As we reach the penultimate edition of the Misery Index for the 2025 season, it’s worth reflecting on why we do this.
Yes, it’s a sardonically fun, often pithy way to recap some of the more notable results of the week. But it also reflects what makes college football so interesting. Sometimes, there’s despair in what happens on the field during a small one-week sample. Often, the pain is about a program’s longer-term trend. But every now and then, what makes a fan base miserable has nothing at all to do with a team’s performance.
Which brings us to Ole Miss.
The Rebels are 10-1 and on the doorstep of the College Football Playoff. They didn’t even play this week, which should have been a time for fans to pour a stiff cocktail and enjoy a stress-free afternoon enjoying everyone else’s drama.
Instead, they’re the center of the college football universe — and not in a good way.
Thanks to Lane Kiffin’s indecision, his stubbornness and his inability to be straight with a fan base that has embraced him like no one ever has, Ole Miss fans spent the weekend in a full rage at their coach, who is mulling massive offers from LSU and Florida.
After Kiffin’s Friday afternoon meeting with athletic director Keith Carter and subsequent statement confirming that his future would be decided next weekend after the Egg Bowl against Mississippi State, Ole Miss fans are appropriately mad at everyone.
They’re mad at Kiffin for putting them in this position during their best season of the modern era. They’re mad at Carter for allowing Kiffin to continue this charade for another intolerable week. And they’re mad at everyone else involved here from super-agent Jimmy Sexton to Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry because they’re all making it exponentially harder to get any enjoyment out of what was supposed to be the time of their lives.
It’s not even that Kiffin might leave. He was probably always going to leave at some point because that’s how the coaching business works. But doing it this way, putting everyone in an impossible position while blithely posting on social media like it’s business as usual, is infuriating and insulting.
To understand the gut-punch part of it, you must take a small step back. For every program, the entire point of this enterprise is to be in the position Ole Miss is in right now. Especially when you’ve never really been there before, with so many things having to go right to finally break through. It should be a relief and a celebration.
Instead, Kiffin’s inability to put his own ambitions on hold just this once for the sake of a once-in-a-lifetime team has left Ole Miss in an impossible position. Now, it’s all about the circus. And with or without Kiffin, it’s hard to imagine Ole Miss entering the postseason with all cylinders firing.
Even worse, Ole Miss fans are going to be subjected over the next several days to complaints about the misaligned college football calendar by those who are running cover for Kiffin’s behavior. That includes Nick Saban, who said on “College GameDay” that this “isn’t a Lane Kiffin conundrum, it’s a college football conundrum.”
Saban should know better. After all, he had to fire Kiffin as Alabama’s offensive coordinator during the playoff in early 2017 because he was too distracted after taking the head coaching job at Florida Atlantic.
So it might be a college football conundrum for Jon Sumrall, who might be coaching Tulane in the CFP while Auburn and others pursue him. But this is also a Kiffin-specific problem, and the idea someone in his position — running an SEC program, making ridiculous money, coaching the No. 6 team in the country — would even consider leaving a potential national championship team for no reason than he just likes that opportunity better is absurd. It’s legacy-defining.
And it’s why Ole Miss reigns as America’s most miserable fan base in Week 13.
Conference Champions of Misery
ACC: At the beginning of November, Louisville was a stealth CFP contender at 7-1 with a seemingly friendly schedule including home games against Cal, Clemson and Kentucky and a road trip at SMU. But since reaching its high point, which put coach Jeff Brohm’s name into speculation for top openings like Florida and Penn State, the Cardinals have suffered an all-systems failure. An overtime loss to Cal started the freefall, which extended to this week’s 38-6 loss to the Mustangs in which they were outgained 485-228. Louisville didn’t have quarterback Miller Moss due to a foot injury, but the problems on offense have been festering for weeks starting with an undisciplined offensive line and a lack of difference-makers at receiver. Now 7-4, Louisville will have to beat rival Kentucky next week to salvage anything meaningful from this season.
Big Ten: Minnesota might be the most irrelevant program in college football. Don’t mistake that for being the worst, because during PJ Fleck’s tenure they’ve won six bowl games and have never finished worse than 5-7 back in his first season. But when’s the last time Minnesota did anything, good or bad, that was worthy of the nation’s attention? You probably have to go back to 2019 when the Gophers started 9-0, reached the top-10 and finished 11-2. Since then, Fleck usually gets by beating up on the bottom half of the Big Ten without threatening to raise the ceiling nor getting himself on the hot seat. But with three losses in Minnesota’s last four games, including 38-35 at Northwestern where kicker Brady Denaburg missed a 40-yarder to tie, the fury is starting to boil. It’s still only a local story — again, nobody outside of the Twin Cities pays attention to Minnesota at all — but it’s worth monitoring. Earlier this year, there was talk in the industry that Fleck could be ready for a change of scenery. If he has an opportunity somewhere else, even with a lateral move, this might be the time to get a fresh start.
Big 12: The Friday news dump from Baylor president Linda Livingstone was not the one its fans wanted. Dave Aranda, who is now 36-36 as he approaches the end of his sixth season, will come back for a seventh in Waco. It wasn’t great timing to bring back a coach with low approval ratings. Fewer than 24 hours later, Baylor lost 41-17 at Arizona in a game where the Bears led 17-14 at halftime and then gave up 27 unanswered points. And if Baylor loses to Houston next week, it’ll be a third losing record in Aranda’s last four seasons. So why is he coming back? Well, you can start with the implosion of athletic director Mack Rhoades’ tenure last week — made final with a separation agreement this week — over university policy issues that haven’t been public yet. And with no permanent AD in place, Baylor doesn’t want to be in the coaching marketplace this year. Under those specific circumstances, it’s sensible to ride with Aranda one more year, but for a program that was already suffering from attendance and fan interest problems this season, 2026 will either be an all-time coaching comeback or a disaster.
Group of Five: Roughly six weeks after the end of the 2023 college football season, Shawn Elliott resigned as Georgia State’s head coach to become South Carolina’s tight ends coach and run game coordinator. It was a surprising move on the surface because Elliott had been successful, taking the Panthers to bowl games in five of seven seasons. But ultimately, he couldn’t resist the pull of returning home to be closer to family. While you can’t blame a man for that, it’s been a disaster for the program he left behind. Georgia State replaced him with Dell McGee, a longtime Georgia assistant under Kirby Smart, and they’ve basically been a non-factor ever since. Georgia State’s 31-19 loss to Troy drops the Panthers to 4-19 under McGee with just one win over two seasons in the Sun Belt. Though Georgia State has had moments of surprising competitiveness, including a seven-point loss to James Madison in October, they’ve lost by double digits nine times in 15 conference games under McGee. Resources have always been a struggle at Georgia State, but any program located in the heart of Atlanta should have access to enough talent to win some games in the Sun Belt.
Headset Misery
Brent Key: Though Georgia Tech was never some kind of dominant team, there was a point in October when the Yellow Jackets were churning out close wins to get to 7-0 and it was fair to look at the remaining schedule and say that team should be in the CFP. But water usually finds its level, and it all caught up with Georgia Tech in a big way when they hit the second half of the season. As it turns out, Georgia Tech’s first loss three weeks ago, 48-36 at NC State, wasn’t a fluke. Because with everything on the line this week, including a berth in the ACC championship game, Key’s team couldn’t have looked worse at home in a 42-28 loss to Pittsburgh. From the opening kickoff, Georgia Tech was a step behind what Pitt was doing offensively, mistake-prone on offense and just didn’t look ready to play. After falling behind 28-0 early in the second quarter, the Yellow Jackets looked like they were about to pull within a touchdown midway through the third quarter. But on third down inside the 10-yard line, quarterback Haynes King threw a 100-yard pick six and that was that. After such a promising start to the season, it’s a crushing way to say goodbye to a potential playoff bid.
Bill Belichick: If you’d have told Belichick a decade ago that at age 73 he’d spend a random weeknight in Raleigh, N.C., supporting his 24-year-old girlfriend at the Cheer Extreme All-Stars event for adult cheerleaders while coaching the North Carolina Tar Heels, you’d expect one of those blank stares he gives at press conferences when he doesn’t want to answer a question. Life has taken Belichick in a strange direction, but it’s a major letdown that the only reason to pay attention to the Tar Heels for most of Belichick’s first season has been through viral moments involving Jordon Hudson. There’s certainly not much to talk about on the field, where North Carolina’s 32-25 loss to Duke doomed them to 4-7 and ensured they won’t make a bowl game. It was also a pretty devastating way to lose, as UNC stormed back from a two-touchdown deficit to take the lead only to watch Duke convert a fourth-and-7, then fake a go-ahead field goal with 2:20 to go that got the Blue Devils to the 1-yard line before punching it in. On the bright side, Bill and Jordon will have more time over the holidays to spend in Nantucket.
Fran Brown: Even if you think he’s still one of the more interesting young coaching prospects right now, his star undoubtedly lost wattage this year as Syracuse sunk to the bottom of the ACC without quarterback Steve Angeli. Immediately after Angeli tore his Achilles on Sept. 20 against Clemson, it was obvious Syracuse’s season was about to go in a different direction. Still, that upset win propelled Syracuse to 3-1 and in position to continue as a feel-good story like they were in Brown’s first season. Since then, though, it’s been a horror show. The Orange’s 70-7 loss to Notre Dame was the fourth time fourth time they’ve lost by at least three touchdowns, and their average margin of defeat has been 28.4 points during their seven-game losing streak. The most points they’ve scored without Angeli was in a 31-18 loss to SMU. Few programs are good enough to survive that long without their quarterback, but it’s fair to question whether it should be this bad.
Moments of Misery
Kansas State blew another one: In a season of near-misses and fourth quarter self-immolations, the Wildcats’ fourth-quarter disaster class was one for the ages. After scoring with seven minutes left, the Wildcats were poised to take a two-touchdown lead and knock Utah out of the CFP race. Instead, after Utah ran a tipped-pass interception back all the way on the two-point conversation — a four-point swing — it was only a 10-point lead. Then with another chance to effectively end the game on the ensuing possession, Kansas State was called for illegal substitution because two defenders couldn’t get off the field fast enough on fourth-and-1, which their teammates had stuffed. Finally, after Utah pulled the game back to 47-44 and got a defensive stop, quarterback Devon Dampier ran 59 yards on another fourth-and-1 to set up the game-winning touchdown. It meant Kansas State lost a game in which it ran for 472 yards, and it’s the fifth time this year they’ve lost by less than a touchdown. It’s the third time the Wildcats’ defense has been tasked with holding a lead and blown it on the final drive.
Florida State saw its season in microcosm: If there’s one play that sums up how awful the last couple months have been for the Seminoles, it occurred with fewer than four minutes remaining in an eventual 21-11 loss to NC State. Down just a field goal, the Seminoles were hoping to punt, get a stop and then drive for the win. Instead, the punt landed straight on the helmet of a Florida State player, ricocheted and rolled 25 yards back the other way where NC State’s punter scooped it up to recover the fumble. Since their season-opening upset of Alabama, it seems like the Seminoles just can’t catch a break. Then again, they’re also not very good, and fans are furious head coach Mike Norvell hasn’t been fired yet. We’ll see what happens after next week’s game against Florida, but 3-13 in the ACC over the last two years is simply unacceptable for this program.
Notre Dame watched its best win diminish in value: The CFP committee’s treatment of the Irish over the next two Tuesdays will be fascinating. Ranked No. 9 this week, the Irish will feel pretty good if they get to the clubhouse at 10-2 with a win over Stanford. The problem, though, is that Notre Dame just doesn’t have enough quality wins to prop up its résumé, and its best win lost significant value when Southern Cal lost at Oregon, 42-27. USC is almost certainly going to drop from No. 15, meaning Notre Dame might not have a win over a top-20 team. Instead, the Irish have feasted on Syracuse (3-8), Purdue (2-9), Arkansas (2-9) and Boston College (1-10) and a few middling opponents. As good as you think Notre Dame is, the schedule is a real problem and could become an issue for the committee if a few teams in the same proximity of the rankings can bag big wins down the stretch.
