College football's untouchable, safe and troubled coaches

Dennis Dodd, veteran writer for CBSsports.com, has given his all 133 Football Bowl Subdivision coaches a numerical ranking from 0-5. 0 is untouchable, 1 is safe and secure, 2 is all good for now, 3 pressure is mounting, 4 is start improving now and 5 is win immediately. Dodd gave Arkansas Coach Sam Pittman a 1 and Arkansas State Coach Butch Jones a 4. Pittman is probably correct, but Jones, who is 5-19 in his two seasons at ASU, has some very strong supporters but it would help his cause to win more games this season. SEC coaches and how they were ranked: Alabama’s Nick Saban, Georgia’s Kirby Smart and LSU’s Brian Kelly were 0; South Carolina’s Shane Beamer a 1; Florida’s Bill Napier, Kentucky’s Mark Stoops, Mississippie State’s Zach Arnett, Ole Miss’ Lane Kiffin and Vanderbilt’s Lea Clark were a 2. Missouri’s Eli Drinkwitz got a 3 and Texas A&M’s Jim Fisher got a 4, which was a bit surprising. Fisher is 39-21 after five seasons with the Aggies, which is not what the faithful expected much from a coach who was 83-23 at Florida State, where he won the national championship in 2013. Fisher is just 12-11 the past two seasons, but he has a $77 million buy-out if he is fired after this season. Fisher did hire offensive genius Bobby Petrino to be his offensive coordinator and if Fisher truly gives up the reins, the Aggies will improve drastically. In front of Congress and essentially the world, the PGA admitted it didn’t have the money to fight LIV Golf, so it sold out. LIV, run by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, has pledged more than $1 billion to be partners with the PGA and that it will terminate its own CEO Greg Norman. The congressional subcommittee chairman Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., made it clear he was not happy. “We’re here because we’re concerned about what it means for an authoritarian government to use its wealth to capture and American institution,” he said. Blumenthal pressed Ron Price, the PGA Tour’s CEO, and Jimmy Dunne, a PGA Tour board member, about why they didn’t look for other resources to help offset the LIV, which has $600 billion in assests, or according to The Associate Press, about 500 times what the PGA has. The PGA Tour is a nonprofit organization founded in 1929 with roots to 1916. LIV Golf was founded in 2021 to compete with the PGA, handing out hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to some of golf’s biggest names. PGA stands for Professional Golf Association. LIV is the Roman numeral 54, how many holes its tournaments play and the score if every hole of a par-72 course was birdied. Critics of the LIV are concerned with Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in 2017. Perhaps in an attempt to help its image, a PIF adviser proposed giving Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy their own LIV teams, according to the 276-page report. The report also revealed that Norman, who recruited golfers like Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Sergio Garcia, to name just a few, with contracts worth more than $100 million, had sent an email to Jay Monahan, PGA Tour commissioner. In the email, Norman said the PGA could not ban LIV golfers from PGA events and stated: “Surely you jest. And surely, your lawyers at the PGA Tour must be holding their breath.” Most likely firing Norman was part of the negotiations between the PGA and LIV. How this will end up seems obvious: Money talks and everything else walks.