While Duke and USC’s resurgences are now complete, Longhorns’ coach Mack Brown is still under pressure, and rival coaches Art Briles and Kevin Sumlin are about to enjoy the rewards of winning.

If you win big, you get paid big
Baylor’s head coach Art Briles is the latest to understand this. The Bears gave him a 10-year extension that will keep him in Waco, TX through the 2023 season, fresh off of a nationally-televised beat down of Oklahoma.

As a private institution, Baylor isn’t required to release financial details of the new contract – and they haven’t – but you know it’s big. Briles is a hot property, and they’ve locked him away nicely.

The Bears, perennial underachievers in the Big XII before Briles arrived, have become one of the real national powers in college football over the past few years – ever since a quarterback by the name of Robert Griffin III started wowing people en route to the 2011 Heisman Trophy.

Nick Florence last year and Bryce Petty this year have continued the explosion of points and big plays.

Under Briles’ calm tutelage – you ever see the guy anything but ice-cool calm? – Baylor has become a place good players want to go, rather than a backwoods destination for kids who’ve been given no other good scholarship offers.

You don’t think homesick-for-Texas RB Lache Seastrunk would’ve chosen Baylor over Texas, Texas A&M and Texas Tech when transferring five years ago?

Not a chance. But the improved level of competitiveness the school is showing means they’re going to continue to get blue-chip players coming in.

Averaging 61 points a game, Baylor’s offence is flat-out fun to watch, and their defence is coming along nicely, too.

Importantly for the school’s coffers, the team is so good that Floyd Casey Stadium is routinely sold out now, and the famous tarp is coming off because so many people want to watch the game.

Briles is the architect of all that and more. He’s single-handedly turned this program’s fortunes around. No wonder he got paid.

Northern Illinois quarterback Jordan Lynch is a gun
The Huskies signal caller is the most exciting player I’ve seen on a college field this year outside of Johnny Manziel.

I wrote earlier in the week that, in a perfect world, Lynch would be a Heisman Trophy candidate – unfortunately, this just isn’t a perfect world. The Huskies play in the Mid-American Conference with a strength of schedule that’s a real killer, keeping Lynch from being a serious contender.

Still, it doesn’t stop Lynch from putting up video game-type numbers and wowing us on a weekly basis – in a similar vein to Johnny Football, the Huskies signal-caller is flat-out fun to watch. He’s the sort of guy that gets the turnstiles clicking over, because he’s guaranteed gridiron entertainment.

The sad thing in Lynch’s case is that he’s barely noticed on a national level. He deserves more recognition from ESPN and others. Hopefully Wednesday’s ESPN2 broadcast will start that.

By anyone’s standards, he’s had a whale of a season, and continued on his merry way on Wednesday night against arguably the best MAC opposition he’s faced all year, Ball State.

He was a lazy 26-32 for 345 yards and two touchdowns throwing the football, and backed that up with 123 yards and two more scores on 20 carries in the ground game.

NIU will win the MAC at this rate, and are looking good for an at-large BCS Bowl invite. That would raise Lynch’s profile, too.

Winning at mid-major schools gets coaches noticed
Reports out of Los Angeles during the week say that the University of Southern California’s favoured candidate for its vacant head coaching job is Kevin Sumlin, currently in charge of Texas A&M University.

Sumlin is charismatic and a winner – two things that are very much valued in Southern California, where the Trojans have a giant profile due to their history of success and the lack of an NFL franchise in the city. He’s definitely the sort of guy I could see in charge and having success at USC.

He’s proven to be very good at his craft, firstly at Houston, where his offences were statistically among the best in the nation and definitely among the most exciting.

Now, at College Station, he has shown an ability to continue to coach his team even as the glare from the Johnny Manziel spotlight continues to shine brightly.

The ability to manage big-time players, while at the same time building and maintaining a solid football program, is undoubtedly what brought Sumlin to the attention of USC’s Athletic Director Pat Haden and the school’s regents.

If you believe another Los Angeles Times report, Sumlin, if he is indeed named as the new USC head coach in December, is going to see a nice bump in his salary – from where it sits at a little over $3 million/season, to somewhere in the neighbourhood of $6 million per year.

That’s insane money – and that salary will come with an insane pressure to win and win big.

Oh, and quickly. USC want to be back winning Pac-12 and National Championships, like, yesterday!

But Sumlin is a proven winner. If anyone can do it, it’s him. He has absolutely the right mentality. This USC fan would love to see him in cardinal and gold next year.

Not that the other candidates thrown up in the LA press – Vanderbilt’s James Franklin, Boise State’s Chris Petersen, ESPN’s Jon Gruden and Denver’s Jack Del Rio – would be bad choices.

After the Lane Kiffin debacle, you can bet your bottom dollar that the appointment of the next coach will come only after exhaustive and thorough due diligence.

No Big Ten school will beat Ohio State in 2013
That’s almost a guarantee from your humble scribe. Why? Because the Buckeyes are that good. But also because the rest of their conference is that bad.

Urban Meyer’s men continued on their merry way Saturday in Champaign, racking up a 60-35 victory against a hapless Illinois team.

This was thanks largely to RB Carlos Hyde who just went nuts on the Illini, rushing for 247 yards on 24 carries and four touchdowns. Quarterback Braxton Miller ran for a score and passed for two more – one to Hyde.

It was a slick performance today that should send shockwaves through the Big Ten. Each week, the Buckeyes come out and do what they need to do: score big and look unstoppable.

With the weakness of the Big Ten, absolutely stacking on the points and yards is the only way that the voters are going to sit up, take notice and say, “Wow, look at Ohio State! Those guys are really killing it!”

If your conference is bad, winning just isn’t enough. You have to thoroughly dominate or you’re penalised regardless of whether you get the W. Right or wrong, that’s the reality of college football in 2013.

Based on that body of work (their defence and offence stacked on points) there simply doesn’t appear to be any hope of seeing the Buckeyes lose before they get to a BCS Bowl.

I doubt Michigan will come close, and I don’t know that Michigan State – the Buckeyes’ likely Big Ten Championship Game opponent – will, either.

Wouldn’t Stanford versus Ohio State be an awesome New Year’s Day Rose Bowl Game match-up?

Mack Brown will be under pressure again this week
38-13 was the final score in the Oklahoma State versus Texas game, favouring Mike Gundy’s Cowboys, and it’s the worst home loss that a Mack Brown-coached Longhorn team has suffered in Austin.

A stat like that is about the last thing that the veteran coach needs, given he was under pressure early in the year after being gashed in two consecutive games before the ‘Horns went on an improbable six-game winning run.

Just when things were quieting down, as far as Brown being on the hot seat, it’s bound to reignite this week. Losing badly on the road is one thing. Doing it at home in front of the school’s regents and others is not good.

So, the Texas streak is over, as is the chance that Texas had of being the Big XII Champion and getting to a BCS Bowl. That honour will presumably now be fought out between Oklahoma State and Baylor, and all the Texas focus turns to whether Mack Brown will be around when the Longhorns take the field in 2014.

Texas actually outgained Oklahoma State 392-381 but, as is so often the case, it was turnovers that killed.

The Longhorns had three, including a 43-yard interception return of quarterback Case McCoy, just a few plays after Texas safety Adrian Phillips missed on an interception in the end zone, which instead went for an Oklahoma State touchdown.

My thought on firing coaches is this: you don’t get rid of a guy like Mack Brown – a legend, no matter how you look at it – without knowing that you’ve got a pretty good guy waiting in the wings.

Or, at least, you go and fire your current coach knowing that you can land a good replacement.

The popular theory is that Nick Saban would take the job and be very nicely compensated for it. But Saban seems happy at Alabama.

Do Texas take a massive risk by pulling the trigger on Brown for anything less than an iron-clad guarantee that Saban would come?

Is there a better guy out there than Brown, other than Saban? You don’t want to trade down, and how many really good coaches are out there looking to move?

Particularly in this environment, with Baylor and, to a lesser extent Texas Tech, snapping up some of those blue-chip recruits that used to go to Texas because the Longhorns were the best team in the state.

The administrators at Texas have some thinking to do.

Duke’s resurgence is complete…
It’s a crazy world where Duke is working on a win streak of six wins in football. More than that, they’re on top in the chaotic ACC Coastal Division.

David Cutcliffe must surely be in the top three for Coach of the Year. He’s built up a solid program and their signature win of the season came this week against the Miami-FL Hurricanes.

It’s one of the feel-good stories of the season – after many long years in the cellar of the ACC, everything about the Duke program is looking up.

Like Art Briles with Baylor, Cutcliffe has made Duke a destination for athletes to come and play football. He’s started right at the bottom and is building a program with the right sort of culture.

With every win, people are going to take more and more notice of what’s going on, and the more eyeballs on the program the better.

Duke’s sudden return to ACC prominence is proof positive that a coach can come in when the program is at rock bottom and steadily build to the point where winning seasons become the norm rather than the exception.

I think it’s also a good lesson for trigger-happy athletic directors who want to fire their coaches too quickly.

If your team was bad for years, it’s likely going to take years to recover. Firing your coach after one or two seasons pretty much defeats the purpose of hiring them at all.

Duke’s administrators have been patient, allowing Cutcliffe to do things his way and on his schedule, and look where it’s got the program.

… and so is USC’s
It was a gutsy win for the Men of Troy at home against Stanford. It’s a win that’s thrown the Pac-12 wide open, and will be making people in Eugene, Orgeron absolutely delirious with excitement because the Ducks are back in the hunt for at least a conference championship.

All because USC’s defence played like men possessed in the last quarter, forcing two turnovers, allowing the offence to make their own share of big plays – I’m looking at you, Marqise Lee and Nelson Agholor.

This gave kicker Andre Heidari the chance to convert on a 47-yard field goal with 19 seconds left in regulation – which, thankfully, never looked like missing – to give the Trojans a famous and improbable 17-20 win.

It was quite a scene after the final play of the game, with USC fans filling the field, and interim head coach Ed Orgeron walking up into the stands to conduct the Spirit of Troy Marching Band. This was far and away the best win of a season that started off horrendously and has gotten better with every passing week.

The Trojans are on a definite roll at the right time for their annual cross-town match-up against UCLA in two weeks’ time, following a trip out to Colorado next Saturday.

If Orgeron wasn’t right among the top candidates – Kevin Sumlin is chief among them if you believe the rumours – for the vacant USC head coaching role, he certainly will be now. At the very least, he has done more than enough to earn a place on the coaching staff for 2014.

The Trojans played with an incredible spirit and an exuberance that hasn’t been around since Pete Carroll’s USC squads were beating up people, going to Rose Bowl Games (and winning them) on an almost yearly basis.

That same swagger and air of confidence, and the belief that they can beat anyone anywhere, has made a welcome return to campus.

All because Orgeron made football fun again for the Trojans. Look what playing fun football gets you. You get to win big games and alter the course of the Pac-12 and National Championship races.

Metaphorically, it seems that the program has come out of the tunnel and here’s hoping that there’s long days of bright light ahead.