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News Nuggets, 08.24.04
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Compiled from staff reports and electronic dispatches

College football goes on after offseason of upheaval

The latest power shifts in college football are complete and could have a lasting effect.

The Atlantic Coast Conference — both new and improved — can now lay claim to the title of best league. Southern California is the team to beat this year - and potentially for the foreseeable future. And it's power to the people in the Bowl Championship Series as poll voters get a greater say in which teams play for the national title.

After the contentious departure of Miami and Virginia Tech from the Big East, football no longer plays second-string to basketball in the ACC.

The ACC now has two perennial national title contenders in Miami and Florida State and a half-dozen other formidable programs. The Big East, meanwhile, is left to search for an identity.

Boston College is set to become the 12th member of the ACC next season, giving the conference enough teams to play a lucrative league title game. The fallout from the ACC's raid of the Big East is a major overhaul for much of Division I-A, with about 20 percent of 117 teams changing conferences in the next two years.

The players will have one less game to play this year. The 11-game regular season returns after two seasons of 12-game schedules. A calendar quirk caused 12 Saturdays to fal between Labor Day and Thanksgiving two years in a row.

The next 12-game season is slated for 2008, but college football officials are hoping to make the extra game — and the extra money — a fixture.

Under coach Pete Carroll, USC is again a fixture among the nation's best. After years of underachieving, the Trojans finished No. 1 in The Associated Press poll last year. Carroll's infectious enthusiasm has awaken the dormant giant and made USC the place to be for top college football players.

The Trojans followed up their first national title since 1972 with the best recruiting class in the country and are being talked about as the new Miami.

Despite losing four All-Americans, the Trojans start the season as the top-ranked team in the country. Quarterback Matt Leinart put up Carson Palmer-type numbers in his first season as a starter and tailback Reggie Bush is part of backfield flush with talent.

LSU and Georgia have taken the place of Florida and Tennessee as the SEC's elite and are expected to challenge USC for No. 1, along with usual suspects Oklahoma and Texas from the Big 12 and Michigan and Ohio State from the Big Ten.

The biggest change in the Big Ten comes from above the field as the league becomes the first to use instant replay to review officials' calls.

The BCS standings produced a worst-case scenario last season, when the Trojans and LSU split the national championship. USC was No. 1 in The Associated Press media poll and the coaches poll after the regular season, but was left out of the championship game.

LSU beat Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl for the BCS title and the top spot in the coaches poll, three days after USC dispatched Michigan in the Rose Bowl. The result was the first split title since the BCS system was installed in 1998.

So it was back to the drawing board for the BCS. What they came up was kind of retro, relying more on the opinions of poll voters than computer numbers.

Under the new formula, the writers poll, the coaches poll and a combination of computer rankings will each count for one-third of a team's BCS ranking. In the past, results from the AP and coaches polls were combined.

Components such as strength of schedule, team record and quality wins have been eliminated.

Now the chances of a consensus No. 1 not playing in the Orange Bowl for the BCS title in January are remote.

"I still don't think we've addressed the issue of if we have more than two teams, like last year we had three that were all very close to the top," said LSU coach Nick Saban. He favors a playoff system, while university presidents are adamantly opposed.

So it looks like the BCS, which will expand to five games starting in the 2006 season to allow greater access for non-BCS conferences, is going to be around for a while.

Whether the same can be said for Colorado coach Gary Barnett remains to be seen. His program became synonymous with scandal during the offseason, as allegations of rape and using sex and alcohol to recruit players rocked the Boulder campus.

Barnett was suspended for four months for insensitive comments about two women who said they were raped by Colorado players. He returns to a team that was 5-7 last year and is not expected to be much better. It's a precarious situation, but as this season will prove, college football can be a forgiving business for winning coaches.

Mike Price and George O'Leary, both felled by scandal just as they were about to take coveted coaching jobs, return to the college sidelines, albeit at a pair of Division I-A outposts.

Price, fired by Alabama last year before he coached a game for after a night of partying at a strip club, was hired by Texas-El Paso. The Miners went 14-34 the past four seasons.

O'Leary was coach at Notre Dame for less than a week in 2001 before he was fired for lying on his resume. After two years as an assistant with the Minnesota Vikings, he takes over at Central Florida.

The newest coach in the Southeastern Conference will also draw plenty of attention. Mississippi State's Sylvester Croom breaks new ground as the SEC's first black head football coach. The former Alabama player and assistant coach under Bear Bryant was passed over by the Crimson Tide when it was trying to replace Price. Alabama hired Mike Shula instead, drawing criticism from some Tide supporters.

Croom and the Bulldogs face Shula and the Tide in Tuscaloosa on Nov. 6.

At Nebraska, coach Bill Callahan will be breaking new ground in a different way. The former Raiders coach has scrapped the Cornhuskers' hallowed option attack and installed the West Coast passing offense, hoping to return Nebraska to its dominant days by modernizing its approach.

Oklahoma has supplanted Nebraska as kingpin of the Big 12. The Sooners were being compared to the greatest teams ever when they started 12-0 last season. Then they lost their final two games. They are loaded again, led by quarterback Jason White, the first returning Heisman Trophy winner since BYU's Ty Detmer in 1991.

Leinart, Georgia quarterback David Greene, Kansas State running back Darren Sproles and Texas running back Cedric Benson are top candidates to keep White from matching Archie Griffin as the only two-time Heisman winner.

And speaking of Detmer, his record for career yards passing is in danger. Hawaii's Timmy Chang needs 2,218 yards to surpass Detmer's 15,031. Directing the wide-open Rainbows, Chang should have the record by midseason.

Scandalized UCF turns to tarnished coach for discipline

ORLANDO — George O'Leary prefers to keep a low-key, straight-shooting demeanor highlighted by a dry wit, but returning to college football after two years away prompted him to bare some of his soul.

"It's great. I love coaching," an exuberant O'Leary said recently after his first fall practice at Central Florida. "I love walking out when the dew's still on the field."

O'Leary blew his opportunity to coach under the Golden Dome of Notre Dame, after being laid low by false statements on his resume that he was a three-time letterman in college and had earned a master's degree in education. Now he's seeking redemption with the Golden Knights of UCF.

"I've moved on," O'Leary said. "It's something I think will probably live in history, but I've done everything I can that I can do. I'm looking forward to this job here and getting this program to where it needs to be."

O'Leary isn't the only coach who sees the 2004 season as chance to bury the past.

Said Colorado's Gary Barnett: "I think everybody more than anything just wants to get to practice or want to get to a game. I'm waiting to get out there."

Some controversies, like O'Leary's, taint only the coach. Others can threaten an entire program.

Colorado was embroiled in scandal when three women sued the school, leveling allegations of fostering an environment that led to rape. At least nine women have said they were sexually assaulted by Colorado football players or recruits since 1997.

Barnett was accused of running an out-of-control program, then convicted of insensitivity for disparaging comments about two of the women, including former Colorado kicker Katie Hnida, who told a national magazine she was raped by a former teammate in 2000.

Suspended for more than three months, Barnett was reinstated in May after an investigative panel concluded he shouldn't be fired.

Dismissal was one thing, he said, but quitting was never an option.

"My obligations have always been to our players, and parents, and people in our program and the university, and I had too many people stand courageously for me in the last six months to ever back out on them," Barnett said. "We just had too many people step forward. For me there was no decision to make."

Unlike Barnett, O'Leary had no safe harbor after his scandal broke. He had already left Georgia Tech, where he was twice named the Atlantic Coast Conference's coach of the year. And Notre Dame owed him no allegiance, having hired him less than a week before. After resigning from his dream job, what followed was exile - albeit in the comfortable NFL, coaching the Minnesota Vikings' defense.

Some coaches don't go as quietly as O'Leary.

When Washington's Rick Neuheisel was fired before last season for gambling in high-stakes NCAA basketball pools, he responded with a salvo of lawsuits. He still may win in court, but it's telling that no colleges have approached a coach who won almost 70 percent of his games.

O'Leary took his first step down the road to redemption late last season, when the Golden Knights came calling. UCF needed a new coach, having fired Mike Kruczek during a 3-9 season riddled with suspensions and academic woes. Athletic director Steve Orsini worked with O'Leary at Georgia Tech, so a connection was already in place.

O'Leary was hired on Dec. 8, creating the irony of a scandalized man bringing order and discipline to a scandalized program.

But this was the perfect place to rehabilitate his reputation. When O'Leary took over, 16 of 62 scholarship players were on academic probation; at the end of the just-completed summer sessions, 40 of 73 players made the athletic academic honor roll.

Said Orsini, "I said this when I first introduced him eight months ago and I'll say it again: There's not a better person available in America today for what UCF's football program needed than George O'Leary."

News Nuggets are compiled periodically from staff, ECU, Conference USA and its member schools, and from Associated Press and other reports. Copyright 2004 Bonesville.net and other publishers. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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