Arizona got eviscerated on Saturday, and Kevin Sumlin is having a pretty rough go of it.
Kevin Sumlin has barely started his job as head coach at Arizona, and already fans are ready to see if the next guy can do better. Sumlin is two games into his $14.5 million contract that stretches over the next half-decade.
Whether or not he makes it all the way through that contract is starting to become a conversation worth having. The validity of that conversation is pretty hollow since Sumlin has coached two games but it’s not hard to see why fans are so frustrated so early on.
Looking at the box score won’t do service to the disaster of a performance Arizona turned in on Saturday. It was a bloodbath, made to seem slightly less terrible thanks to the fact the second half was rendered garbage time.
Don’t be fooled by anyone flashing stat comparisons between the two halves for Arizona. Yes, they produced much more in the third and fourth quarters than the first and second. No, that’s not an indication that anything is going to get better anytime soon. Despite revving the engine down, Houston was rolling all over Arizona’s defense, Ed Oliver mauled Arizona’s offense and Khalil Tate looked like less like a Heisman finalist and more like a guy who has some things to figure out in his game.
None of this is to say Sumlin needs to be fired, because that’s dumb. You can’t execute a coach after two games, but there’s no rule against harshly judging. Arizona isn’t a premier program in the same way Texas A&M was, but it’s not a smalltown college either. There are expectations when you A) come from a big program where you had success and B) get paid $14.5 million.
Things have rather aggressively veered off course for Sumlin, but there’s still time to turn the ship around. He hasn’t yet been given a full recruiting cycle and could very easily turn the program around in a year or two. College Football isn’t a forgiving place, especially when losing is both big and constant. Dropping his first two games — one of which was an embarrassing blowout — takes away any grace period Sumlin might have been able to bank on.
The honeymoon period has clearly ended in a bad way, but Sumlin needs to start proving that talks of a divorce are premature.