Daily briefing: On Lance Leipold, Jimmy Lake and ‘Intellectual Brutality’

Ivan Maisel’s “Daily Briefing” for On3:

Once again, Lance Leipold shows he can coach

Lost in the what-is-going-on-at-Texas uproar after the Longhorns lost at home to Kansas 57-56 in overtime is what is going on at Kansas. In journalism parlance, we buried the lede. The simple answer is that Lance Leipold can coach. He won six Division III national titles at Wisconsin-Whitewater (going 6-1 in national championship games). He took Buffalo from an FBS afterthought to a MAC East Division title (2018) and into the AP and coaches’ top 25 (2020). Leipold left Buffalo to replace Les Miles at Kansas, a job that scared off a lot of coaches. But at age 57, Leipold took the shot at the big time. It’s clear, the way that Kansas made Oklahoma play for four quarters and Texas for longer, that this redo is going to be fun to watch.

A quick exit for Jimmy Lake

It didn’t even take two seasons for Washington to determine that it had made a mistake in giving Chris Petersen’s program to Jimmy Lake. Athletic director Jen Cohen corrected her (and, to be fair, the university’s) $9.9 million error Sunday by firing Lake. As someone who has been appalled at how quickly universities pull the plug on coaches in the modern era, I feel hinky in saying it, but Washington made the right decision. Lake may be the right head coach somewhere, but it isn’t on Montlake Boulevard. Is Cohen the right AD? Most head coaches — though not Lake — get to redo staffs once before being canned. This is Cohen’s mulligan.

The ‘nerd schools’ scuffling this season

It’s not a good season for “Intellectual Brutality,” as Stanford used to call it, the mix of academics and athletics that defines football on the Farm, as well as at Northwestern, Duke and Rice. In the past decade, Stanford went to three Rose Bowls, Northwestern has won the Big Ten West in two of the past three seasons and Duke won the ACC Coastal in 2013. This season, all four teams are 3-7 and sinking fast. None of the teams has won in three weeks; Stanford hasn’t won since upsetting No. 3 Oregon on October 2, and Duke hasn’t won since the week before that. When the “nerd schools” are winning, it maintains the story that college athletics likes to tell, the marriage of academics and athletics. Right now, this part of the marriage is going through a rough spot.