The biggest news in college football this week once again centers on the simple existence of a season. The Pac-12 has set a start date. The Mountain West has set a start date. The MAC is reportedly close to setting a start date.
For those of you who were hoping we’d have our model out this week, our apologies (also, thank you!). We’ve pushed the tentative release date back to October 21st, the Wednesday preceding the Big Ten’s opener. By then, the schedule should be locked in for each conference, we should have clear plans for bowl season, and we should have a better idea of how common coronavirus-induced postponements are, as well as whether a team suffering one coronavirus outbreak makes them less likely to suffer a second (or third, etc.). We were planning to release a model that accounted for all this uncertainty, but it was going to involve a lot of guessing, and it wasn’t going to be as thorough as the model we’d hoped to build. So, instead, we’ll delay, and when we do release a model, it should be a complete one.
One consequence of the delay is that we don’t have numbers to assess the playoff importance of individual games this week. We can still do some deducing, though. And here are the biggest games in terms of playoff impact, based on those deductions:
SEC Openers that Might Matter
Mehhh…ok. None of these probably matter. They only matter if they do, which is to say they only matter if there’s an upset. We’re going to exclude the games with three-score (or greater) favorites. Here are the others:
Florida @ Mississippi (12:00 PM EDT Saturday, ESPN)
Kentucky @ Auburn (12:00 PM EDT Saturday, SEC Network)
Tennessee @ South Carolina (7:30 PM EDT Saturday, SEC Network)
Lane Kiffin’s debut at Mississippi is an opportunity to really mess things up for Florida. Auburn is trying to establish themselves within the Georgia/Florida/LSU tier behind Alabama (as is Texas A&M, but there’s nothing they can do to help themselves this week, because they’re a 30+ point favorite against Vanderbilt). Tennessee has an interesting defense. Not the best Week One slate from the SEC, but that may have been a decision based on giving themselves a buffer to work some things out if things were dicey. Probably smart. Greg Sankey seems smart.
Big 12 Openers that Might Matter
Again: Meh. Here’s the one that kinda-sorta matters:
Texas @ Texas Tech (3:30 PM EDT Saturday, FOX)
Texas Tech is bad, and we all need to accept this before this weekend, because if Texas trounces them, we need to be prepared to not be surprised if Texas then comes out next week and takes a Bevo-sized dump against TCU. That said, Texas is the only team in the conference with any likelihood of challenging Oklahoma. This could change, but for now, it’s the truth. Oklahoma State just struggled to beat Tulsa. Iowa State lost to Louisiana-Lafayette two weeks ago. Baylor won a lot of close games last year and isn’t exactly returning that same team. It’s an Oklahoma-Texas league right now, which is to say it’s probably just an Oklahoma league, but we need to have some foil for the Sooners.
The ACC Continues to Happen
Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. None of the three probably-good teams are playing, and one of those is UNC, who didn’t exactly shimmer against Syracuse in their opener. It’s all undercards. We have to write something, but we’re doing this begrudgingly:
Louisville @ Pittsburgh (12:00 PM EDT Saturday, ACC Network)
Florida State @ Miami (7:30 PM EDT Saturday, ABC)
There will be a good team on the field when Louisville visits Pitt, but it will only be there when Louisville’s on offense and Pitt’s on defense. During the rest of the game, you’d do better watching Temple’s offense against Tulane’s defense. But alas, Tulane’s at Southern Miss this week and Temple doesn’t open ‘til October 10th, so here we are. As for FSU/Miami, we know one of these teams is bad, and we think one might be good, which means we won’t learn whether the good one’s actually good, but we might learn that they aren’t. This is the same thing that was going on above with Texas.
The Group of Five!
Ok, so with the Big Ten returning, the Group of Five’s playoff chances are most likely pretty shot. The Pac-12 returning might impact this as well, but there are more contingencies there. Still, this is where the week’s biggest game lies, and there are some intriguing undercards here as well:
Georgia Southern @ Louisiana-Lafayette (12:00 PM EDT Saturday, ESPN2)
Army @ Cincinnati (3:30 PM EDT Saturday, ESPN)
Troy @ BYU (10:15 PM EDT Saturday, ESPN)
Army vs. Cincinnati is the national championship 2020 deserves. The Black Knights are probably receiving more love than their ability merits, due to the unorthodoxy of their play and the novelty of Army being good again. They aren’t receiving undeserved love, though, because again—it’s Army. Cincinnati’s intriguing from a playoff perspective. They have some name power. They place in the sixth-best conference. They get to play a lot of games (ten are currently on the regular season schedule), two of those are against Memphis and UCF, and I’m assuming the AAC has a conference championship. They don’t play a Power Five team, and Army won’t be treated like one, but Army might be deservedly treated by the committee as being better than Georgia Tech, UCF’s marquee nonconference foe, and perhaps undeservedly treated as being better than some middling Power Five teams. We’ll see.
In other Group of Five action, Louisiana-Lafayette gets a chance to prove they’re good after looking quite mediocre in last week’s comedown from the win in Ames. BYU gets a chance to prove they’re good after missing a few weeks with coronavirus following the Navy blowout. Troy, for what it’s worth, could also prove that it’s a good team, and Troy’s got an interesting path to playoff relevance in that if Louisiana-Lafayette continues to struggle but win, as they did last week, they could prove a better asset to the Sun Belt as a “they beat Iowa State, so they’re not a meaningless win” chip for an undefeated Troy than they might serve as an undefeated conference champion themselves. But that’s a long way off. For now, get excited for Army’s invasion of Cincinnati, and watch whatever the hell else you want while we wait for the big stuff to start happening.
