Week 11 Stock Report: Georgia is most balanced team in the country, James Franklin in the market for yet another offensive coordinator
After 11 weeks of the 2023 season, we’ve reached the part of the college football calendar where some programs are gearing up for a championship run, while others are about to start firing and hiring new coaches.
Each Monday, I take note of whose stock — be it team, head coach, player, assistant, unit, Heisman candidacy, preseason narrative, etc. — is trending upward, whose is down and whose is holding.
Here is this week’s stock report:
📈 Stock Up: Georgia is the most balanced team in the nation
Georgia has now won 27 straight games, and with the weather cooling and leaves falling, the Bulldogs are once again rounding into form as the most balanced team in the nation in 2023.
They aren’t quite as dominant defensively as in years past, but they might be even scarier offensively. Still, compared to the rest of the nation, Georgia is Thanos on both sides of the ball.
The Bulldogs are the only team in the nation that ranks in the Top 15 nationally in scoring offense, scoring defense, yards per play and yards per play allowed. Only Oregon is even close to such efficiencies on both sides of the ball.
Georgia is:
No. 5 in yards per play (7.29)
No. 14 in yards per play allowed (4.73)
No. 6 in scoring offense (40.6 ppg)
No. 6 in scoring defense (15.6 ppg)
The 14th in yards per play allowed should come with a bit of a qualifier, too, considering seven of the teams ahead of the Bulldogs hail from the Big Ten — a conference completely bereft of offense in 2023.
Georgia splattered Ole Miss 52-17 on Saturday night, racking up almost a perfect 50-50 balance in passing yards (306) and rushing yards (305). Carson Beck has emerged as a top-flight quarterback surrounded by a wealth of weapons.
Defensively, UGA has an outstanding secondary and a front seven that still rotates upwards of a dozen blue-chippers. Against Ole Miss, UGA allowed a pair of early touchdowns only to clamp down and hold the Rebels to 19 yards across their next six drives.
After the game, head coach Kirby Smart remarked that Georgia has “dudes everywhere.” And he’s right. And the Bulldogs’ supreme talent coupled with their ruthless balance is why they’re again on track to do something that hasn’t been done since WWII — win three-straight national championships.
📉 Stock Down: Zach Arnett’s decision to pivot Mississippi State away from the Air Raid cost him his job
On the Andy Staples On3 Instant Reaction Show on Saturday night, Andy and I discussed the possibility of Mississippi State head coach Zach Arnett getting fired Sunday after the Bulldogs were blitzed 51-10 by Texas A&M. Their lone touchdown was a kickoff return to open the game and then they scored all of three points the rest of the night.
But wait! It turns out, we had the wrong guy in the crosshairs in that game as the first coach fired (for on-field reasons) in the 2023 cycle. But Jimbo Fisher getting canned the day after his offense had their best game against a FBS opponent since 2018 still didn’t speak well for Arnett’s chances to retain his job for a second season in Starkville, and sure enough, he was fired Monday morning.
Mississippi State was just 4-6 in Arnett’s first season, and needs to win out (Southern Miss and Ole Miss) to extend the school’s bowl streak to 13 straight seasons. The Bulldogs have a single SEC victory — a yakety sax 7-3 victory over Arkansas.
The Bulldogs rank last in the SEC in scoring (21.4 points per game), and are middling on defense — Arnett’s specialty.
The 37-year-old was considered a rising star, and while he inherited one of the most experienced teams in the nation, he was promoted to head coach under unfortunate circumstances following the tragic death of Mike Leach. It hasn’t been a good fit from the start — especially the decision to pivot away from the Air Raid to a traditional pro-style offense despite a roster not built to do so.
The Bulldogs don’t have the offensive line to run the ball consistently, yet they’ve pounded the rock with little results (just 4.0 yards per carry). Quarterback Will Rogers, who is currently injured, has regressed badly in his senior season under new OC Kevin Barbay. Rogers has thrown for just 10 touchdowns this season and is completing passes at just 61% — a career-worst.
It wasn’t difficult to see Arnett being a potential one-and-done coach with his decision to ditch the program’s ‘Air Raid’ identity and that his new boss AD Zac Selmon didn’t hire him.
The AD who promoted Arnett is now at Auburn, and considering he was the lowest-paid head coach in the conference (just $4.5 million annually) with a mitigated buyout, it likely won’t cost the Bulldogs much of anything to move on and reset the program with a fresh face. Arnett will be highly sought-after as a DC again (naturally fits include LSU if the Tigers move on from Matt House, USC and elsewhere depending on other coaching dominos).
Mississippi State is a tough job, but as several previous coaches have proven, you can go to bowl games annually there. Now that the program has moved on from Arnett, they ought to give former head coach Dan Mullen a call. Other potential candidates could include Tulane’s Willie Fritz, Troy’s Jon Sumrall and Liberty’s Jamey Chadwell.
Stock Holding: #ChaosSZN
Never say never in college football, but time is running out on the idea that 2023 would be a #ChaosSZN. Earlier in the year — when Alabama, LSU and Clemson — all suffered losses in the first two weeks of the season, it looked like we were destined for a wild and wacky fall.
Instead, while the season has been quite entertaining, we’ve seen very few upsets. The ultimate chaos may actually result in who feels snubbed from the final College Football Playoff Rankings at the end of the regular season.
Plenty will be sorted out between now and the first weekend of December, but it sure seems like we’re on a path where either Georgia or Alabama (SEC), Michigan or Ohio State (Big Ten), Washington or Oregon (Pac-12) and Florida State or Texas (ACC vs. Big 12) makes the final Four Team dance.
And none of that seems all that crazy.
Perhaps I’ll be wrong. Maybe Oregon State upsets Washington this weekend, or Texas falls at Iowa State. What if FSU chokes against Louisville? Maybe there’s a world where Alabama and Georgia both make the playoff (we’ve seen it before!). Who knows?
But 2023 hasn’t been chalked with craziness. Not yet at least. And we’re running out of time.
📈 Stock Up: Coaches getting raises thanks to Texas A&M’s job opening
The Aggies stunningly fired Jimbo Fisher on Sunday, immediately becoming the biggest opening on the 2023 coaching carousel cycle. I wrote a column about why Dan Lanning should be Texas A&M’s top target, but whether the Aggies end up hiring Lanning, or Duke’s Mike Elko, Florida State’s Mike Norvell or whoever, a bunch of coaches are about to get some serious raises in the coming month.
Lane Kiffin just signed a new contract with Ole Miss, and I’ll be damned if Junior doesn’t end up getting more dough (from either the Aggies or Rebels) out of this. Same for Lanning, even though he has a $20 million buyout.
The fact that Texas A&M was willing to eat Fisher’s record sunk cost means it’s going to spend bigly on whoever it hires next. And that means not only will that guy get paid, but a bunch of other coaches will, too.
📉 Stock Down: James Franklin’s OC hires
Amid a particularly newsy Sunday, James Franklin fired Penn State offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich after the Nittany Lions managed just 70 passing yards at home in its loss to No. 3 Michigan.
Penn State had been a paper-tiger offense all season, torching bad Big Ten teams only to turtle against Ohio State and Michigan. Former 5-star quarterback Drew Allar continues to play timid and skittish against quality defenses, and Yurcich’s uninspiring play-calling led me to ask Saturday if he was just Brian Ferentz but with better players.
Penn State ranks dead last among all Power 5 teams in explosive plays over 20 yards (25). The Nittany Lions are 102nd in yards per play (5.1).
But this is not just a Mike Yurcich problem for Penn State. Franklin, who is a former OC, has struggled to hire quality coordinators throughout his entire tenure at PSU. Joe Moorehead, now the head coach at Akron, is an outlier among the five previous OCs Franklin has hired — three of whom he’s now fired.
It’s been a revolving door, and part of the problem appears to be a “too many cooks in the kitchen” deal with Franklin being a bit too involved rather than taking a CEO-type approach to the entire team.
Penn State’s offense (and it’s instability and lack of playmakers on the perimeter) is what’s holding this program back, and while there’s not much optimism James Franklin will actually get the next hire right, he needs to if his program is ever going to turn any sort of corner.