looking at 0-and. There aren't many places that would keep a coach who starts out 2-21.
San Jose State's coach (Brent Brennan) was retained for a third year after going 2-11 in year 1 and 1-11 in year 2 (2-21 vs. FBS, 1-1 vs. FCS). SJSU, however, is one of the most cash-strapped programs in the country and almost certainly would not have had the money to pay any sort of buyout so there really wasn't a choice to be made there.
In all fairness, SJSU is now 3-4 in Year 3 of the Brennan Era, with a P5 road win no less, albeit at a bottom-5 (for P5) Arkansas, and the Spartans probably won't win any of their remaining 5 games (@ Army, vs. Boise, @ Hawaii, @ UNLV, vs. Fresno). Speaking of Arkansas, they only have 2 FBS wins midway through Chad Morris's second year, and if they don't beat Western Kentucky at home on Nov. 9 -- which they very well might not -- that number may not increase and it would be hard for him not to get launched.
Kent State is also a place that literally had to let a coach stay for all 5 years of his contract (Paul Haynes, 2013-2017) despite FBS win totals of 3, 2, 2, and 2 in the first 4 years because they had no money to pay any buyout. They won 1 FBS game in Haynes's final, lame-duck year.
There's a lot of football left to be played, all of it in the 2nd-worst conference in the country, and it wouldn't surprise me too much if we stumbled into a couple wins to finish 2-10. I am on record as saying that I literally only need 2 wins this year to support a third year for Bloomgren, because that would be an improvement over the 1 FBS win from last year.
I have no illusions, though, that if we do manage the 0-fer, Stanford Joe would ever declare Stanford Mike and the Beloved Stanford Way a failure after just 2 seasons. That would be a bigger upset than my Illini downing the Badgers yesterday as a 31-point dog. The rhetorical groundwork (propaganda would be another word for it) has already been laid, with last year being termed "Year 0." I also expect to hear the excuse that the university with the $6 billion endowment "can't afford to pay buyouts."