This Week in Our Dumb, Beautiful Sport: James Franklin Strikes Again, Lane Kiffin Trolls LSU, and the Return of Bobby Petrino

By Ryan Ginn on September 29, 2025 at 9:10 am
Dan Lanning and James Franklin embrace after Oregon's double-overtime win at Penn State on Saturday, September 26, 2025
James Lang-Imagn Images
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Welcome to This Week in Our Dumb Beautiful Sport, a weekly look at the chaos that reigns over the most perfectly imperfect world of college football.

Week 5 started to separate the elite from the merely good. It was a great week to Oregon, Ohio State, and Ole Miss and a bad week to be a coach hired in 2022 with a large buyout (Brian Kelly, Lincoln Riley).

PENN STATE FALLS SHORT AGAIN

I think the most scared I’ve ever been during my time on the Ohio State beat was the Penn State white out game in 2014. Media members get let on the field with five minutes left, and I remember looking up at the Penn State student section and visualizing getting trampled to death if a field storming happened. Instead, Joey Bosa tackled two people at once and everyone got to live. While that game was against Bill O’Brien’s Penn State, James Franklin’s 4-21 record against top 10 teams at Penn State has largely kept the Beaver Stadium field stormings at bay.

Saturday night was the same movie all over again, as Penn State found a way to lose a winnable game against a good team. After a 3-3 slugfest turned into a 17-3 Oregon lead, the Nittany Lions picked themselves off the mat and scored two touchdowns to send the game to overtime. The euphoria was short-lived. The two teams traded touchdowns in overtime, and Penn State even had an opening in second overtime when Oregon scored but couldn’t convert its mandatory 2-point attempt. That didn’t matter, though, because Drew Allar threw an interception on Penn State’s first play of its drive in second overtime to end the game (more on that below). 

Instead of a field storming, we got the Penn State student section throwing stuff at the brave (OK, stupid) Oregon players who ran over to taunt the home crowd. 

KIRBY SMART'S KRYPTONITE

This is going to sound insane, but I don’t care. If you look at Kirby Smart’s track record, there’s some dicey stuff in there when he doesn’t have by far the best roster in the country. In fairness to him, assembling the best roster in the country is part of the job, so I’m not going to ignore the fact that he has two national championships and played for a third. But if you look at years when the roster isn’t as good – which seems to be the case this year – it’s good but not great.

In 2016, for example, he went 7-5 with losses to Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech. The Bulldogs also beat FCS team Nicholls State by 2 points and a 4-8 Missouri team by 1 point. Sure, it was his first season, but Georgia went 10-3 the season before so it wasn’t the barest of cupboards. Two years later he stuck with a wildly ineffective Jake Fromm in a 36-16 loss to LSU, alienating true freshman quarterback Justin Fields in the process. In 2019, he lost to a 4-8 South Carolina team in double overtime. Along the way, even when the Bulldogs have been at their best, there’s also generally one or two wins by an uncomfortably small margin against teams that have no business hanging around.

Eventually the roster ramped up and the Bulldogs won it all in 2021 and 2022. Fair play to him. As I said, recruiting is part of the job. I don’t punish coaches for having the best players. But even then, it wasn’t perfect. The 2021 national champion Georgia team suffered a humiliating defeat along the way, losing to Alabama 41-24 in the SEC Championship as a 6.5-point favorite. That game led to an amazing tweet from my friend Luke Johnson, who covers the New Orleans Saints for Nola.com.

Now the Bulldogs merely have a few aliens instead of a whole team of them and the cracks are starting to show again. In 2023, Georgia choked away a playoff spot with a loss to an Alabama team that was already starting to slip. In 2024, Georgia lost to an Alabama team that didn’t make the playoff. And now, in 2025, Georgia has gone and done it again, losing to an Alabama team that recently lost by two touchdowns to Florida State. That loss came one week after Georgia survived an overtime game against Tennessee team that currently doesn’t look like anything special.

Luckily for Smart, Georgia has a pretty easy road the rest of the way. Even games against Ole Miss and Texas are at home, and they’ll likely have a major crowd advantage for their game against Georgia Tech in the Georgia Dome. But it’s clear that the Bulldogs are a step down from their best, and that will bring coaching into play in more games than they’d like.

OHIO STATE’S DEFENSE IS LEGIT

The No. 1 Ohio State Buckeyes have a defense capable of winning a second straight national championship, and they proved it again on Saturday. Facing a Washington team that came into the matchup averaging 54 points a game, the Silver Bullets held the Huskies to two field goals in a 24-6 win.

As Dan Hope wrote, it was the Caden and Kayden Show in Seattle, with Caden Curry and Kayden McDonald combining for 18 tackles, eight tackles for loss, and five sacks. Personally, I also love watching Arvell Reese play and it seems I’m not alone on that front. I predict a lot of NFL teams will be falling in love with him come draft season.

LANE KIFFIN TROLLS LSU 

It was a big week for Lane Kiffin, who I can only assume utilized his daughter to lay a trap of epic proportion the week of the LSU game by announcing that she was dating LSU's All-SEC linebacker Whit Weeks. This is true idiot of the week territory for Weeks. If you're going to be a distraction the week of a massive game, you better find a way to win the game. Instead, the Tigers looked awful and allowed Ole Miss's backup quarterback to do what he wanted for large chunks of the game. 

Immediately after the game, Kiffin had something to say about Weeks. 

He wasn't done there, either. Kiffin made sure to dedicate a tweet to Brian Kelly, who might want to start spending more time fixing his offense and less time yelling at reporters who dare ask if he has a plan to one day field an offense that can reliably gain 10 yards. 

USC IS IN HELL

Not to be outdone by Florida's hiring of Billy Napier or LSU's hiring of Brian Kelly, USC has possibly topped them all by turning Lincoln Riley into a .500 coach. The Trojans lost 34-32 to Illinois on a field goal as time expired, bringing Riley's record to 13-12 in his last 25 games. 

It can't feel good for USC, which took the money dangled by the Big Ten but now looks increasingly irrelevant in the national picture. One week after playing a game that kicked off at 11 p.m. EDT, the Trojans played the Illini in a game that started at 9 a.m. PDT. When you get a payout that big, TV gets to say jump and you get to ask how high. Meanwhile, Trojans fans have to be wondering who can actually win there if not the coach that went 55-10 at Oklahoma and coached two Heisman Trophy quarterbacks and No. 1 overall picks in addition to Super Bowl champion Jalen Hurts. 

BOBBY PETRINO RETURNS

Bobby Petrino is the Arkansas interim coach after the Razorbacks fired Sam Pittman on Sunday. It was a move that literally everyone saw coming once he was named offensive coordinator of the school that once had to fire him for lying about the secret relationship he was having with an athletic department employee whose hiring broke the law, but it's still interesting that Arkansas really can't control its own worst impulses.

The program and fan base has seethed for more than a decade over the fact that their best coach in decades was ousted because of a motorcycle crash, sending them straight back to the college football wilderness. Now he has a second chance in Fayetteville, although nothing about his recent track record or the Arkansas NIL war chest (or lack thereof) indicates Petrino and the Hogs will be able to recapture the magic. 

WEST COAST NIGHTMARES

Speaking of questionable coaching hires, interim coach Frank Reich and Stanford eked out a 30-29 win against San Jose State on Saturday evening. Looking at Stanford's schedule, it feels like a pretty safe bet that the Cardinal are headed for a 2-10 season. Reich is filling in on short notice, but perhaps Andrew Luck should have turned to someone with actual college football experience instead of his former NFL coach who was fired from his last two jobs. That's somehow still better than UCLA, whose 17-14 loss to Northwestern all but guarantees they'll finish the season 0-12 barring some sort of miracle. 

PLAY OF THE WEEK

If you intercept a pass to win an overtime white out game at Penn State you get to be play of the week, so congrats to Dillon Thieneman.

IDIOT OF THE WEEK

It’s LSU linebacker Whit Weeks, who fell into the world’s oldest trap the week of his team’s biggest game of the season so far, not only dating Lane Kiffin’s daughter but allowing her to post about it publicly. You'll never convince me this wasn't a spy/sabotage situation, and credit to Ole Miss for the fact that it actually worked. 

REF JAIL INMATE OF THE WEEK

Another week, another outcome impact directly impacted by officials who might be more accurate if they had a few days in jail to think about their actions. This time, it’s Wake Forest having a win over Georgia Tech stolen from them because a referee missed the most obvious offsides in the history of college football. The penalty would have allowed the Demon Deacons, who are not coached by Mario Cristobal, to run out the clock.

NO CONTEXT SCORES OF THE WEEK

Here are some scores that caught my eye for any number of reasons – randomness, outcome, unique matchup – that shall remain unknown:

Virginia 46, Florida State 38 (2OT)
Utah 48, West Virginia 14
San Diego State 6, Northern Illinois 3
BYU 24, Colorado 21
Minnesota 31, Rutgers 28
Tennessee 41, Mississippi State 34 (OT)
Iowa State 39, Arizona 14

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