The Goat Pen

I'm going to chalk Tennessee's underwhelming performance up to first-game jitters. I still expect the Vols to defeat VT fairly handily next week in Bristol. I'll say 35-17.

Idaho and New Mexico State have been voted out of the league. They will be looking for new conference affiliations following the 2017 season. Idaho has an offer from the Big Sky Conference, but they'd obviously have to drop back down to the FCS level. One could argue that might improve matters for t...

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/sources--n ... 11274.html

Not terribly surprising.

Terrific hire. I didn't think he'd leave BYU, and I never thought he'd leave to come east. Miami hired the most accomplished coach they've ever hired when they got Mark Richt. UVA has done likewise here. The ACC Coastal Division has gotten a significant upgrade with these two hires.

Corrected post: Bowling Green head coach Dino Babers is denying rumors that he's taking the UCF job. I thought Babers was going to get a shot at the Illinois job, but the mess in the Illinois athletic department apparently made running any kind of search impossible, so Bill Cubit got that job. I wou...

USC takes the interim tag off Clay Helton. I thought they'd wait to see if he could win the PAC-12 title game, but apparently the win over UCLA was good enough.

Mike Sanford, Jr. He worked for his father at UNLV. Part of the problem at UVA seems to be their assistant AD Jon Oliver. Oliver's supposed to be an operations guy, but he has a reputation for meddling with the football staff. The UVa blog Streaking the Lawn compared the situation for any UVa footba...

http://virginiatech.sportswar.com/free-content/2015/11/29/fuente-hired-by-virginia-tech-bud-foster-retained-as-defensive-coordinator/ This may be a brilliant hire, and it may just not work out at all. I'm excited to find out. Fuente, to me, was the best realistic option for VT. Kudos to Whit Babcoc...

Mike London resigns. London, from the people around the Virginia program I've talked to, is a very good man who was just in over his head in that job. One of the names I've seen mentioned for that job is Notre Dame OC Mike Sanford.

What took them so long?

Nevada OC and former Rainbow Warrior QB Nick Rolovich is the new Hawaii head coach, replacing Norm Chow.

And now, back to the rest of the scintillating action on this thread...

Toledo's Matt Campbell is taking over in Ames. Campbell is a very good young coach, but Iowa State's a tough place to build a winner. Interesting hire.

It absolutely is a gamble. Sometimes you have to gamble to improve your situation if you're not happy in your current one, and clearly, the Georgia folks are tired of coming up short in the SEC race. If they land Kirby Smart, which seems the most likely outcome here, they could end up with something...

I don't know. I think things had stagnated there, and Georgia has to be envious of Florida's resurgence under McElwain. I think Richt had done what he was going to do at Georgia, and might need a fresh start somewhere else-- I imagine Miami and UVA will be calling, and if Georgia manages to poach Ju...

So, Les Miles survives, and Richt gets fired. Wow.

http://espn.go.com/ncf/story/_/id/14242 ... kies-coach

Virginia Tech has not confirmed this, and with the craziness of 2015 hiring/firing season now fully upon us, it's still possible Fuente makes other plans.

Frank Beamer finishes his final regular season in what has become typical fashion-- with an ugly, hard-fought win over Virginia. Mike London continued his string of questionable decisions in this game with an idiotic fake punt just before halftime that handed a struggling VT offense good field posit...

Virginia Tech was very fortunate to have a chance to win this one in overtime, as a superior North Carolina team played sloppily enough to keep VT in it. I thought UNC was strangely passive in the first half after their first drive, and missed a chance or two to take VT out of the game early. The fi...

How to describe this ugly football game? An anecdote from it might serve best. They were honoring former GT players and coaches on the field tonight, with special focus given to GT's 1990 national championship team. At one point, they had a slideshow on the Jumbotron paying tribute to deceased membe...

Yes, it is. I'm already dreading that game, especially since I'll probably be there for it. I thought Beamer would wait a bit longer to announce this, but his retirement is not a surprise. I'd like to think this was entirely Frank's decision, but I suspect it wasn't. In any case, Frank Beamer is the...