Coaches who have room for improvement; much more

Arizona's offense struggled mightily in offensive coordinator Sonny Dykes' first game at the helm. AP

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While it would have been very easy to fill the entire Mailbag this week with Michigan-Appalachian State-related queries (they accounted for at least 80 percent of the e-mails I received), the purpose of this column, in theory, is to cover a variety of topics -- not to mention I've already written four different stories regarding that game -- so let's at least start with a different, albeit related, topic before we get to some of those.

Which coaching staff has the most room for improvement after Week 1? Obviously, the Michigan guys are in hot water ... but who else? I was at the BYU-Arizona game, and thought the Wildcat coaching staff panicked way too early and got away from their game plan.
--Bill, Pocatello, Idaho

They say (whoever "they" is) the most improvement a team can make is between weeks 1 and 2, and while I don't necessarily believe that (Florida sure made a lot of improvement last year between Week 13 and ... um, their bowl week), there are definitely a few coaches who need to go back to the drawing board this week. Note that I don't think Michigan is one of them. Most everything that went wrong for the Wolverines on Saturday (blown coverages, missed tackles, poor decisions by Chad Henne) are theoretically correctable. (Though you think they would have figured out how to stop a mobile quarterback over the last nine years.) The bigger problem is when you go out in Week 1 and find out that everything you'd been planning on just went up in smoke.

Bill's Wildcats are at or near the top of the list. The whole idea behind Mike Stoops bringing in offensive coordinator Sonny Dykes from Texas Tech was to provide the Wildcats' previously anemic offense with a more wide-open scheme that better suited their personnel. So what happened? They went out against BYU and looked like the same, anemic offense, producing 41 yards in the first half and going 59 minutes without a touchdown. I didn't see enough of the game to attest to Bill's observation that the staff "panicked," though apparently, after eight months of hype, Dykes inexplicably went conservative in the opener. "If I had to do it over again, I'd come out firing," he said Monday. "We just need to be who we are." He'll need to figure out "who they are" in a hurry.

Another guy who's got to be scratching his head right now is Virginia's Al Groh. The Cavaliers really struggled offensively last year because of youth, but those close to the program insisted last year's freshman QB, Jameel Sewell, would emerge as a big-time playmaker this year. Instead, Sewell looked even worse in Virginia's 23-3 shellacking at Wyoming, going 11-of-23 for 87 yards with two interceptions. If Groh is indeed sticking with Sewell (he says he is), he and offensive coordinator Mike Groh (ah, those father-son coaching tandems, they always work so well) need to figure out some way to make him more comfortable.

Auburn offensive coordinator Al Borges is going to have some sleepless nights this week. While he does have the comfort of knowing the Tigers' defense looks like it will once again be dominant enough to carry them most games, you're going to get burned sooner than later if you can't run the ball or protect your quarterback, as was the case against Kansas State last week. And South Florida may be bringing an even tougher defense to town this weekend.

Finally, enough has been written about Charlie Weis' problems (including in a question below), but suffice to say he's on this list. I'm not exactly sure what the master plan was against Georgia Tech -- send Demetrius Jones scrambling for his life and hope he could out run all those unblocked Jackets blitzers? -- but now that he's tapped Jimmy Clausen for Penn State, I assume there will be an entirely new game plan. Give Weis credit for one thing, however: He might not have outsmarted Georgia Tech, but he did outsmart me (twice). I wrote last week that it was "obvious" Evan Sharpley would be his starter (whoops), and then wrote Saturday he would probably wait a couple of weeks to anoint Clausen (whoops, again). Now if he can just figure out a way to keep the Nittany Lions' defenders out of his backfield (not likely), the Irish will be in perfectly good shape.

Stewart, given that you cover college basketball as well as college football, how would you compare the Appalachian State victory with George Mason's appearance in the 2006 Final Four? One could make the argument that Appalachian State's victory was more impressive considering football requires 40 to 50 players (including substitutes, special teams, etc), whereas it takes just six to seven talented players in basketball, making lack of financial resources and size more of a challenge in college football.
--Thomas Lang, Ft. Pierce, Fla.

You know, I've been trying since Saturday to come up with the proper basketball equivalent to that game, but it's tougher than you think. Not only are they different sports, but Division I basketball teams aren't pigeonholed into classifications like "BCS" and "non-BCS," I-A and I-AA. The George Mason-UConn Elite Eight game was very similar in that you had an upper-echelon team from the "mid-major" division knocking off one of the highest ranked teams in the country that had an obvious talent advantage. But that UConn team had also bore its excellence over an entire season; Michigan's ranking was purely hypothetical. We don't yet know just how big of an "upset" it really was. Also, those kind of upsets aren't nearly as rare in college basketball. (Remember Santa Clara knocking off eventual national champ North Carolina in a preseason tournament in 2004? North Dakota State beating Wisconsin in Madison a couple of years ago?)

From a competitive standpoint, I'd say the Appalachian State win was the equivalent of a No. 14 seed beating a No. 3 seed in the first round of the NCAA tournament (saying 1 vs. 16 or 2 vs. 15 would do an injustice to Appalachian State and give Michigan too much credit), but in terms of the accomplishment itself, this one was much, much more impressive for three reasons: a) the game was played at Michigan's stadium, not at a neutral site; b) because of the actual, formal disadvantage (63 scholarships) with which Appalachian State was playing; and c) unlike a 14-over-3 tournament win, this was an event (I-AA over a ranked opponent) that had never previously been accomplished.

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