College football coaches: Ferentz, Kiffin among most overrated

Welcome to the Monday edition of The Cooler, where I can tell your exact age depending on how many times you remark today that we "need the rain." Let's get to it:

*CBS Sports polled the 129 active FBS college football head coaches and received responses from about one-fifth of them for an anonymous series on a variety of issues related to the sport.

The most recent item of note: Coaches were asked to identify among their peers the most underrated and overrated coaches in the business.

On the overrated side, Willie Taggart (Florida State) and James Franklin (Penn State) pulled in 20 percent of the vote apiece. Right after them? Two guys with some local interest in Gophers rival Iowa's Kirk Ferentz and Bloomington Jefferson graduate Lane Kiffin, now of Florida Atlantic. Both guys got 13 percent of the vote.

One coach wrote of Kiffin, the son of longtime NFL coach Monte Kiffin: "If you're born on third base, that's great, but don't think you hit a triple."

The underrated votes were spread a little more evenly, and it should be noted that Ferentz also got some votes in that poll (though not enough to crack the leader board).

And no, there is nary a mention of Gophers coach P.J. Fleck anywhere in the piece.

*Lindsay Whalen's final regular-season home game with the Lynx drew an announced crowd of 13,013 (some convenient rounding, perhaps, by the Lynx to get a pair of Whalen's 13s in there) and resulted in an 88-83 victory over Washington that showed the Lynx can still be a force.

Remember, through all the ups and downs this season the Lynx did manage a seven-game winning streak at one point. They'll need two road wins in the single-elimination part of the WNBA playoffs, starting with Tuesday's opener at Los Angeles, to extend Whalen's career and give her at least one more home game in the playoffs.

*ESPN's Matthew Berry has his first fantasy football Love/Hate column for the 2018 season, and it includes some interesting thoughts at the tight end spot. He loves Kyle Rudolph of the Vikings but hates new Packers TE Jimmy Graham. He writes of Graham: "You would think that playing with Aaron Rodgers would increase the value for all involved, but just 17 percent of Rodgers' touchdown passes during the past decade have gone to the TE position and the Packers haven't produced a top-10 tight end since Jermichael Finley in 2011."

*The Twins are 59-64, five games under .500. They've reached that threshold a few times in the last couple months as they tried to stay relevant, but they haven't reached four games under since they were 33-37 on June 20 — exactly two months ago.