It was never just Duke.
We’re hearing a lot today, and we’ll hear more tomorrow, about the rise of football at a basketball school. The discussion is being had in the context of Duke’s ascent. It’s a fascinating development, and while last year’s success could be largely ascribed to the weakness of the ACC (Duke beat only two bowl-eligible teams, one of which was their opponent in their bowl), the story is already different this year. From the moment Jordan Waters crossed the goal line to stick the dagger in Clemson on Labor Day, this was a different story. Duke football might not be great—our Movelor rating system has them 32nd, ESPN’s SP+ has them 24th—but it’s good. It’s solid. It’s good enough to soundly beat Clemson despite not playing its cleanest game. It’s good enough that betting markets have tomorrow’s game with Notre Dame—a top-15 team by virtually all accounts—finishing within a score.
The phenomenon isn’t limited to Jon Scheyer’s inherited kingdom, though. Also tomorrow, Kansas visits Texas, a matchup that was a meme in 2016 and 2021 but is now a meeting of ranked foes, one of whom has designs on the national championship. Elsewhere? Undefeated Kentucky welcomes Florida to Lexington, Mark Stoops looking to strengthen his case in the dormant feud with John Calipari. Up north, in one that isn’t as much of an historic aberration but still catches the eye, undefeated Syracuse tries to give mighty Clemson a losing record as the Tigers step into the Carrier Dome.
Duke. Kansas. Kentucky. Syracuse. It’d be a great Final Four, and instead it’s a heck of a college football Week 5. There might not be a titanic clash, but that’s only because the titans are up against these guys. Notre Dame. Texas. Florida. Clemson. Some reeling, some surging, each stepping into a matchup it is in realistic danger of losing—realistic danger from a basketball school. Here’s what’s ahead:
The Good Games
From Corvallis to Durham (it’s fun to name college towns):
Friday, 9:00 PM EDT: Utah @ Oregon State (FS1)
Oregon State’s loss to Washington State kept this from being the first of many Pac-12 clashes this year between undefeated playoff contenders. Instead, the Beavers’ margin for error is gone, Jonathan Smith’s program sliding into the spoiler role until we’re otherwise notified. The first target? A Utah team which has won the waiting game so far but likely can’t hold on forever.
We still don’t know when Cam Rising will be back, but after all that optimism last week before the Utes played UCLA, reports currently hold that the return won’t come tonight. In one way, this increases the space Utah has to work with. The committee has shown it will forgive losses extra if they come with a backup quarterback under center, and a road loss to this Oregon State team was already unlikely to be terribly damaging if it stood as an isolated occurrence. The problem is that even if one loss is forgiven, you’re unlikely to get two waved off, and it’s hard to believe any college football team this year could navigate the rest of Utah’s schedule without picking up another loss. This is, then, one of many playoff elimination games. It’s more certain to be a last stand for Oregon State, but Utah’s path forward with a loss lies far behind the unrealistic line.
Who wins? The markets have Oregon State as a narrow favorite, and that’s probably fair, though the margin’s up for debate. Utah’s defense has carried them so far, and the backup in question, Nate Johnson, has done enough, but eventually this team is going to need to score 30 points against FBS competition. That might not be tonight—it’s expected to be a low-scoring evening, though Oregon State does grade out better offensively than defensively, in a twist against perceptions—but Utah can’t get away with it forever. They either need Rising back or they need a way to score without him, and while their performance to date has been impressive, you usually don’t see teams keep winning stressful games for this long of stretches.
Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Florida @ Kentucky (ESPN)
One of Utah’s less stressful games came against Florida, and the Gators have rallied since. They’re a borderline top 25 team in a lot of eyes, they’re strong defensively, and they put a big hurt on Tennessee two weeks ago in Gainesville, turning heads in the process. If the Gators can get past Kentucky, they’ll have a strong claim on being Georgia’s primary challenger in the SEC East. That isn’t the type of challenge we may have seen LSU give Alabama back in the day, but it would be a big step forward for this Florida program.
Also looking for the big step, though, is Kentucky, and most ratings would say the Wildcats’ defensive aptitude is even stronger than the Gators’. The Wildcats are only a narrow favorite, implying they aren’t the better team, but that is very much up for debate. Kentucky hasn’t overwhelmed so far, but they’ve also managed to avoid facing a serious test, making us curious where their ceiling might lie. This is one of a series between good-not-great teams that’s going to determine the SEC East pecking order, one already upended by Florida taking down the Vols.
Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Clemson @ Syracuse (ABC)
Up in New York, Clemson is trying to get right, and an issue here for Clemson is that they could be a perfectly respectable team and still drop to 2–3. It comes down to whether Syracuse is as good as their play so far suggests.
Syracuse has yet to play a game closer than two scores, and while Purdue and Army aren’t much, they’re the quality of teams it’s impressive to beat by 15 and 13, respectively. Orange quarterback Garett Shrader had a tougher time last weekend against West Point, but he’s started to build name recognition (in a good way) as the ACC pulls a Snow White, getting its bearings after years under Clemson’s spell. Could Syracuse win this conference? Yes. Not because Syracuse is necessarily all that good, but because so much is still unknown in this league.
Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Kansas @ Texas (ABC)
On the topic of unknowns: Kansas scored 28 in the first half against Illinois and then only held Nevada off by seven. Illinois isn’t what it was last season, but Nevada is one of the worst FBS teams in the country, if not the very worst. Who are these Jayhawks, and how good exactly is Jalon Daniels, the man who lit college football on fire last year until injuries took a bite out of the middle of his season? Daniels is not as good as Johnny Manziel, but he has the traits of that kind of player: He is so unusual and can do so much that he introduces a lot of upset potential into any game he plays. He shakes up the formula.
Texas doesn’t want any formula shaken. The Longhorns have finally put together a team we can all agree is among college football’s five or ten best, and they silenced some of the peskier doubts last week when they shoved Baylor around from wire to wire, washing out the taste of incomplete performances against Rice and Wyoming. Now, Kansas comes to town, and Kansas is supposed to be one of the teams Texas doesn’t have to worry about, and Texas very much has to worry about Kansas here. The Longhorns are a big favorite, but not all big favorites are created the same: The margin should be bigger here than in Georgia’s trip to Auburn, but the Longhorns have a scarier chance of going down. The upside is that if Texas does win big, they’ll get some extra style points for their trouble.
Saturday, 6:00 PM EDT: LSU @ Mississippi (ESPN)
Life is tough when you’ve got one loss, and it helps a little if the loss is to Alabama, but Mississippi still has Georgia on its schedule. So. This is desperation all around from the playoff perspective. Realistically, this is a lot like Florida vs. Kentucky: It’s two teams grappling for a claim on second chair in one of college football’s best divisions. The difference here is that LSU and Mississippi are probably better than Florida and Kentucky. Not by a lot, but by enough. New Year’s Six implications, even if the playoff ship has likely sailed.
Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: Notre Dame @ Duke (ABC)
Life is tough when you’ve got one loss, and it helps a little if the loss is to Ohio State, but…well, we don’t really know yet what to expect out of USC.
Notre Dame remains in the playoff race. For now. This was one kind of trap game, and now it’s the other. The Irish are not coming down off of a game-changing win, but they’re stepping back into the box after a gutting loss to a title contender, and I’m not sure which sets them up to play better or worse. Sam Hartman and Notre Dame have a lot to prove here. Win big, and they look like the team that played every bit as well as the Buckeyes. Lose, and they’re into that big mix of teams trying to stay in the top 25. We’re going to learn a lot about these guys tomorrow night.
Duke, meanwhile, is playing with all the eyes on them in a different way from how it was for that Clemson game. Against Clemson, all eyes were on them but in surprise. We turned on the game, we watched Duke hang with Clemson, we saw Duke take the lead, and then we found the rest of the sporting world had joined us to see what was going on. People are ready for Duke this time. That’s pressure they didn’t have before.
It’s believable that Duke could be a good team. Like Syracuse, it’s believable that they could win the ACC. If they can win this, it’s going to become believable that they could challenge for a playoff berth, whether they’re one of the four best teams in the country or not. As for Riley Leonard? You’ll be hearing a whole lot about his Heisman odds if he can spring the upset, and not only from his head coach.
The Important Games
Others involving playoff contenders, fringe and serious:
- Friday, 7:00 PM EDT: Louisville @ NC State (ESPN)
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: USC @ Colorado (FOX)
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Penn State @ Northwestern (BTN)
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Georgia @ Auburn (CBS)
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Michigan @ Nebraska (FOX)
- Saturday, 6:30 PM EDT: Oregon @ Stanford (P12N)
- Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT: Iowa State @ Oklahoma (FS1)
- Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: South Carolina @ Tennessee (SECN)
- Saturday, 9:00 PM EDT: Alabama @ Mississippi State (ESPN)
- Saturday, 10:00 PM EDT: Washington @ Arizona (P12N)
This is a lot of games, and it ranges from Louisville—a playoff candidacy in the mold of Syracuse’s and Duke’s, best summarized as “haven’t lost, play in a low-ceilinged league”—to Penn State, Michigan, and Georgia, each of whom someone is seriously arguing is the best team in the country.
For Louisville tonight, and for Tennessee tomorrow, the goal is establishing legitimacy. For every other contender on this list, this is about making a statement. We say all the time that margin matters, and this is a good illustration. Who are we going to be talking about the most next week? If everyone survives, it’s going to be the teams that came the closest to losing and the teams that won the biggest. Who’s going to sit at the top of the committee’s résumé printouts when they start meeting in the next few weeks? The teams who win by the most.
Georgia is particularly interesting, because this trip to Auburn has some parallels to the trip to Columbia to play South Carolina two weeks back. That turned out ok, but it wasn’t impressive, and that’s been the theme of the season so far in Athens. We know Georgia can bully teams, but when they keep not doing it, we start to wonder why it isn’t happening, and whether it means they also won’t show up against the teams they can’t push around.
More broadly, this is one part of a test of how much this college football season is like thos ten to fifteen years ago, before we got our recent runs of dominance within the sport. Our current understanding is that there are a lot of teams with high ceilings and low floors. If that bears out, we might start getting some shock, and not the early-season kind that teaches us Duke is, contrary to expectations, a pretty good team. We might start getting the kind of shock where teams we know aren’t good are beating teams we thought might win the national title.
In the Group of Five world:
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: UAB @ Tulane (ESPN2)
- Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT: San Diego State @ Air Force (CBSSN)
- Saturday, 10:30 PM EDT: Nevada @ Fresno State (FS1)
Our basic thought concerning the Group of Five race is that there are three teams a cut above the rest. There’s undefeated Fresno State, whom the AP Poll now has ranked; there’s undefeated Air Force, who’s winning impressively and coming off a season which led us to believe they’d do just that; and there’s one-loss Tulane, the reigning Cotton Bowl champs who fell to a good Mississippi team in a game Michael Pratt didn’t play. None of the three should be in much danger this weekend, but if we’re talking about Oklahoma and Washington being vulnerable, that goes doubly for these guys.
Last, the other remaining undefeated power conference teams:
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Indiana @ Maryland (BTN)
- Saturday, 4:00 PM EDT: Missouri @ Vanderbilt (SECN)
Mizzou’s been tough to figure out, flashing a high ceiling against Kansas State but looking underwhelming over the rest of their work. Maybe that reflects poorly on Kansas State, but if it does, it’s not exactly good for Missouri. Maryland, meanwhile, is looking like they’d be a contender if they played in the Big Ten West. Unfortunately for Maryland, they do not play in the Big Ten West. What they’re trying to do here is get to Columbus at 5–0. It would be surprising if they didn’t do that. Big Ten West contenders should beat Indiana.
The Interesting Games
More of interest, within the Sun Belt:
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: South Alabama @ James Madison (ESPNU)
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Old Dominion @ Marshall (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT: Troy @ Georgia State (ESPN+)
The Sun Belt’s in this weird in-between spot where it doesn’t appear to have any serious threats to make a New Year’s Six bowl—especially with James Madison not yet bowl-eligible as they complete their FBS transition—but it might be, top to bottom, the best Group of Five league. This week, JMU continues to try to convince bettors and those who talk about the Sun Belt that a South Alabama team who lost to Central Michigan is not some vague sleeper. The other unbeatens—Marshall and Georgia State—try their luck against Old Dominion and Troy, and we should remind that Troy was one of the preseason favorites in this conference.
More of interest, outside the Sun Belt:
- Friday, 10:15 PM EDT: Cincinnati @ BYU (ESPN)
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Texas A&M vs. Arkansas (SECN)
- Saturday, 4:00 PM EDT: Boise State @ Memphis (ESPN2)
- Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: Michigan State @ Iowa (NBC)
- Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT: West Virginia @ TCU (ESPN2)
Memphis would like to sneak into that New Year’s Six conversation themselves, but Memphis would like a lot of things, and Memphis generally does not get what it wants within the broader world of college football. They’ll host Boise State, who’s trying not to accept life in the wilderness but appears to be in the wilderness this year nonetheless. Elsewhere, we’ve got curious Big 12 games (TCU might still be good, as no one is accusing Colorado of being a normal bad football team), Brian Ferentz Points Watch against a Michigan State team with a big looming distraction, and a rivalry game at Jerry World that tends to turn wacky. Good, (hopefully) clean fun.
The FCS
There are twelve FCS games we’re keeping an eye on, ranging from those with national championship impact to top-25 matchups to games impacting the Ivy League title and little else. We’ll start with the MVFC:
- Saturday, 2:00 PM EDT: South Dakota @ North Dakota State (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 2:00 PM EDT: Youngstown State @ Northern Iowa (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 3:00 PM EDT: North Dakota @ South Dakota State (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 5:00 PM EDT: Missouri State @ Southern Illinois (ESPN+)
South Dakota State and North Dakota State are, as usual, the contenders for the FCS championship among this bunch. The rest are, as usual, all among the FCS’s thirty best teams, grappling with one another for playoff slots.
In the other league with a lot of national hopes, the Big Sky, the slate’s only mildly thinner. Three games to watch out west:
- Saturday, 4:00 PM EDT: Idaho @ Eastern Washington (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 4:00 PM EDT: Portland State @ Montana State (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 9:00 PM EDT: Northern Arizona @ Sacramento State (ESPN+)
Eastern Washington is having a phenomenal season, and so is Idaho, and Idaho was starting with higher expectations so that means more for them. The Vandals are there with Sacramento State (who plays an NAU team that’s probably bad but did just knock off Montana) as a sleeper to win the national title, otherwise known as a team who could make the national championship if they get the right draw (i.e., if the NDSU/SDSU loser lands the 4 or 5-seed). Montana State, finally, hosts a Portland State team that’s done good things but shouldn’t put up enough of a fight against the most serious challenger to the Jacks and the Bison.
Others of note involving one or two teams within the Movelor top 25:
- Saturday, 2:00 PM EDT: William & Mary @ Elon (Flo)
- Saturday, 5:00 PM EDT: Harvard vs. Holy Cross (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT: Central Arkansas @ Southern Utah (ESPN+)
The polls disagree with Movelor about the CAA, still high on the possibility of East Coast FCS football. William & Mary is only 18th in Movelor, but they’re 5th in the FCS poll. Interestingly, Movelor has Elon as about an equivalent team to William & Mary, while they didn’t even receive votes this week in the poll. Harvard isn’t expected to be what they sometimes can be, but they provide Holy Cross a good opportunity to make a statement before the Saders enter the dregs of Patriot League play. Central Arkansas and Southern Utah have bad records but are probably solid teams, at least within the FCS.
Last up, the Ivy League:
- Friday, 7:00 PM EDT: Columbia @ Princeton (ESPNU)
- Saturday, 1:00 PM EDT: Dartmouth @ Penn (ESPN+)
Like Harvard, Yale and Princeton and Dartmouth and the rest of the Ivy League also aren’t what they sometimes can be. The league is a little down right now within the national context, or at least, it lacks top teams. All four of these guys have realistic hopes of winning the conference title, and it’s a special conference title to win. The full round robin being played between the same teams year in and year out? We don’t get a lot of that in college football. This one’s for the traditionalists.
