Welcome to our daily college football newsletter. If you like what you read and want it delivered to your email inbox every morning, subscribe to our Substack. It’s free!
**
Oregon beat Ohio State. On a back-and-forth night in Eugene which pushed more than one person past their personal edge of self-control, Dillon Gabriel and the Ducks took down Will Howard and the Buckeyes, edging ahead in the Big Ten race and moving themselves onto one of the safest playoff tracks in the country. Halfway through the regular season, the Ducks have a claim as the most accomplished team in college football. That’s not a bad place to be.
We’ll talk about the big picture in a moment, but one of the more notable revelations of the night wasn’t so much a revelation as a reminder: Dillon Gabriel is an immensely capable college quarterback. One year after picking apart Texas down the stretch in a Red River thriller, the sixth-year senior demonstrated why he was the preseason Heisman favorite upon slotting in for Oregon. It’s not that he’s some all-time great or even necessarily the best quarterback right now nationally. It’s that when you need a play, there might not be anyone else in the country you’d rather have under center. He delivered when he had to. He kept Oregon in it. He did his part. And with the game on the line, Oregon fans probably rightly trusted him over the man throwing the football for the guys in white.
Oregon was impressive. Gabriel was impressive and Oregon was impressive and questions about the Ducks now revolve around just how good they can be, instead of whether they’re worthy of competing with Ohio State. Oregon can compete with Ohio State. That much is settled. The game was in Autzen, and the game was in October, but suspicions that the Buckeyes might roll through Dan Lanning’s team turned out to be unfounded. This was a vindicating night for Oregon. There are still doubts about whether Oregon is of national championship quality—they’re not quite as deep as Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio State, and we mentioned October because it’s possible those programs are trying to gear themselves more towards peaking in January than playing their best ball right now—but those early-season wonderings over whether Lanning’s squad had taken a step back from last year can be put to bed. Against a highly regarded Ohio State defense, Oregon’s offensive line held up and Oregon’s receivers made some hay. This team has gotten better since it played Idaho. It’s gotten better since it played Boise State.
For Ohio State, things are ok and they’re not. Everything is still in front of the Buckeyes. They can still win the Big Ten. They can still earn a top-two seed in the playoff. They can still win a national championship. They’d probably be favored again were this game played a second time. They lost by one point on the road against one of the ten best teams in the country, if not one of the four or five best. It was Oregon’s biggest game of the season. It was not Ohio State’s. Ohio State still was a little bit of better game management and one hypothetical field goal away from victory.
And yet, you can see the fears seeping in with these Buckeyes. If you had to design a way to lose close that would inspire the most uncertainty, this was it. Their defense had a curiously hard time corralling Oregon’s athletes. Will Howard played a good game but not a great game. Unforced errors from the top on down became the knockout blow. Starting left tackle Josh Simmons is reportedly likely to miss the rest of the season. On one hand, Ohio State suffered its own most nightmarish scenario and still lost to a good team by one point in a stadium referred to as a zoo. On the other, Ohio State had to confront all those fears. All those concerns are valid. All those issues are there. They don’t have to be lethal, and there’s time to address a lot of them, and it’s a pretty big luxury to walk into a road game in Eugene thinking, “Man, I hope we win this thing by 20 and can start focusing on Texas.” But Ohio State wanted a big win, and Ohio State didn’t get it, and that makes the situation just a little more fragile in Columbus.
Overall? I think our model’s correct when it says Oregon’s likelier to win the Big Ten now but that Ohio State’s still the likelier national champion. Football’s different in December from what it is right now.
**
Enjoying what you’re reading? Subscribe to our free Substack to receive it every day in your email inbox.
**
Alabama and Georgia Might Miss the Playoff
Speaking of that model: In 48% of its simulations this morning, at least one of Alabama and Georgia missed the College Football Playoff. Each won yesterday. Each has only one loss. But with Texas playing ruthless football and the SEC deep at the top, the Tide and the Dawgs will have to do more than just show up.
Alabama did win, and South Carolina isn’t bad or anything (consensus top-30 team nationally), but the idea after last weekend’s events in Nashville was to come out and make someone pay. Alabama made no one pay. Jalen Milroe was sloppy, the Tide got chewed up by South Carolina’s defensive line, and Alabama’s defense made the Gamecock offensive effort look a lot more potent than it did against Mississippi. The primary big-picture concern around Alabama is focus and edge, and the primary short-term concern is the secondary, but there was little which the Crimson Tide did which resembled the Alabama we’re used to seeing. The offensive line wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. Ditto Milroe. What if Alabama is merely good now?
Georgia was not in serious danger against Mississippi State, and even the ten-point final margin belies a reality where the Dawgs led by at least three possessions for most of the second half. But Mississippi State is worse than Vanderbilt, and Georgia couldn’t land a decisive blow. They had to bleed Mississippi State out.
We’re used to seeing Georgia play with its food. It’s been a hallmark of the program under Kirby Smart. A popular defense of the practice goes that the Dawgs show up for big games. Do they, though? Because in both 2021 and 2023, they didn’t play their best game in the SEC Championship against Alabama. Prior to 2021, they didn’t accomplish a whole lot with any regularity. Kirby Smart does a great job of converting raw talent—something the University of Georgia procures in abundance—into great football players. But should we really trust that this is a great team because of games that happened two years ago?
Maybe Georgia goes to Austin this weekend and shows something big. But the simplest explanation right now regarding Alabama and Georgia is that they’re a step behind. It’s that even if you take the off-field and psychological questions out of the discussion, they just might not be all that dominant at football. Top-five teams? Probably. Capable of losing to Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and LSU? They’re definitely capable of it.
Meanwhile, across the South, Texas silenced any reasonable doubts that it’s the best team in the country. Quinn Ewers looked a little limited physically, but he knocked off the rust as the game went on, which is the direction you want things to go if your starter has an injury concern. Oklahoma has serious problems, but plenty of teams have had serious problems in the Red River Shootout lately. Usually, we only get a blowout like that once or twice a decade.
Heading in, we thought the gripes were fair about Texas having only played Michigan, not a particularly strong football team in this year’s national landscape. You can say the same about Oklahoma, but the fact the Longhorns won both those games in both those environments without having to break a sweat seems to signify—as does Texas’s virtually uniform number one ranking across credible rating systems—that something more is going on there. We can have the same discussion about peaking timing with Texas that we can have with Oregon. Texas is not used to playing at this level. This is new to them in the playoff era. But once you’ve reached the peaking discussion, things are going pretty well.
You can’t kill LSU, at least not in Baton Rouge, where the Tigers put Mississippi back on their heels in an electric overtime duel. It’s about 50/50 that one of these two will make the playoff, and while Mississippi’s still likelier, with the friendlier road ahead, there isn’t a game left on LSU’s schedule where the Tigers shouldn’t at least be highly competitive. They might be favored in every remaining regular season game.
We’d wondered if Mississippi might be a top-two SEC team, given every contender for that title’s lost in at least somewhat embarrassing fashion. (Georgia had a great second half in Tuscaloosa, but that doesn’t mean the first half gets wiped away.) They still might be. It’s hard to fault someone for losing to a top-15 unit in Death Valley. But more likely, they’re in the same mess Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and now LSU are also in, that no-man’s land just below the throne. I’d guess Mississippi’s closer to Bama and Georgia than to Tennessee and LSU, but it’s also hard to trust Mississippi to win big games, which kind of negates the strength of their average play.
Kentucky took an uppercut from Vanderbilt and did not remain on its feet, dropping the Wildcats to .500 and quickly stopping our “Wait a second, Kentucky’s pretty good” campaign. Vanderbilt’s now ahead of Mississippi State in Movelor, where every SEC team is among the 70 best nationally. Every other conference has at least one team ranked 85th or worse.
Penn State Passed Another Test
I don’t know how much beating USC means, and when I say that, I’m not saying, “Beating USC doesn’t mean that much.” I really don’t know how much it means. If you average Movelor, SP+, and FPI (we find all three to be decently credible, and we understand all three fairly well, so we cite them the most), USC comes out as a top-20 but not top-15 team. In that light, for as great of a “helmet game” as this was, it was more effectively the kind of hard road test that national championship contenders are expected to win and conference championship hopefuls are forgiven for losing. Penn State wants to be a national championship contender. Thanks to Tyler Warren, some creativity, and a healthy dose of fearlessness in crunch time, they can hold onto that self-perception for at least two and maybe more than three more weeks.
I’m not sure whether there’s anybody dangerously good behind Michigan and USC in the Big Ten. We know Ohio State’s great and that Oregon can beat Ohio State. We know Penn State can handle business against good football teams on the road. We think USC and Michigan are probably tough outs. But what about Washington, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, and the rest?
Our best guess is that this is where the Big Ten and the SEC really split apart. Drop Washington, Iowa, Indiana, or Wisconsin into the SEC, and we’d be watching them the way we watch Arkansas and Florida. The Big Ten falls off a lot more quickly than the SEC. Still, we’ll happily keep an eye on Indiana, and our model’s saying Iowa isn’t out of the playoff race yet either, with a manageable slate ahead and teams who beat them a combined 11–1. Nice win for the Hawkeyes yesterday. They made Washington look tired.
Iowa State and BYU
Even after losing to BYU, we called Kansas State the Big 12 favorite. They still seemed like the best team and the most well-rounded, and with the Big 12 schedule being what it is, we figured everyone would pick up a loss eventually.
That last part still might happen, and Kansas State is still a factor in the race. There’s a good chance K-State is the best team in the Big 12. But Iowa State and BYU have been catching up, and yesterday, they pushed past the Wildcats. BYU dominated Arizona at home, much like K-State did a few weeks ago. Iowa State handed it to West Virginia in Morgantown, looking not unlike Penn State in August in front of that hostile crowd. Again: Kansas State is probably the best team in this conference. But the schedules have evened out enough to give BYU and Iowa State the advantage, each sitting undefeated while K-State has the loss.
To K-State’s credit, they survived Colorado in a game where it briefly looked like they’d lost Avery Johnson to something like an oblique injury, the current scourge of quarterbacking. It’s hard to hold off the Buffs late at night. Their big-play potential disproportionately outpaces the overall product they put on the field, which makes few leads safe. But K-State handled business there, just as Iowa State and BYU did. With Utah failing to handle business in Tempe on Friday night, we’ve probably got a three-horse Big 12 race. Utah still has Utah in them somewhere and might be a devastating spoiler down the line, but their path to the conference championship is narrow and filled with thorns. Arizona State (who beat Utah) and Texas Tech (who beat Arizona State) occupy strong positions in the standings, but we’ve seen a lot from Big 12 teams this year, and what we’ve seen on the whole for those two indicates they’re not at the level of the ag schools and the Latter-day Saints. There is time for that to change, but at the moment: Three horses.
Is Louisville Good?
Pitt survived again, staying undefeated with the help of a late missed field goal by Cal. Clemson dominated again, rolling past Wake Forest as they continue their silent vicious reign over the rest of the ACC. Our question in this conference is Louisville: What are they? It’s not a great sign that they struggled against Virginia, but winning on the road is hard, winning after blowing a lead is hard, and Virginia’s beaten a couple somewhat respected opponents.
Every other ACC contender has to play Louisville at some point in the season. SMU beat them last weekend in Kentucky. Miami gets them next weekend in Kentucky. Clemson gets them in South Carolina in November. Pitt heads down the Ohio River the weekend before Thanksgiving. Louisville may yet be a participant in this race themselves. The loss to SMU was only one loss. But they’re going to be a factor no matter what.
Notre Dame and Washington State
Our two wild card playoff contenders aren’t much alike, which is why we often group them separately in these. Our haphazard guess with Washington State is that the CFP committee will rank them lower than our model expects. Our model treats them as half a mid-major, but they have a mostly mid-major schedule, and as we’ve harped on previously, the Associated Press hasn’t done WSU any favors. Given our model has them only 11% playoff-likely, the fact our model might be overstating their chances bodes poorly for the Cougars. Still, they got to 5–1, surviving Fresno State on the road in a game where John Mateer was dangerous in a less fun way (for WSU) than usual. They’re a serious threat to win eleven games. We have to keep an eye on them.
As for the Irish:
Notre Dame pounded Stanford. It wasn’t as immediately decisive as Notre Dame’s win over Purdue, but for long stretches of the game, we saw the version of Notre Dame which looks like a national championship threat. The problems for Notre Dame, of course, are 1) how many stretches there are where their offense is out of sync and 2) how physically limited this roster is compared to the teams they’ll eventually have to beat if they want to make that threat a promise. Hanging in there physically against Texas A&M is one thing. Hanging in there against Oregon is another, not to mention the Texases of the world.
The Jekyll/Hyde nature of the offense makes Notre Dame hard to rate. Movelor likes them because Movelor likes final scores. FPI likes them because FPI likes average yards per play (or something resembling it). SP+ is more cautious because it better accounts for terrible pockets of play. Still, SP+ has Notre Dame as one of the ten best teams in the country, and I’ll say this, too: The depth has held up alright so far through some injuries.
It’s worth noting here that Oregon State lost to Nevada, which is the second defeat for the Beavers. We suspected that second defeat was coming, but we didn’t know when. That should wipe that particular OSU off the biggest boards.
Bryson Daily for Heisman?
I haven’t checked the Heisman odds, but Army’s offense keeps operating like a wrecking ball against these mid-major defenses, and quarterback Bryson Daily is playing the role of Miley Cyrus. Take away opponent strength, and Army’s the most efficient offensive team in the country. Add opponent strength back in, and…they’re still pretty good?
Movelor, SP+, and FPI are very different from one another, but each has Army ranked in the 50’s nationally, which means that’s probably how good Army is. I’m curious, though, about the strength of the offense, specifically. That’s something Movelor doesn’t try to measure, and it doesn’t seem like an easy thing to put numbers on given how unusual Army is. Long story short: The Black Knights beat UAB by 34 points, scoring touchdowns on each of their first five drives.
Elsewhere among Group of Five playoff contenders, Tulane and Navy were idle, Memphis picked up a nice solid win over USF, Boise State kept Hawaii at arm’s length and eventually pulled away, UNLV had a fine showing on Friday night, JMU won big on Thursday, Liberty survived FIU on Tuesday but didn’t help itself, and Toledo got downed big by Buffalo. The upshot of all of that is that everyone besides Toledo mostly stayed put. The MAC is back out of the picture, and the pack behind Boise State is distant and quirky.
Montanas and Dakotas
It looked for a while like Northern Arizona might upset Montana in Missoula, but the FCS theme for the weekend ended up familiar: Dakotas and Montanas rolled. Combined, the five Dakotan and Montanan schools in action won by 138 points, or nearly 28 points per team. They did that against teams Movelor ranks 7th, 12th, 25th, 41st, and 48th in the FCS. That’s like pounding Mississippi, Michigan, Iowa, Arizona, and Texas Tech by those margins. In the most impressive showing, Montana State rolled right through Idaho in Bozeman, leading 38–0 before the Vandals scored a final-minute touchdown.
The new Movelor FCS Top 10, with last week’s ranking in parentheses:
1. South Dakota State (1)
2. North Dakota State (2)
3. Montana State (4)
4. South Dakota (3)
5. Montana (6)
6. Incarnate Word (9)
7. Idaho (5)
8. Villanova (7)
9. Mercer (11)
10. Delaware (10)
Get ready for some snowy football in December, even if Penn State and Notre Dame don’t get CFP home games.
**
Our other stuff, from this morning:
- Updated CFP Bracketology, from our model.
- Wins Above Bubble, and two other approaches to a top 25.
- Updated playoff probabilities.
- NIT Stu’s College Football Vibe Check.
We should have Movelor’s Week 8 spreads up later tonight, with more on Notre Dame, Texas, and Iowa State in the works for tomorrow and Tuesday, each from a local interested party.
Bark.
**
Thanks for being here. If you like what you just read and want it delivered to your email inbox every morning, subscribe to our free Substack.
