You could make a case that there are two ways to look at the result of any two-team contest. The first is to say that any surprising aspects of the result reflect on the quality of the winning team. The second is to say that any surprising aspects of the result reflect on the quality of the losing team.
It isn’t this simple, of course, but it’s not the worst argument, and it applies especially well to Week Zero, in which we have only one data point on each team and so no patterns from which to extrapolate trends. Did Vanderbilt underperform or did Hawaii overperform? Did New Mexico State underperform or did UMass overperform? Did Louisiana Tech underperform or did FIU overperform?
Experts smarter and more learned on this stuff than I might be able to tell you more about Jackson State’s front seven and Jacksonville State’s recruiting capability under Rich Rodriguez. I’m going to make a few quick, simpler observations, and then we’re going to talk about Notre Dame and USC, the weekend’s main characters. As always on this site, we’re going to get a lot of help from Movelor, our college football model, which has been updated to include the results of this week’s games.
- UMass, an independent FBS program playing worse this last decade than most of the FCS, played a gutsy game in Las Cruces. In the heat and at elevation, the Minutemen didn’t blink. UMass only plays two power conference opponents this year. It wouldn’t be outrageous for them to start dreaming of a bowl game.
- It’s easy to see Jacksonville State becoming a perennial factor in this new edition of Conference USA, provided this new edition lasts. The Gamecocks didn’t look great yesterday (the image of Rich Rod coaching in a sweaty gray t-shirt was a heavy metaphor), but this conference is not good, and by its standards, the Gamecocks are not bad.
- Louisiana Tech and FIU demonstrated to us again how much we love the chaos of college football. With so many games every weekend and with such a mistake-prone but still supremely athletic talent base, college football is perfectly designed to create moments. Unfortunately for FIU, their hosts were the beneficiaries of those moments last night.
- It sounds like Kurtis Rourke is going to be ok, with Ohio head coach Tim Albin billing his exit as precautionary in nature. San Diego State remains quicksand incarnate as a football team.
- It’s hard to believe in Vanderbilt after seeing them struggle to hold off Hawaii, but I don’t know what would have passed as belief in Vanderbilt to begin with. Much like Duke, Vanderbilt’s a program where you take its moments when you can get them.
- Jackson State looked really, really good for a SWAC team, even with a head coaching transition and so much talent lost to the transfer portal. The Tigers are historically a strong SWAC program, so this isn’t too much of a surprise, and as with the others, we could also paint this as South Carolina State looking bad. But: It’s possible JSU could be a little fringe FCS powerhouse, not unlike what Yale and Princeton were five years ago in the Ivy League. In a world where we keep examining the impact of Deion Sanders, Jackson State remains a character to watch even as he moves on.
Now, Notre Dame and USC.
USC is the less interesting of the two. They did exactly what we all could have predicted, looking stupendous on offense and vulnerable on defense. The Pac-12 Network broadcast crew did a great job of hyping up San Jose State and quarterback Chevan Cordeiro, but the Mountain West is not a strong offensive conference, or even a good Group of Five conference overall right now, so his status as preseason offensive player of the year there is good for him but not especially meaningful. Also? It was big plays on the ground which hurt USC. That’s linked to Cordeiro, and Cordeiro had some nice gains by foot himself, but this was not Colt Brennan carving up the Trojan tacklers. Allowing a team 7.3 yards per rushing attempt on 27 attempts is bad no matter who that team is. It’s especially bad when you’re ostensibly a College Football Playoff contender and you’re playing a team unlikely to make a bowl.
The Trojans climbed a little in our model, moving from 5.1% playoff-likely to 6.2% playoff-likely and leapfrogging Louisville to join the arbitrarily gatekept Movelor top 21, but the Movelor improvement was minimal and the playoff probability improvement came largely from our model’s impression of upcoming USC opponent Notre Dame, which we’ll get to in a minute (short version: Notre Dame will now, in our model’s eyes, be a better loss for USC if they lose that game and a better win if they win it).
Movelor’s line was six points lower for this game than betting markets had it, and USC threaded the needle between those lines, leaving the door open to neither view being more correct than the other. Even with Movelor adjusting its perception a little bit upwards—the Trojans are 1.1 points better in Movelor’s eyes than they were—the gap in perception should be about five points right now, which is kind of a lot of points. Some of this is how packed together teams are from 8th through 27th in Movelor’s ratings, but regardless, if we take the market’s implications as correct and say Movelor is five points too low, then sure, USC is the 8th-best team in the country and one of the two favorites to make the Pac-12 Championship. I am skeptical of that claim.
From here, USC plays Nevada and then four of the worst five teams on paper in the Pac-12. We’ll get some intel from those games—every game can show us something—but we really aren’t going to get significant answers about this team until they go to South Bend. USC looks poised to remain a mystery, even more than a year into the Lincoln Riley era.
Notre Dame played just about a flawless game in Dublin, but they did it against a hopelessly overmatched Navy team that’s fallen a long way since Keenan Reynolds. Still, it’s hard to not raise some eyebrows at the Irish.
You could argue that Movelor overreacted to this result, and did so in outlandish fashion, vaulting Notre Dame from 15th to 8th in its rankings and allowing the team’s playoff probability to increase by more than 50%, improving from 8.1% to 13.5%. You could also argue that Movelor reacted in fairly customary fashion, saying Notre Dame is maybe two or two and a half points better than we thought. This is an area where rankings like the AP Poll do a disservice to college football fans. Each season’s initial AP Poll is designed as an estimation of how good teams are. Every subsequent ballot revolves around whether teams deserve to move up or drop, turning the exercise into a horse race and completely changing the definition of what the poll is ranking. Notre Dame being two points better than we thought isn’t all that many points, but as Movelor is showing us, it’s really meaningful given where they are on the college football ladder. Come next Tuesday, though, they’re still going to be right around 13th unless someone gets upset above them or Florida State or LSU really shellacks the other. It’s easy to make too much of a 42–3 game in Ireland against one of the FBS’s worst programs, but it’s also easy to make too little of it, and focusing on who deserves what week to week is a great way to lose the plot. Our model’s best guess yesterday morning was that Notre Dame was the 15th-best team in the country. Our model’s new best guess is that they’re the 8th-best. Each is a perfectly fair guess, but if the AP Poll ran a post-Week Zero edition and some voter moved Notre Dame up seven spots, the greater narrative ecosystem would flip out.
I don’t know if Notre Dame is the 8th-best team in the country. Combining my knowledge of Movelor’s strengths and my knowledge of Movelor’s shortcomings, I might have them a little bit lower. But was yesterday’s performance worth 2.3 points of improved perception in a world where USC’s was worth 1.1 points? Absolutely. If anything, the USC change is the one that feels suspect.
So, taking those 2.3 points at face value, we do have an interesting development in the College Football Playoff race. USC’s schedule just got better, combining with their own slight improvement and their first dodging of disaster to lift the Trojans from 5.1% to 6.3% playoff-likely. Clemson’s schedule just got scarier, dropping the Tigers from 14.0% to 13.4% playoff-likely. Ohio State’s schedule also got a little scarier, dropping the Buckeyes from 41.6% to 40.5%. The difference between these three Notre Dame opponents is that USC is more likely to need marquee games than the other two are. Ohio State will get plenty of those playing a schedule which includes Michigan and Penn State. Clemson’s path relies less on impressive victories and more on avoiding losing, with the ACC so bad at football in this day and age. USC doesn’t play a bowl-likely team until the middle of October, and of its toughest opponents it’ll only have to play Notre Dame and Oregon on the road. Narrative’s powerful in college football, but by traditional metrics, the Trojans should need some help if they wind up at 12–1, and Notre Dame exceeding expectations signifies they’ll have a chance to get that help.
As for Notre Dame: The Irish are poised to be a 55-point Movelor favorite next week against Tennessee State, which is a hard measuring stick to meet. After that, though, they’ve got a really interesting game in Raleigh. They’re a fringe character, just as they were before, but they asserted themselves in the conversation, earning comparable mention to Clemson in this playoff race after previously sitting closer to Oregon State. The Irish are in the mix, and they’ll almost definitely have to win two of three against Ohio State, USC, and Clemson to break through, but that’s looking more possible than it looked yesterday morning. It’s small enough that we wouldn’t talk about it amidst a full week of games, but that’s what you get for risking the Week Zero spotlight. Sometimes, everyone notices your aggressive onside kick go awry. Other times, you whoop the U.S. Naval Academy and illustrate your competence.
