I don’t remember that.
I guess Applewhite has that over him.
Of course he did, but they were ranked like, 40, 60, etc.
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Penn State.
Not counting the Penn State game, he only faced 4 ranked teams his entire tenure and lost all 4. (UCLA ‘12, UCF ‘13, Louisville ‘13, BYU ‘14)
You must be crazy trying to give him credit for Penn St. lol
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Point taken, I forgot about Penn State.
Wasn’t Kliff still the OC for penn st?
Yep
I see several folks in this thread not wanting to give Levine credit for the Penn State victory. I hope none of those folks are also saying that Applewhite deserves the blame for the San Diego State loss.
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FWIW, those UCF and Louisville games in 2013 were down to the final play on the road. UCF game kinda turned on a BS targeting call against our safety. We were a little nervous walking out of the stadium with how worked up their crowd got.
For comparison, Herman needed a miraculous late game comeback with Postma to beat ranked Memphis at home. He then totally blew it the next game against unranked UCONN.
We can play this game with any coach.
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ward’s first start he beat a top 25 memphis under levine
Memphis ended that year at #25, but wasn’t ranked until after the bowl game. They were 3-2 when we played them and went on to not lose a game the rest of the season after playing us.
If going by final rankings, and this includes the Penn State game, these were the games Levine coached against ranked teams:
- lost to '13 UCF who finished 10th
- lost to '13 Louisville who finished 15th
- lost to '13 Vanderbilt who finished 24th
- beat '14 Memphis who finished 25th
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Only five coaches were on staff for the SDSU game. Any chance we had at winning that game was very small. Herman took everyone.
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That’s an excuse to some
I should revise my statement.
It appears that Levine never beat a team that was ranked in the Top 20 at the time of the game.
Penn State was apparently ranked #22 at the time.
Thus, Applewhite does have one thing over Levine: he can lay claim to having a victory over a Top 20 team.
Hopefully there are many many more to come
Rankings only matter at the end of the season… Sure it makes the game bigger, but I would rather beat an unranked team who finishes top 25, than a team who was overrated and tanked to finish 6-6. Florida fans could be bragging about beating a top 25 Tennessee who is 0-5 in conference. Maryland could brag about beating the other UT when they were top 25.
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And on the road! Great win!
By the season’s end, we may have two or three of those.
I think Lawdog’s point was that Penn State’s situation wasn’t any better than ours last year. It’s not like the focus for us was tearing down a statue of Tom Herman.