College football is a sport where power stays in the same hands for a long time. It’s a sport of dynasties and empires, a sport of thrones and dominions, a sport where the disparity in quality is so wide and the best team wins so often that coaches take on legacies not dissimilar to that of Alexander the Great.
You would think, given this structure, that changes in college football’s power hierarchy would be slow, churning affairs, and for the most part, you would be right. Since beating Ohio State in the 2019 season’s Fiesta Bowl, Clemson has steadily declined. Since starting 0–4 in 2021, Florida State has steadily improved. For a long time, it was unbeknownst to us, but these two have been approaching one another. It is difficult, though, to share a crown, and just as in the ancient days, when an army would have to reach the palace and topple the king no matter how mighty of foes they’d vanquished on their march, there are moments in college football when the world snaps instantly to a new normal. The pressure builds, the pressure builds some more, the trends point in a way things might be going, the buildup plays out for seasons. Then, in one moment, the balance finally snaps. A new ruler takes the scepter. In this weekend’s case, that scepter is a spear. That spear is on fire. And Florida State is plunging that flaming spear deep into the turf of its sovereign territory.
Clemson has fallen.
Florida State rules the ACC again.
It is not quite this concrete, of course. There are plenty of games to be played, including one very consequential game in three weeks’ time over there in upstate South Carolina. Power struggles often get messy, and this one might as well, and plenty of unknowns dance around in the shadows of that spear’s fiery light. But since November 7th, 2015, when Florida State came to top-ranked Clemson and top-ranked Clemson sent them home a loser, the answer to who rules the ACC has been the Tigers. This morning, it’s the Seminoles again.
Pitt fans will bicker and point to Kenny Pickett, but one conference championship does not constitute a coup. Pitt won the ACC in 2021 and received three of a possible 164 votes in the conference’s 2022 preseason poll. This league has belonged to Clemson since Deshaun Watson was a sophomore in college. Now, all indications hold that it belongs to Florida State. Dabo Swinney is king no more. Mike Norvell, welcome to your reign. Three weeks or thirteen years or anywhere in between, this conference is now yours.
How did this happen? It was visible on the field these last two nights. Even as Clemson’s recruiting has improved over these last five years, the physical dominance has gone away, and in the absence of transcendent quarterbacking and a vicious defense, the Tigers have slowly receded to their Tajh Boyd selves, a Clemson that can certainly compete in the ACC but is no longer a player on the national scene. For the last two years, quarterback DJ Uiagalelei took a disproportionate share of blame for this, but Cade Klubnik did not look better, while Oregon State fans sit giddy over Uiagalelei’s performance Sunday in a smacking of San Jose State. Klubnik looked talented last night. Klubnik looked like he was playing with heart. Klubnik looked ill-prepared and ill-equipped, making two inexcusable mistakes while running an offense as though he was trying to fly a 747 down both engines on the starboard wing. It is hard to make an evaluation of Cade Klubnik. It is easier to say Cade Klubnik had nothing great to work with in Durham.
It’s challenging not to get into conspiracy theory territory while discussing Clemson’s downfall. Despite being out-recruited by the best for the entirety of recruiting history, Clemson suddenly became able to compete physically with the Alabama Crimson Tide for four years in the middle of last decade. At the end of those four years, more than fifteen percent of players subjected to the NCAA’s drug screening tested positive for a banned PED. In the four and now five seasons since, the size and speed advantages have wilted despite the recruiting numbers closing the gap. I don’t know a whole lot about the NCAA’s drug testing procedures, nor do I know much about supplements. I don’t have the confidence necessary to make this a real accusation. This is speculation and nothing more. But a good test of a conspiracy theory’s legs is how many people would have to keep silent to avoid the truth coming out, and I would think a supplement-centric PED program could be run with only a handful of staff knowing about it. Contrarily, if Clemson really was cheating and it was this easy, I can’t believe they’d be alone in the approach. Maybe their strength and conditioning was legitimately ahead of the curve for a few years and has lost that advantage since.
Less controversial explanations for the downfall of Dabo:
- Trevor Lawrence was one of the best football players in college history, and perhaps elevated an otherwise good–not–great team to greatness.
- Brent Venables was one of the best defensive coordinators in college football, and his strengths were not just schematic but developmental and cultural.
- Even as Clemson’s succeeded more on the high school recruiting trail, Dabo Swinney has treated the transfer portal with disdain, something Florida State and even Duke have not done. Talent does not only enter college football programs from the bottom anymore. It comes in through the sides to an extent it never has before.
- It is very difficult to maintain the discipline and motivation and various invisible competitive edges necessary to keep a dynasty dynastic. Who has kept a program dominant for a full decade, in the history of college football? It’s not a long list. There are expiration dates on these things, unless you are a nationally historic coach. Dabo Swinney had a ton of success last decade. He will forever be an historic coach at Clemson. But nationally?
On the ascendant side, Florida State entered Sunday night with a lot of hype and a lot of doubt. It wasn’t unlike how Texas and Notre Dame are often treated: The story of a dormant power returning to college football’s forefront is so enticing that the media and fandom ecosystem jumps ahead of itself, an issue compounded by a collection of desires to be “right,” to see the big thing coming. Every action has a reaction, though, and so the doubters shout back, and a divide forms. Credit to those who said the Seminoles would be good. I don’t know if you know any more than the rest of us, but you were right.
How did this happen? It was, again, visible on the field. While LSU—among college football’s more talented programs, playing under an experienced and successful head coach—faded and folded as contact with the grindstone grew more intense, Florida State sent more and more athletes into the breach. We have been so skeptical of the transfer portal’s capacity to build a program quickly, USC’s defense a stirring counterpoint last year to the case made by USC’s offense (more on that later). Mike Norvell is making it hard to deny. It is hard to gauge the eventual capabilities of 16 and 17 and 18-year-old men. It is easier to gauge the immediate capabilities of 21 and 22 and 23-year-olds. If you focus your attention on the transfer portal, it stands to reason that you will have fewer misses than if you direct the same energy and capabilities to the high school recruiting landscape. Florida State played like an all-star team on Sunday night. Are they an all-star team? Are they big enough and strong enough and fast enough to compete with Alabama and Georgia? That remains to be seen. But Alabama and Georgia don’t play in the ACC. Clemson crushed their playoff chances (you cannot lose by three touchdowns to an unranked foe, or so precedent holds), but Clemson remains Florida State’s biggest conference threat. Florida State is big enough and strong enough and fast enough to compete with Clemson. What we don’t know is whether Clemson is good enough to compete with FSU.
More Thoughts on Those Two Games
Each game was sloppy and messy, and it’s easy to give FSU a lot of credit due to the size of the final margin, but it wasn’t until the fourth quarter that the thing became a blowout. Florida State trailed at the half, and LSU had left a lot of points on the board. The game was a lot like Michigan’s “blowout” of Ohio State last year, and we should all remember what each team did when they next took the field (two games later, in Michigan’s case). Florida State looked supremely talented in that fourth quarter, talented enough to claim the ACC mantle without yet playing a conference game. But Florida State has to prove it can do that consistently, and Florida State has to prove it can do that outside the state of Florida, and Florida State will likely one day have to prove it can do that while facing adversity. The Seminoles nearly had to play from far behind, but they didn’t, and there remains a lot we don’t know about this team. The way the ACC is built, we might not find answers on that until New Year’s, but such is college football. There is a big advantage to playing in a weaker power conference. That advantage is that you get to play Boston College in two weeks, tune yourself up, and get credit for a Power Five win.
I’m not sold on LSU being terrible. The balance of power in college football is such that failing to hang in with the ACC’s best team means you’re by no means an SEC contender, and it certainly appears that the SEC is a three-team league with a concerning gulf after Tennessee. LSU has a strange schedule in that Movelor projects them to go 7–5 but Movelor also has them favored in all but two remaining games, and in one of those where they’re the underdog, the current Movelor spread is one tenth of a point. A thing about Brian Kelly is that he has been blown out on the national stage time and time before. Perhaps it’s through his shamelessness that he’s still so often managed to win ten games. Often, it’s happened in the same season.
A lot of folks who built up the possibility of a Clemson comeback this offseason, those who pinned a Swinney problem on Uiagalelei and pitched Klubnik as the program’s savior, are pointing to Clemson’s missed field goals and red zone turnovers as evidence that the game was closer than it looked. They aren’t wrong, the game was closer than a 21-point affair, but Duke made mistakes of its own. It handed Clemson its lone score on a silver platter. It turned the ball over near the red zone itself. It stalled out on crucial early drives. Make whatever excuses you feel you need to make as a prognosticator, but when you’re arguing that the “top ten” team you backed was somehow a better opponent than the team which outgained it 5.8 to 5.1 yards per play, you are making a joke. Duke was the better football team than Clemson last night. If this was a fluke, it was a fluke in the most thorough of ways.
What does this mean for Duke? Great things! The Blue Devils now grade out in our model as the ACC’s third-likeliest playoff participant, and while that only brings with it a 2.7% playoff probability, that is really freaking fun for Duke. It’s like Wake Forest these last few years: This program should not be this good, and how cool is it that it is this good? Riley Leonard is not a Heisman contender, but he’s the kind of quarterback who makes college football so dang fun. LSU vs. Florida State was a professional college football game. Clemson @ Duke was a game among amateurs, and it brought with it all the fun that should imply.
One thing I’d like to note about Mike Elko’s use of the transfer portal is how tailored the approach was to Duke. Duke picked up five transfers this offseason. Two were from Ivy League programs, one came from Stanford, one came from Miami, and one came from Texas A&M. Three of those five transfers were players already attending comparable academic institutions to Duke. With the transfer portal what it is, the Ivy League might be a key recruiting ground for schools like Duke, Stanford, Northwestern, and Notre Dame. College basketball fans can tell you about the athletic quality at the absolute top of those eight schools’ programs.
Prime Time
Hey, speaking of the transfer portal:
Remember Saturday?
I still don’t know what to think about Colorado, but I do know what to think about Travis Hunter, and that guy rocks. When you look up lists of the best two-way players in college football history, you get back quickly to the guys awards are named after—Jim Thorpe, Chuck Bednarik, Sammy Baugh. Travis Hunter is going to change games this year, and he also might change the game. I don’t think that’s an overstatement. Deion Sanders may not have treated players already at Colorado with as much tact as a lot of incoming coaches do, but he deserves massive credit, with Hunter and elsewhere, for refusing to blindly follow convention. Using Hunter like this is a Billy Beane move.
I’m less sure what we should think of the game’s other star, Shedeur Sanders. He looked spectacular, but TCU’s defense was also performing a moving tribute to the Grenadian military’s performance in 1983, so it’s easy to get ahead of ourselves. The same is true of the game as a whole: TCU is far from nothing, but they’re pretty clearly not as good as last year’s team, and last year’s team relied on a lot of beneficent luck. They still might wind up in the top 25, this may turn out to be that caliber of win for the Buffs, but—and go ahead and disagree, I understand this might be overly conservative by half—I think Nebraska should be favored over Colorado this coming Saturday, even in Boulder. Colorado has a lot of proving left to do. To use the Florida State comparison as an illustration: Florida State beat a better team more convincingly and did it on the heels of a solid season last year. We have seen one game from Deion Sanders’s program at CU. It’s fun to get excited, and I don’t want to deny anyone that experience, but I’m personally going to hold back.
The Playoff Picture
Our model gives 17 teams better than a 1-in-30 chance of making this year’s Playoff, so let’s go through those 17 in order and talk about what we saw:
Georgia: 55.6%
The Bulldogs beat Tennessee-Martin in a game that taught us nothing.
Now.
I am really concerned about Georgia’s driving situation, which reared its head yet again Friday night when player coordinator Jarvis Jones was arrested “for maximum limits speeding and reckless driving.” I’m mostly worried about this persistent issue because I’m worried Kirby Smart’s inability or unwillingness to control his players and staff is going to lead to more death than it’s already caused. But. There is also concern on the far less consequential football side of the coin.
We talked earlier about how hard it is to maintain a dynasty. We said, “It is very difficult to maintain the discipline and motivation and various invisible competitive edges necessary to keep a dynasty dynastic.” We’re watching Clemson’s last ruins crumble, and we’re less than four years removed from them holding decently close to Joe Burrow’s historic LSU team. Georgia is only in its third year of this, and the program already has such poor discipline (and I’m talking dedication/attention to detail, not punishment) that it’s up to 14 speeding and/or reckless driving citations in the last seven and a half months, and that’s only including players, and that’s not including the incident in which a drunk-driving staffer lost her life and a player died while the pair raced another player. I hate to keep bringing up those deaths, I can’t imagine the pain those families are going through, but this is a really big fucking deal, and I don’t know why the head football coach at the best program in the country hasn’t taken away every set of car keys by now. Football coaches have a lot of power. Kirby Smart is treating the roadways of northeast Georgia as something wholly outside of his domain.
To bring this again back to football: If the discipline is so poor with regards to moving violations, how’s attendance at voluntary workouts? How’s nutrition? How’s sleep? How’s attention during film study? Georgia had all the talent in the world for a few years before it finally broke through and jostled Alabama off the throne. Talent can only get you in the door. It takes more than that to keep winning. It feels a little grumpy–old–man to get so pissed off about this, but this is horrific stuff, and it makes me skeptical of Georgia’s ability to keep winning. They don’t play a good team until November (the SEC’s middle falling out is about to be a quiet and significant story, but we can talk about that plenty over the weeks to come), so they’ve got time, but I don’t think that’s helpful to them if focus is indeed an issue.
Alabama: 51.0%
The Crimson Tide beat Middle Tennessee in a game that showed us that Jalen Milroe has a lot of tools.
Michigan: 39.6%
The Wolverines beat East Carolina in a game that showed us that Michigan really thinks it’s being persecuted when its coach absolutely broke some well-known recruiting rules. They should absolutely do this—get your motivation where you can find it—but the drama is hilarious. You would think Jim Harbaugh was suspended for smuggling Uyghurs out of Xinjiang.
Ohio State: 37.3%
This was interesting. Ohio State had a lot of trouble pulling away from Indiana. Most of the weekend, the impact of the new clock rules (the clock no longer stops while the chains move for first downs, outside of the last two minutes of each half) was grandly overstated. But Indiana managed to hold Ohio State to 67 plays (Clemson ran 81 last night, for context), and I did not watch closely enough to know if they were milking clock intentionally and/or whether the new rules helped them do it. If we’re going to take anything away here, then, it’s that the clock rules could perhaps be a little exploitable but, more consequentially, Kyle McCord and the Buckeye offense haven’t quite clicked yet. They get a nice little tune-up opportunity next week against Youngstown State.
Tennessee: 30.8%
Movelor, our rating system, is really high on Tennessee. Let’s acknowledge that out of the gate. Still, the Vols were convincing against Virginia. (Credit to Virginia for having a quarterback with a really cool name. Tony Muskett. Wow. That is awesome. Especially in a colonial town.)
Penn State: 28.1%
The third party in the Big Ten’s two-party system, Penn State pounded West Virginia, with quarterback Drew Allard receiving a lot of hype as the Nittany Lions managed 11.1 yards per pass attempt. Pretty good!
Florida State: 23.1%
I think I’m out of FSU thoughts for the day.
Utah: 16.1%
I don’t know what to think about Utah, partly because I don’t know what to think about Florida. Way back on Thursday night, the Utes handled Florida without too much trouble, controlling the game from halftime onwards and performing its first survival act while it waits for Cam Rising to return from his ACL surgery. When will he be back? I have no idea. But the next challenge for this team comes in Waco on Saturday against a Baylor program that is looking like it’ll be hard-pressed to make a bowl. It’s survive and advance for Utah, but I’m curious if they can. Lot of curiosity with these guys.
Oregon State: 11.5%
The Beavers bullied San Jose State on Sunday, and that doesn’t tell us a ton, but there’s something to be said for competently handling an opponent you’re expected to competently handle. There is no reason to doubt Oregon State yet, nor should there be one all that soon.
Oregon: 11.4%
Oregon put up 81 points on Portland State, which felt a little unnecessary. If you’re scoring more than 80 points, I feel like you need to go for 100. Otherwise, it looks like you were insulting *and* you fell short. Anyway, I don’t think Portland State’s going to be a factor in the Big Sky this year. Lot of good teams in that league. Portland State is evidently not among them.
Kansas State: 11.3%
In one of two bright spots for a suddenly beleaguered Big 12, Kansas State took care of business against Southeast Missouri State. If you are a conference, you do not want half your bright spots to involve Southeast Missouri State. K-State shut out the Redhawks.
Notre Dame: 10.7%
Notre Dame played Tennessee State and it went as Notre Dame would hope. The bigger thing of interest with these guys is how Clemson’s loss changed their playoff path. The answer? Their expected wins actually dropped a little bit. The Irish also play at Duke.
The primary challenges for these guys are now twofold instead of threefold. They need to split with Ohio State and USC where previously we were including the Clemson game in that category. But, the secondary challenges are a lot tougher than they were. For one thing, Clemson is in that mix, but the game at Duke won’t be easy, and there’s still plenty of reason to be wary of trips to NC State and Louisville, just as there should be concern about the visit from Pitt. The ACC has gotten so bad lately (and Notre Dame has gotten better enough) that Notre Dame’s schedule has often become defined more by two or three games than by its full breadth and width, but this year’s is not a cakewalk.
Washington: 10.6%
Washington did cruel things to Boise State this weekend. Cruel, cruel things. Maybe Boise State stinks, maybe Boise State’s day is really done, but Kalen DeBoer is building believers, and Michael Penix Jr. is building a Heisman candidacy, and the Pac-12 appears to have a really fun pack of five good teams. This should not be used by revisionists to imply that the Pac-12 was good this last decade—it was not, it is an affront to the notion of truth to say it was good—nor should it be used by fanatics to say that the Pac-12 is going to produce a national champion—none of these teams are probably among the country’s five best—but it’s going to be a fun season out west, and I hope we can all be happy about that.
USC: 10.6%
The fifth of those five teams in our model’s playoff probabilities but believed by most to be the best of the five (Movelor has the Trojans one point worse than three of the four ahead of it and 3.5 points worse than Utah, who beat them twice last year, one of which was a smoking), USC held Nevada to 14 points on Saturday, matching its low from all of last season, a low it met three times. It’s not a bad low—it’s very rare to see a college football team win while scoring two or fewer times—and Nevada isn’t a good team—they might be the second-worst team in a bad-bottomed Mountain West—and USC did get carved up a little through the air, but they stuffed the run and they held a football team to 14 points, and for this defense, that’s a good sign.
(For those following our model’s continued disagreement with the USC narrative: An admittedly hilarious way for this season to play out would be for USC to win a lot of close games, crush Colorado to get everyone fired up, and lose to Oregon or Washington by one point in the conference championship, leaving them 12–1 and every analyst’s fourth-ranked team while we slam our heads against tables and point out that an 11–1 Penn State who only lost to Michigan would be favored by eight against the Trojans on a neutral field.)
Oklahoma: 8.1%
We promised a second Big 12 bright spot, and get a load of this:
Oklahoma beat Arkansas State.
Specifically, Oklahoma beat Arkansas State 73–0, and like the Oregon–Portland State result it can only say so much, but it’s still very hard to score 73 points on an FBS opponent and it’s also hard to shut an FBS opponent out. I’m comfortable saying the Sooners are a Big 12 contender. A lot of that is that I’d be comfortable calling the 1988 Permian Panthers a Big 12 contender after the way our schools looked this weekend (go Cyclones), but a share of it is Oklahoma’s own performance. Also: If Brent Venables was winning Clemson a lot of those games, perhaps he might win a few in Norman.
Louisville: 5.6%
The lengths we went to in order to include Texas on this list…
Louisville is a wonderful illustration of what the ACC is right now. The Cards survived Georgia Tech by a handful and are, in some universe, sort of playoff contender. What’s going on? There isn’t a single ranked team on Louisville’s conference schedule. Not one! There might be by the time this is published, Duke might be ranked, but even that game is happening in Louisville. The Cards’ toughest remaining games are home against Notre Dame (nonconference), home against Kentucky (nonconference), at Pitt, at NC State, and home against Duke. That isn’t nothing, but it’s a pretty great schedule. It’s filled with eleven Power Five teams (their last nonconference games are against Indiana and Murray State), and it could very well land Jeff Brohm’s program in the ACC Championship. Our model does not have these guys in the top 25, for the record.
Texas: 3.4%
There we go.
Texas beat Rice soundly, but it had some trouble turning good drives into touchdowns in the early going, and it had some trouble producing on the ground, and Rice is expected to be quite bad. God bless ‘em this weekend in Tuscaloosa, but I don’t personally have much faith in the Horns, and a nonconference game that tough leaves little margin for error over the rest of the schedule. Could an 11–2 team get into the playoff with a road loss to what could be the top-ranked team? Sure. But it better be an inspiring loss, and Texas is looking far likelier to go 8–4 than 11–2. Give it a little more time, ye who Hook.
Other Notes of Note
We do love the word “note” around here.
- That Wyoming game Saturday night was so much fun. Terrible for Texas Tech, bad for the Big 12, but so fun for Wyoming, who gets Texas in Austin a week after the Longhorns play Alabama. Just wanted to point that out. We have them finishing a harmless 7–5, but we would love to start hyping these guys. There are few things that would be more fun this season than Wyoming making a Cinderella campaign towards something. (Wyoming has Portland State this week, which will give us a crucial data point in the Wyoming vs. Oregon debate.)
- South Carolina disappointed, but UNC looked strong defensively, at least relative to expectations. I’m very willing to entertain the prospect of a good UNC, and I’m excited for their stylistic clash with Minnesota in two weeks’ time.
- G.J. Kinne might be the next big thing. After building Incarnate Word into the FCS’s third or fourth-best team last year, something which was far from easy to do, Kinne took Texas State to Waco in his debut and upset Baylor, giving LBJ’s alma mater its biggest win since it reached the FCS semifinals back when the FCS was I-AA and Texas State was three years removed from being known as Southwest Texas State. We have them inching close to a 50/50 bowl likelihood. They have yet to make a bowl, though they won seven games in their second FBS transition year back in 2014. They meet UTSA this weekend, continuing their tour of Interstate 35.
- North Dakota State might be the second-best in the FCS again, taking care of business against Eastern Washington while post-Kinne Incarnate Word came down to earth against UTEP. To help us answer this question, South Dakota State—the best FCS team, we still presume—will play Montana State—the other candidate for second-best in the FCS—in Brookings this weekend. (Brookings is where South Dakota State is located.) We will have more on that and everything else (in the whole world) over the days to come.
