We wrote last weekend that college football, once again, had five main characters: Alabama. Georgia. Ohio State. Clemson. Oklahoma. In addition to these five, we wrote that the sport had three secondary characters.
We’re going to need a new supporting cast.
Notre Dame’s offense struggled against Ohio State. It disemboweled itself against Marshall. Appalachian State, fresh off a track meet with UNC, held Texas A&M to seven offensive points. Down went Thing Seven and Thing Eight, all after earlier in Austin, Thing One nearly took a shocking loss at the hands of gutsy Texas.
Alabama’s a main character, so Alabama’s near-disaster is the main story of the day, and questions abound as to what exactly we saw at high noon in the heat. How did a limping Hudson Card—he who couldn’t hold the starting job over Casey Thompson last year—keep the Longhorns in the game against mighty Alabama? Why did mighty Alabama struggle so dramatically to move the ball against the men in orange?
There’s a narrative to which one can turn with the Tide offense, led by the phenomenal Bryce Young, which says that it doesn’t excel in road environments but that it does enough. It did enough today. It technically did enough last November at Auburn. Scoring points wasn’t the problem in College Station last October. Come SEC Championship time, it did quite a bit against Georgia, and that was when it mattered.
This is a flawed narrative from the start. You might not need to beat every opponent by sixty, but comfort is a priority, and Alabama’s offense looked decidedly uncomfortable yet again today in a hostile road environment. The Horns were loud. Alabama was quiet. Bryce Young was phenomenal many a time, but simultaneously, the Tide’s air attack was lacking in efficiency, and aside from breaking one big play towards the end of the first quarter, early in what was then a very different game, the rushing attack stalled as well.
Alabama has plenty of talent, and that talent extends to the coaching ranks. They may figure this out. But for as much credit as Texas deserves—and they deserve all the credit in the world, and it’s more than fair to say they would have won this game had Quinn Ewers not left with injury, even while giving Card every kudo we can find for courage and composure—Alabama has some offensive problems. Just as Clemson does. Just as Georgia did last year. Just as Ohio State and Oklahoma each probably have some defensive problems, even if those are a bit in the rearview.
We don’t want to neglect our other main characters, and we don’t want to neglect Michigan, who had a much easier opponent than Marshall or App State—two of the best mid-majors in the nation—but did, unlike Notre Dame or Texas A&M, play like you’d expect a good football team to play. So, let us say that all five of Georgia, Ohio State, Clemson, Oklahoma, and Michigan did just fine. Now let’s go find some potential new teams to watch, league-by-league(-ish).
Pac-12
USC’s got the hype, and they’re bringing that hype back down to Los Angeles tonight after leading Stanford by 21 at halftime and 27 at the end of the third quarter. It was a California beatdown, and the Trojans undeniably looked good.
But are they that good?
We don’t have an answer. We really can’t know at this stage. Stanford’s a fine program, but they’re a fine program having a decidedly hard time. You can get a measurement of a team with a stick as faded and twisted up as the Cardinal, but it’s not going to be all that precise.
We will get that answer. It may come slowly, but we’ll get it. USC plays four more middle-of-the-road teams and then goes to Utah on October 15th. Take care of business, and they’ll be a main character by then, but business hasn’t been taken care of yet. And speaking of October 15th, Utah’s still probably a pretty good football team, and one with a manageable path from here, albeit absolutely no margin for error, especially with Florida already beginning to lose (we’ll get to that game).
To find others in the Pac-12 who could make noise, you have to get into the territory of “well, technically.” There are teams with paths, but even those who’ve done everything you could ask them to do so far, like Oregon State and Washington, would have to surprise too greatly to warrant more than cursory mention less than halfway through September.
Really, a Pac-12 team can only make the playoff with a 12-1 or 13-0 record (or well-placed meteorites). It’s hard to see anyone but USC doing that, because Utah’s already got the one loss and winning out is an improbability. USC’s in the picture, but they’re not as large as other people on your screen may make them appear.
Big 12
The Big 12 offers us some intrigue, but mostly because it’s such a wide-open race behind Oklahoma (and possibly alongside Oklahoma) that it affords a better road to those still in possession of all of their tires. Playoff shots exist not entirely through being good, but by being good enough and also playing in a league lacking a certain, definite power.
This list of teams without a loss does not include Texas, inspiring though today was. The Longhorns certainly look to be a highly competitive team so long as they don’t treat this week like a victory, but the probability of them winning eleven straight from here is next to zero. It’s just hard to avoid a fall that many times in a row, even if Ewers is fully healthy (I haven’t heard any prognosis there).
The list also does not include Baylor, who took on the challenge of playing in Provo late on a Saturday night and paid the agreed-upon price, but it does include Oklahoma State, certainly a weird team but very possibly a good one, and one who got past a decent Power Five opponent today in a game that won’t give them a great strength of schedule but kept them in the picture. Realistically, Oklahoma State and USC are in a similar boat. Each has a few hard games remaining, but will be favored in potentially all but one of their contests and is already 2-0.
Behind Oklahoma State, you could try to make a case for Texas Tech, Kansas State, Iowa State, and TCU, but the realistic optimist’s view on each is set more fully on 2023. Tech’s win over Houston was nothing to sneeze at. K-State’s win over Mizzou was emphatic. Iowa State’s win over Iowa was a disaster, through and through, but exorcisms aren’t supposed to be pretty. Still, these are teams looking to potentially sneak into the Big 12 Championship with two or three losses. They aren’t teams with a realistic playoff chance right now. Oklahoma State has a realistic chance. It’s not great, and it’ll suffer from a lack of marquee wins if the rest of the Big 12 can’t slap a few teams high up the rankings board, but it’s comparable to USC’s.
Big Ten
Today was mildly terrible for the Big Ten, but the league’s sneakily set up rather well for a two-bid shot. Whoever wins the conference is almost certainly in, and an 11-1 team making the cut wouldn’t be surprising. Michigan has a great shot at being that 11-1 team. Getting good enough wins might be a problem, but if there are four or fewer teams with no losses or just one Power Five loss, the Wolverines might not need good wins.
Penn State and Michigan State also have solid shots of being that 11-1 team, and to be clear, Ohio State has a shot as well, though they’re more focused on being the ones who actually win the Big Ten. Penn State goes to Auburn next and Michigan State goes to Washington, but each of those is winnable and from there, it’s only conference games, where each should be competitive with the possible exceptions of games against the league’s top pair.
What makes the path so great, in part, for all four of these Big East teams, is that with the exception of Minnesota, who has played New Mexico State and the Western Illinois Leathernecks, every team in the Big Ten West has thoroughly embarrassed themselves at least once. Wisconsin did it today against Washington State. Iowa did it last week against South Dakota State and then again today against Iowa State. Nebraska did it to kick off the season over in Ireland. The Big Ten West is on track to give us an 8-4 team in a conference title game, which is exactly what it’s designed to do. Conference championship game tests are good if you’re a conference trying to prove itself as a whole, or one who likes TV revenue. Conference championship game tests aren’t good if you have one playoff candidate and you need them to just win the damn trophy to get in.
Overall here, Michigan’s already a secondary character and the Michigan State and Penn State paths aren’t where USC’s and Oklahoma State’s lie. Not yet. They may get there, but there’s too many ifs in the “second Big Ten bid” profile.
ACC
Ha.
Look, the ACC’s bad. It’s really, really bad. Put Marshall in the ACC and depending on division and home-away splits, you might have a title game appearance contender. This is part of why we haven’t really caught on yet, as a society, to all of Clemson’s struggles these last three (on our way to four) seasons.
And yet.
The ACC has eight teams without a loss, seven if you exclude Clemson because we’ve already mentioned them. Two of these are Syracuse and Duke, who’ve done what they can but are probably kind of bad. One of them is UNC, who gives away points like Genghis Khan used to give away syphilis. One of them is NC State, who needed East Carolina’s kicker to have a very sad day to get out of the North Carolinian version of Greenville alive. One is Florida State, who is very much in the Big-12-pack mode of hopefully being a year away.
The final two are Miami and Wake Forest. Wake Forest had a good run last year, but that was as much scheduling quirk as impressive performance. Miami is enjoying the new-coach bump in the polls, but new coaches are often new at places like Miami because they have a lot of work in front of them. The Hurricanes go to College Station next weekend, and Texas A&M had an embarrassing day, but I’d guess they’ll still be favored over their guests.
Nothing new, then, from the ACC. It’s a league that’s very good at producing teams who make the top 25 and very bad at producing teams who could believably compete against Georgia or Alabama right now, even acknowledging Alabama’s performance today.
SEC
Florida nearly had about the best two-game start to a season you could design, holding a nine-point lead late in the first half against their second ranked opponent (each deservedly ranked). Even if they’d beaten Kentucky today, though, they wouldn’t be a believable playoff contender. Trips to Knoxville, College Station, and Jacksonville (to play Georgia) are just too much. An 11-1 SEC team’s a good bet, provided they have good wins (and they usually will—2020 Texas A&M was a Covid aberration), but Florida was never a good bet to get to 11-1.
The same is true for the team who didn’t lose that game, Kentucky, and for the team who didn’t lose their game up in the Steel City, Tennessee (though they tried), and for Mississippi State and Mississippi and Arkansas, who all have done their jobs so far and all should still have nightmares about missing a bowl because they play in the SEC West and the Hogs decided to schedule opponents like a kid from Springfield, Missouri playing a video game.
It’s possible one of these will rise, but we’re into Michigan State/Penn State territory. Even Texas A&M was probably a stretch, but they had the recruiting hype and the schedule, and we bought in on the concept. Errantly, as it turned out.
BYU
Yes, really.
Notre Dame is dead, and may be next year as well given the state of their depth chart on the offensive side (Marcus Freeman better schedule a meeting on Monday with the transfer admissions office). Cincinnati died last week in Fayetteville. Appalachian State would have a really cool résumé right now if they’d made a tackle here or there against the Tar Heels last week, but they didn’t, so they don’t. (How a team went from allowing those 63 points to allowing 14 at A&M is a bigger question than how Texas hung with Alabama. We knew Texas had the dudes. They always have the dudes. The UNC-App State-A&M triangle is much less explicable.) Fresno State took a loss. Marshall may finish with no ranked wins. All of our non-Power Five possibilities (Notre Dame is a Power Five, but they shift the math when they’re around the picture the same way Cincy did last year) are gone. Except for BYU.
BYU has now handily beaten a mid-major and taken down a highly-regarded Big 12 team. Next week, they visit Oregon. In a few weeks, they meet Notre Dame in Las Vegas. The week after that, they welcome Arkansas to the mountains amidst the Hogs’ grueling slate. Between those four games, BYU could well get a good win. A good enough win. With two good enough supporting wins. And with some comfort level accompanying the concept of BYU being a premier team, their hill isn’t as steep as Toledo’s would be. They, like Cincinnati last year, have been good enough before to be instinctively taken seriously. And they’re on their way to a Power Five league, which shouldn’t mean anything regarding this year’s results but might, because the committee is eminently human. Winning out is improbable, but it looks a little less so for BYU given how many mid-majors they have to schedule. Their schedule is in the window between mid-major and Power Five. Winning out, if they can do it, would be pretty hard-pressed to not get them in.
**
Where does that leave us? Well, we’ll see what our model has to say sometime in the next few days, but my impression is that our credited cast is this:
Main Characters: Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson, Oklahoma
Secondary Character: Michigan
Tertiary Characters: USC, Oklahoma State, BYU
These are not the nine best teams. They might not truly be the nine likeliest to make the playoffs. But after today, I think they’re the ones to watch. That’s our best guess, as Mississippi State runs out the clock in Tucson and Week 2 comes to a close. More from us on Monday.
