Uncle Luke's Shockingly Dumb College Football Take Misses The Mark

When it comes to the discourse of college football, coaching, and program expectations in today's day and age, it is abundantly clear things have gotten rather crazy.

I wrote earlier about how guys like Curt Cignetti have flipped on their head the expectations of what it takes to rebuild a program, but others have taken the opposite approach and entrenched themselves in the camp that firing coaches is almost never the answer.

One such "voice" in the world of college football is rapper and notorious Miami Hurricane fanatic, Luther Campbell, otherwise known as Uncle Luke.

Campbell has had some wild takes over the years, but he may have seriously outdone himself with this latest contradictory and, at times, flat out false statement.

Good Lord, that's awful!

Okay, you know the drill. There's a lot to unpack here, so let's break it down bit by bit.

Do Your Own Research

Let's start with his most laughable claim: that the schools he listed have all been largely irrelevant for 25 years.

Either Uncle Luke has been living under a rock for the past two and a half decades, or he needs to get a more accurate calendar.

Miami, Florida, Florida State, Oklahoma, and LSU have all won at least one national championship and have been to multiple title games in the time frame he mentioned.

I don't know what relevance means to Campbell, but he needs to clearly define those terms for us, which brings me to my next point.

Contradictions Abound

So schools like Florida State and LSU have been irrelevant since the turn of the millennium, but Lane Kiffin, Mario Cristobal, and Deion Sanders (seriously) are the three best coaches in the game today?

Luke, buddy! C'mon!

For Christ's sake, Sanders and Cristobal are coaches at two of the schools he listed as being irrelevant.

Kiffin is a phenomenal head coach. I'll give him that, but it's not like Ole Miss is some powerhouse program ready to take over the world of college football.

The fact that he threw Sanders in that conversation is hysterical all on its own, but his line about Cristobal doing something unprecedented is a vintage case of short-term memory from Uncle Luke.

Less than a decade ago, Mark Richt had the Canes ranked second in the country after dismantling an overrated Notre Dame team in Miami Gardens.

And would you look at that! Miami is once again number two in the AP Poll and has a home win over a Fighting Irish team that was ranked way too high to start the year.

By the way, that 2017 Miami team finished the season with three losses and didn't even win the ACC, and Richt was out by the end of the following year.

Speaking of Richt…

Good Is The Enemy Of Great

Everyone losing their minds over Penn State firing James Franklin (which is the crux of Campbell's incoherent post) is going about this all wrong.

I keep hearing people say that Franklin was the perfect coach for Penn State because they aren't a championship caliber program and their expectations were too high.

That's flat out wrong.

Before they became one of the juggernauts of modern college football, the Georgia Bulldogs had not won a national championship since 1980.

They fired their head coach, Mark Richt, because he consistently won them nine or ten games a year and occasionally had them in the title conversation.

Always a bridesmaid but never a bride.

Sound familiar?

Georgia didn't keep Mark Richt just to stay relevant.

They fired him and took a chance on a young, up-and-coming coordinator named Kirby Smart, and the rest is history.

The goal for programs like Georgia and even Penn State (whose 1986 championship is more recent that the aforementioned Bulldogs' last title before Smart) shouldn't be stability.

These are programs that can and should be competing for a national title.

Mark Richt and James Franklin are very good coaches, but these teams and fanbases shouldn't be condemned for wanting to take a shot at something greater than "very good."

Penn State was right to fire Franklin, plain and simple, regardless of what Uncle Luke or any other internet loudmouth has to say about them.