Now Is The Time For Hysteria

Israel: We had ourselves the hell week of all hell weeks last Saturday. And in the aftermath, the top of the sport is upside down and incoherent, babbling and whining about which teams are good and which are bad in tones you can otherwise only find from Old Testament prophets. Is Florida secretly good? Is Texas truly a tire fire? Is it going to come out that Cooper Manning never even showed Arch a football before college? Why can't Notre Dame close? Why would Oregon bench Dylan Raiola just to play him in the fourth quarter against his former school? How did we end up with a first-ranked Miami? These are the questions left to us in the wake of some near-unprecedented football mayhem. The two directions left to go from here are either set the universal order right or make shit go even more left. I know what I choose. Ray: After the pyro-spectacular of last weekend, with all those ranked teams either losing outright or barely escaping defeat, something needed to be done to restore normalcy. And so Maryland fired head coach Mike Locksley on Tuesday. Locksley is most recently noted for having guided the Terps to 12 consecutive conference losses, seven of the last eight by double digits and the most recent coming against Rutgers. The last and decisive one was just a seven-point loss, but it may as well have been 49 when you apply the added "You lost to RUTGERS?" metric. But we're not here to bag on Locksley, per se. He was hired to replace Randy Edsall halfway through the 2015 season, then didn't get the full-time gig because the athletic department thought it should rather have D.J. Durkin, who was fired after two years for conduct too odious for so middling a college football coach. From there, Maryland had Matt Canada fill in as interim, then ditched him to hire Locksley full time. It went OK for awhile—who can ever forget that Duke's Mayo Bowl win over North Carolina State?—it finally collapsed in a heap, which seems a harsh but not unfair way to describe this year's Rutgers team.

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