Clemson’s “Test,” Ohio State’s Test, and the 29 Other Games Defining Week 4

One of the effects of the regionalized, small-sample nature of college football scheduling is that it’s easy for a good team to look like a great team, sometimes for years on end. When a team plays only sparingly against the best the sport has to offer, beating up on its neighbors but only traveling far for bowl games, semi-exhibitions in nature, they can theoretically appear nationally competitive for years on end and never really be exposed. A blowout loss to Alabama in the College Football Playoff? Who wouldn’t be blown out by Alabama?

This, I suspect, is what’s happened with Clemson in the aftermath of their dominant 2018 season. That Clemson team was excellent. The 2015 and 2016 Clemson teams were excellent. As we’ve written elsewhere, though, the 2019 team never had much of a chance against LSU, and the 2020 team lost at Notre Dame before letting Justin Fields put up six hundred yards on it, and last year’s limped to three losses, struggling to score all the way. Add in the suspicious wrinkle that something like twenty percent of players tested before the 2018-19 Cotton Bowl were caught using a PED, and there’s an unproven but straightforward narrative: Clemson made up the athleticism gap by using performance-enhancing drugs, and while their recruiting has started to close that gap somewhat after the PED program closed up shop, it’s still not at the level of the titans of the game. Clemson, this narrative says, might be a top ten team, but it’s hard to believe they’re one of the sport’s four best.

How widespread the PED usage was is a matter of speculation. But the performance on the field is not. Clemson hasn’t had much of a chance against one of the sport’s powerhouses since 2019-20, and really since 2018-19 if you throw the same “are they a powerhouse” skepticism at Ohio State (and we do, but they’re a little more peripheral to us this week). Last year, they struggled against the ACC, unquestionably one of the two worst Power Five leagues, and arguably worse than the Pac-12. Clemson is an ACC power. They are not a national power. We think.

The problem—and this takes us back to the regionalized, small-sample facet of this, is that we might not know until the national championship. It is deviously possible for Clemson to go the whole year playing only two or three teams in the sport’s top twenty, and to then draw someone favorable—Ohio State, Utah, Oklahoma—in the Fiesta Bowl before getting blasted to smithereens by Georgia, at which point we will all say, Who wouldn’t be blown out by Georgia?

The story going into tomorrow’s “top 25” matchup in Winston-Salem is that Clemson is getting tested, on the road, by a team with ACC Championship ambitions. To a large extent, that’s true. The game is on the road, and Wake Forest has ACC Championship ambitions. But it says a lot that a team can have ACC Championship ambitions when they 1) just escaped Liberty at home by a point and 2) took it square on the chin from both their good opponents last year and 3) are wonderfully lovable and led by one of the coolest coaches in the sport but are still (whispers) probably not very good. I have no quarrel with Wake Forest. But this game falls into Clemson’s lap. Win close, and it’s evidence that Wake Forest is a good team who has a lot of fight in them. Win big, and it’s evidence that Clemson really is dominant again. Or at least, that’s what the AP Poll will reflect. Hopefully, Wake Forest just beats them, so we can stop doing this silly little dance, pretending that the good times are still great in Pickens County (and so we can believe a little more seriously in the Demon Deacons). I encounter a lot of Clemson fans who are of the type which said Boise State’s run in the 2000s was a product of their cupcake league. I might take Colin Kaepernick’s Nevada over Sam Hartman’s Wake Forest head-to-head.

Ohio State vs. Wisconsin

We will get to the better games, but in terms of consequence, this is second in line. Ohio State, as we alluded to above, has some of the same questions as Clemson. Wisconsin, like Wake Forest, is poorly-equipped to answer those questions, though the Badgers’ ceiling remains top-five high, unlike that of Wake, who enjoys more consistency but lacks that potential.

This only really matters if the Buckeyes lose. The Big Ten, and specifically the Big Ten East, is good enough and—crucially—thought of as good enough that if the Buckeyes win their league, they’re in the playoff, with almost no exceptions. Our model sees paths to multiple Big Ten teams making the cut, meaning even 11-1 might be enough for the Bucks.

But, there are no 11-1 paths that involve losing to Wisconsin. Ohio State has to win this game or face the necessity of winning out. There are minor exceptions, but that’s more or less the script. And Wisconsin, like we said, is a top-five team when they’re good. Movelor, our model’s rating system, sees them as the 13^th-best team in the country, and that’s factoring in how often they’re bad.

Factoring in home-field advantage, Movelor sees this game and Clemson’s trip to Wake as comparable. Tellingly, the betting markets have the Buckeyes favored by two or three scores while Clemson’s expected to win by only a touchdown.

Oklahoma vs. Kansas State, Utah at Arizona State, USC at Oregon State

Three more prominent characters here—Utah’s got about a one-in-ten chance of making the playoff, per our model, USC is bettors’ Pac-12 favorite—and each has a tricky one. Expectations are lower for the three than they are for Clemson and Ohio State, but the games are of comparable concern. Kansas State has some offensive issues, but their defense is stout and they’re a feisty bunch. Arizona State just fired its head coach, but the ingredients are there on paper. Oregon State is of the Wake Forest mold, but perhaps a year behind them on that schedule, which is to say they’ve won three games and they might be good but they probably aren’t. The Beavers are a team who’d love to contend for a Pac-12 Championship appearance, and would honestly probably be elated with late-season relevance in that race. They are a team a national title contender should beat handily.

Not everyone has to be a national title contender, though, and for all three of these programs, making the playoff would be a significant accomplishment this year, with new coaches in Norman and Los Angeles and no playoff appearances to date from the fellas in Salt Lake City. So, big games, with big stakes.

Georgia vs. Kent State, Alabama vs. Vanderbilt

These games will happen this weekend, and they are technically extraordinarily high-leverage but you’re more likely to die in a car crash and whatnot.

Michigan vs. Maryland, Penn State vs. Central Michigan, NC State vs. UConn

These teams all have a better playoff chance than Utah, and all should win handily tomorrow, but we are not going to give them the unearned dignity of a place in Georgia and Alabama’s header.

The Good Games

Alright, now we’re into the fun stuff:

• In the SEC, Florida goes to Tennessee while Arkansas and Texas A&M meet up at Jerry World. Arkansas has yet to lose, but they sure looked like they were looking ahead to this one last week. We’ll see if that preparation paid off. Texas A&M has one of the best defenses in the country, its offense stinks, and thankfully Appalachian State found a way to keep keeping drives alive or they’d be the subject of the breathless, questionable hype that for some reason isn’t going to Arkansas or Mississippi in their stead. Tennessee, meanwhile, has a rocket-powered offense but, due to playing Alabama in addition to Georgia, a pretty poor playoff shot. For them, this is a game to make that Bama game big in three weeks.
• In the Big Ten, Minnesota goes to Michigan State, and Minnesota just lost receiver Chris Autman-Bell but this was a defense-first team anyway. The Gophers have a spectacular playoff path, and they look like a legitimate good team, but they need to win this one to keep that first thing the case and to prove that second one isn’t a deke.
• In the Big 12, Iowa State hosts Baylor and Texas goes to Texas Tech. Iowa State, Baylor, and Texas are candidates in a busy race with the Oklahomas for a Big 12 title game berth, and though at the moment, it looks like Oklahoma State is the favorite behind the Sooners, all three of these guys could change that with impressive performances tomorrow. As, to be fair, could Texas Tech, though the instinct should the Red Raiders win will be to call it a reflection on their guests, not on them.
• In the ACC, UNC still has yet to lose, and when we say we’ve written them off unfairly we don’t mean that because we think they’re good, but we do think they have a lovely little path, especially when considering that 1) they play Notre Dame this weekend, and Notre Dame could finish the season ranked, and 2) a 12-1 Power Five champion usually gets in, and UNC doesn’t play Clemson in the regular season. So, that’s a big one, even if it’s technically an unranked matchup (Movelor has UNC 38^th and the Irish still 11^th, though betting markets loudly disagree on Notre Dame, which is a little unusual for Movelor).
• In the Pac-12, Oregon’s up in Pullman playing still 3-0 Washington State in a game featuring, according to Movelor, two of the league’s four best teams. Oregon bounced back in a big way last weekend, and because they host Utah and don’t play USC, there’s a chance they’ll be favorites in each of their remaining contests, having only lost to the obvious best team in the country right now. Meanwhile, who knows about Washington State? Wisconsin can play so badly sometimes, but it’s possible Wazzu deserves more credit for that than they’ve received.

The Interesting Games

Deeper cuts, and since we mention Tulane let’s also mention that Coastal Carolina took care of things at Turner Field last night and is now 4-0:

• Kansas and Duke are each 3-0 as the Blue Devils head to Lawrence. Not all 3-0 records are the same, and Duke’s consists primarily of a win at Northwestern, while Kansas has beaten both West Virginia and Houston on the road, but it’s a fun day for each program and it should be especially fun for the Jayhawks, who are looking more and more like a bunch destined to cause headaches throughout their Big 12 campaign.
• James Madison has looked great in their FBS debut so far, checking in at 35^th in the nation in Movelor. That makes them a narrow Movelor favorite on the road at Appalachian State, who probably isn’t good but might be wily enough to make up for it. If the early weeks have taught us anything, it’s that we can’t take our eyes off the Mountaineers. Always something going on with them.
• Washington hosts Stanford, and after looking great last week, the pressure’s on the Huskies to prove that they really are a contender in this bizarre Pac-12, where the one team we’re fairly sure is good (Utah) already has a loss, USC and Washington are supposedly bouncing all the way back, and Washington State/Oregon State/UCLA are all hanging around keeping us wondering. The Pac-12 might not quite be better than the ACC, but it’s sure more fun right now.
• TCU (at SMU), Syracuse (vs. Virginia tonight), Florida State (vs. Boston College) and Tulane (vs. Southern Miss) are all 3-0, and are all interesting enough that this could end up mattering.
• Cincinnati and Iowa haven’t started the year how they’d like, but each plays a 3-0 team this week with a chance to put said team in its place. The Bearcats host Indiana. The Hawkeyes go to Rutgers. There’s no believable playoff shot for either, but each is probably a pretty good team, which conversely means that wins by Rutgers and Indiana would really shift perceptions for those two.

The Obligatory Mentions

These guys all have better than a 1-in-100 playoff shot, and for each it would be totally erased with a loss:

• Mississippi hosts Tulsa.
• Kentucky hosts Northern Illinois.
• Pitt hosts Rhode Island.
• Miami hosts Middle Tennessee State.
• UCLA goes to Colorado.

**

Alright, 31 games, and 21 at least hit the “interesting” threshold. That’s a good week right there. We’ll have updated playoff probabilities (and conference, and national championship) on the other side.