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Eventually, the 12-team playoff will probably yield a Cinderella champion, breaking from a hundred years of earnest, occasionally doomed attempts to give college football’s national title to the best team. College basketball and the NFL and Major League Baseball all are used to what a big ol’ bracket can do. College football will not be prepared when the bracket eventually spits out the fourth-place SEC team. There’s that old line about Eskimo languages having a hundred words for snow. The college football ecosystem has zero words for a 9–3 team lifting the sport’s ultimate trophy.
One of the better “Cinderella” candidates this year is, in a development I fear will make you wretch and heave, Michigan. Michigan is doubted by those who drive betting markets. Michigan is doubted by those who watched its offense against Fresno State. Michigan plays enough big-time opponents that it could get into the playoff at 9–3. Michigan plays enough questionable opponents that it could get into the playoff at 13–0.
There is a scenario in which Michigan does, ultimately, successfully defend its title, conventionally or otherwise. Given concerns surrounding Oregon and how many pieces there are to put together at Ohio State, not to mention the last ten years of Penn State football, there’s a chance Michigan’s the best team in the Big Ten by default. Even if they’re only, say, the sixth-best team in the country, that could be enough to earn them a College Football Playoff 2-seed, where a friendly draw and upsets across the bracket could leave them with a title much more improbable than the last.
While that scenario exists, it’s hard to picture, and not only because we lack the words for it. It’s unlikely. Our model—which cares more than most about how teams finished last year—remains high on the Wolverines. But, through some numerical tricks, we can estimate what it would think of these guys’ path were they the 13th-best team nationally, which is the average of where ESPN’s SP+ and FPI have them. The answer? Our model would call Michigan one or two percent likely to win it all.
Much more likely is the scenario where Texas lifts the trophy on that mid-January night. We have words for that scenario. The first, of course, is “back,” but there are plenty more than that: Besides Georgia, Texas’s national championship scenario is the most conventional of those in the mix. It’s the path to which we’re most accustomed, the path which makes sense to us. One of the nation’s best teams brings back most of its contributors (including its NFL-scouted quarterback), adds a strong recruiting class, and reinforces the weak points with transfers, all under the leadership of someone we believe is among the best head coaches in the sport. That’s how national championships are supposed to happen. That’s how the best team in the country gets built. We understand this path. We have words for this path. We lack the words for Michigan.
Most likely, the national champion will not be on the field on Saturday at the Big House. Even our model—again, one of the highest out there on the Wolverines right now—pegs the probability at 5-in-6 that neither Michigan nor Texas wins the College Football Playoff. But both are contenders, and both are among the most storied programs in the land, and this is the kind of cross-conference game we don’t often see between the Big Ten and the SEC in the regular season. It’s about to get more regular, thanks to the numbers game (LSU just played USC), but this is a different type of matchup from the last Big Ten/SEC nonconference duel, a Penn State vs. Auburn home-and-home. Wisconsin scheduled admirably in the mid-2010’s, but to find a regular season game this big between the Big Ten and the SEC, you have to go back to 2012, when Alabama rolled the Wolverines at Jerry World. I’m not sure even that was as big as this will be. Aside from the playoff, this is the biggest nonconference game this college football season. This is a big one.
Texas is not the exact same Texas as the Texas who won last September at Alabama. Still, many will be familiar with a loud environment and a lot of attention accompanying a Week 2 game. The Big House will be rocking, but the Longhorns shouldn’t be entirely unprepared, even if you can probably never quite be ready for the voices of 107,000 people screaming down at you. As plenty have noted, Texas might struggle on the ground against a vicious Michigan front seven. Play-calling and Quinn Ewers’s execution must not miss. But the Longhorns are favorites for a reason. That reason is primarily that their defense, while not Michigan’s, is good enough that it should provide its offense with plenty of chances.
The playoff impact:
In our model’s 10,000 simulations, the winner of this game makes the College Football Playoff 86% of the time. Coincidentally, that number stays the same no matter who the winner turns out to be. If Texas wins, Texas is 86% likely to make the playoff. If Michigan wins, Michigan is 86% likely to make the playoff.
For the loser, the situation isn’t bleak. Texas still makes the field 56% of the time in simulations in which they lose this game. For Michigan, that number is 53%. Movelor does likely overrate Michigan, as we keep saying, so the real-world numbers might be a little bit lower, but they’re in that ballpark. A win on Saturday takes the victor up to a 6-in-7 playoff probability, or thereabouts. A loss drops the loser to somewhere only a little better than 50/50. The margin of the game and how other teams perform will affect the final numbers, but that’s the rough probability accompanying the showdown.
Overall? Texas has built to this in conventional fashion. Texas wants to be the next college football power. Saturday is a measuring stick in that quest. Michigan, meanwhile, has a title to defend, and they’re not that incorrect when they say nobody thinks they can pull it off.
High noon in Ann Arbor. Temperatures in the high 50’s. Sunny. A not-unreasonable amount of wind. Two teams who probably should have met last January with a title on the line. A title’s still on the line here. The line’s just a little less direct.
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Big Games
It feels a little hyperbolic to describe these next games as “big,” compared to Michigan vs. Texas, but these five count:
Iowa State at Iowa
Kansas at Illinois
Colorado at Nebraska
Tennessee vs. NC State
Boise State at Oregon
Two of these are rivalries. That’s where they get their worth. I suppose there’s a chance one of Iowa, Iowa State, Nebraska, or Colorado makes the playoff, but the chance is small. This isn’t about that chance. This is old-fashioned college football, cultural collisions from those who live their lives contrarily despite their close geographic proximity.
In Iowa City, Iowa will try to retain the Cy-Hawk Trophy in a game it’s won seven of the last eight times, most memorably in 2021 when Brock Purdy found himself outplayed by Spencer Petras (through no fault of Petras’s, to be clear). Playing at home, Iowa’s a narrow favorite here in just about everybody’s eyes. The teams are similar (Iowa State is also defense-first, though they’re more balanced than Iowa in total), but if one’s a little better, it’s Iowa, and the game’s at Kinnick Stadium.
There’s a respect angle to this contest as well, and it goes beyond the opposite sidelines. In fact, at this moment in history, Iowa and Iowa State might respect one another more than the nation respects either, which is a wild thing to say. Matt Campbell’s built the Cyclone program from the brink of mid-majordom into a reliable factor in the Big 12. The ‘Clones stand as one of many teams vying to be the tip of the Big 12 spear in this Power Four era. But a failure to deliver real conference contention on a consistent basis, coupled with some brutal early-season losses and a never-ending string of mentions around jobs another coach ultimately gets? That’ll get the college football chirp machines cracking. Across the field, Iowa is coming off the biggest meme of a college football season in internet history. Can the Hawkeyes score points? They did in the second half last weekend against Illinois State. That doesn’t really answer our question.
Further west along I-80, Nebraska has some business to attend to. Last year, the Huskers were the recipients of a mauling at the hands of Deion Sanders’s Colorado Buffaloes. The Buffs pounded their old nemesis, leading 13–0 going into halftime and extending that lead across the final thirty minutes of play. Nebraska could move the ball, but it couldn’t hold onto it, and it couldn’t stop the pass, allowing Shedeur Sanders to throw for nearly 400 yards with some gaudy efficiency numbers.
Now, Matt Rhule’s had a year to reinforce the foundation, and the shine has worn off for the Sanders Family Circus. Can the Huskers keep their heads? If so, they should win comfortably. The possibility they don’t is why the markets only have this one a seven-point game.
Back across the Corn Belt, Illinois hosts Kansas, and make all your jokes, Mr. Jokemaker, but under Lance Leipold and Bret Bielema, these teams each have a winning season to their name within the last three years. (Ok, maybe you can keep making those jokes.) If you want to watch Jalon Daniels play football, which you should, this is a good opportunity to make it happen. Bless the man forever, but his body struggles to keep up with the sport he plays, so catch him before he gets hurt again. Daniels against a Bielema defense is solid stuff. If Nebraska and Tennessee stand on business, this will be the best game of the primetime hour.
If you just can’t wait ‘til the holidays for a mayonnaise-themed football game, you are in luck. Duke’s Mayo is sponsoring this Tennessee/NC State tilt in Charlotte.
This one isn’t quite a playoff elimination game, but it has that air. If Tennessee handles what it needs to handle, the Vols will sit 35% likely to survive SEC play and get to the top ten or eleven when it counts. If they lose, that number drops to 9%. For NC State? There’s still a 7% shot at a playoff berth with a defeat—the ACC is a comfy place sometimes—but a win would lift them to 21%, partly because it would prove they can beat a team we think is similar in quality to the best the Atlantic Coast Conference has to offer.
Finally, the LeGarrette Blount Bowl. It’s been 15 years since Blount punched that Boise State player in the face following the Broncos’ win over the visiting Ducks. The pair have met once since, but that was in the Las Vegas Bowl. This is much more similar to those 2008 and 2009 matchups, in that there are national implications.
Oregon is 0–3 all-time against Boise State, a fact we wish we’d internalized better over the years because it would have been fun to call Boise the capital of the Pacific Northwest. Alas, the win streak probably ends on Saturday night. Depending who you ask, Oregon is favored by three or four scores, even after last weekend’s limp appearance against another Idahoan squad.
A loss doesn’t really hurt Boise. That’s how it goes when the spread’s that big. Boise State sits at 6.6% playoff-likely right now. Lose, and that drops to 6.2% in the average outcome. In the event Boise keeps the game within 20, the playoff probability will probably rise. No matter what happens Saturday night, Boise State needs to win the Mountain West if it wants to play in the first ever College Football Playoff round of 12. A loss doesn’t change that. This is a bit of a free play.
What’s the upside on this free play? If Boise State does pull off the upset, they’re much more likely to be among the nation’s best mid-majors, and you could do worse when plucking than to grab one of the Oregon Duck’s feathers for your cap. There are other good mid-majors out there, so the playoff probability only jumps to 23% with a Bronco victory, but that’s a substantial leap.
For Oregon, a loss would be a disaster, not because it pushes the Ducks off the playoff path but because it shows they aren’t good enough to be taken seriously as a title contender. Win, and they’re 59% playoff-likely. Lose, and they’re down at 25%, facing similar odds to the team who, in this hypothetical, would have just beaten them. A loss would be a sizable setback for Dan Lanning’s program. Across the field, 35-year-old Spencer Danielson is trying to breathe life back into Boise State.
Playoff-Impacting Games
There are so many playoff hopefuls, and therefore there are a lot of games involving playoff hopefuls. Some we don’t need to mention in detail, not because an upset is impossible but because you get the idea.
Tennessee Tech at Georgia
Northern Illinois at Notre Dame
USF at Alabama
Western Michigan at Ohio State
Bowling Green at Penn State
Middle Tennessee at Mississippi
Buffalo at Missouri
Alongside Texas, Michigan, and Oregon, we’re thinking of these seven home teams as the core at-large playoff contenders, those for whom ranking is a bigger deal for making it than conference championship status. There are storylines here—you might remember USF playing Alabama in Tampa last year—but these are all take–care–of–business games.
Kansas State at Tulane
Arkansas at Oklahoma State
Baylor at Utah
These are trickier. None is a conference game—the Baylor/Utah contest was preexisting on the schedule and wasn’t converted into one that’ll affect the Big 12 standings—but they’ll still affect the Big 12 title race, and therefore the playoff. It’ll take good teams to win these games, just as it’ll take a good team to win the Big 12 title. With Tulane one of the better Group of Five teams, there’s a playoff angle on that side as well.
As it goes for Oregon against Boise State, Kansas State has never beaten Tulane, with the second of their two all-time losses coming in 2022 in Manhattan. That loss dramatically altered the course of that 2022 Kansas State season. Had they simply survived the Green Wave, K-State would have entered November a playoff contender. Instead, they had to play near-spoiler for TCU, winning the Big 12 Championship only to see TCU go to the College Football Playoff anyway. With a win, K-State’s playoff probability jumps to 42%. With a loss, it’s down to 18%. For Tulane, the numbers are 20% with a win and a mere 5% with a loss.
Oklahoma State and Utah don’t face as relevant of competition, but Arkansas and Baylor are both capable of putting a scare into their hosts. For the Pokes and the Utes, this is about continuing to establish themselves. The best thing Big 12 and ACC schools can do for themselves and their leagues is win nonconference games.
Florida A&M at Miami
Appalachian State at Clemson
Speaking of the ACC, these are the two most-watched ACC contenders, and understandably so. Clemson’s probably the ACC’s best team. Miami has the most upside, in terms of narrative power and maybe also football.
App State is one of those teams so many people have called a Group of Five playoff sleeper that they might be the Group of Five playoff favorite, at least in the zeitgeist. Like Boise State, they’re getting a lot of attention. They aren’t far enough off our radar for us to dismiss that out of hand, but they’re not at the center of our radar. We’ll be interested in what they can do down across the state line, and we’ll be curious if this is a matchup that can get Clemson’s offense right, or at least provide a reprieve.
Utah State at USC
USC is like Miami without the conference title hopes. They’re somewhere in limbo between two types of playoff contention. What does that mean? They’re not really in playoff contention. Not yet, anyway. But they’re among the country’s main characters, so they’ll get a mention here. It’d sure be a funny time for a letdown game.
Troy at Memphis
UTSA at Texas State
Four more Group of Five contenders, two apiece from the Sun Belt and the AAC. We’ve got the winner in Troy/Memphis at 12.28% playoff-likely, a number that is bizarrely the exact same for the UTSA/Texas State winner. In 1,228 of our 10,000 latest simulations, the winner of Troy/Memphis makes the playoff. The same is true for UTSA/Texas State. Very similar games, with some local rivalry elements thrown on top of the one in San Marcos.
UMass at Toledo
Gardner-Webb at James Madison
Liberty at New Mexico State
Three more core Group of Five contenders, Toledo, James Madison, and Liberty should all take care of business on Saturday. Our model’s concerned about Liberty, but betting markets aren’t, and this early in the year we tend to put more stock in the latter than the former (they’ll converge on each other in a few weeks, at which point either can be a worthwhile red flag for the other). That Liberty/NMSU one is a conference game. It’s head coach Tony Sanchez’s first year in Las Cruces, with Jerry Kill retiring following the Aggies’ 10-win season last fall.
Interesting Games
A few worth tracking, in groups:
BYU at SMU
Duke at Northwestern
These are your core Friday night options. Two good ones, with SMU a potential ACC threat and Northwestern a potential Big Ten spoiler.
Georgia Tech at Syracuse
Michigan State at Maryland
South Carolina at Kentucky
Some early conference action in three high-major leagues here. Georgia Tech’s is the biggest. The Yellow Jackets want to show that the Florida State win wasn’t a fluke. Syracuse is hoping Florida State’s just legitimately bad. If Tech wins, count them an ACC contender. 2–0 will be significant if one win came against FSU and the other came on the road.
Mississippi State at Arizona State
Arizona State was one of the most surprising teams last weekend in the good sense, walloping Wyoming. Was it just Wyoming’s transitional status, moving on from the Craig Bohl era? Or do the Sun Devils have something? This won’t tell us everything—Mississippi State shouldn’t be a world-beating outfit this fall—but it’ll point us along.
Texas Tech at Washington State
Oregon State at San Diego State
It’s possible a Pac-2 team will become a playoff factor. We don’t really know how the committee will treat their schedules, and at this point we can’t label any of either team’s games as unwinnable. Both play Boise State. Both play their primary in-state rival. The pair plays each other. We can’t give them the attention we can give even JMU yet—we can’t go around calling every game a playoff qualifier—but keep an eye on these two. Texas Tech only narrowly escaped from Abilene Christian last weekend. San Diego State isn’t as good as you might wonder if they are.
Eastern Kentucky at Western Kentucky
Marshall at Virginia Tech
Two intraregional games we could see becoming rivalries one day. EKU is an FCS school, but they aren’t too big an underdog against WKU, and they decided to take a little piss out of the Western Kentucky “whiteout” game by refusing to wear their home uniforms, forcing WKU to show up in red while its fans match the visitors’ white. That sounds so silly when I type it out.
San Jose State at Air Force
SJSU had to hire a new coach and the consensus has agreed to treat Boise State as the Mountain West favorite, with UNLV the trendy new team to watch, but these two could both be factors in that conference race. That makes this game rather important.
Southern Utah at UTEP
Idaho at Wyoming
Finally, the two places we’re likeliest to see an FCS-over-FBS upset. Wyoming had a bad, bad opening weekend. Idaho had a good one. Southern Utah? Frankly, they got run over by a Cam Rising-shaped truck, but a bad FBS team does just as much as a good FCS team for making an upset possible. It’s on UTEP to stop getting itself from mentioned in this space.
Big FCS Games
Three of ‘em:
Southern Illinois at Austin Peay
Montana at North Dakota
Incarnate Word at South Dakota State
Austin Peay won the UAC last year and nearly got through to the FCS Playoffs’ second round. Tough road game for a good Saluki team. North Dakota is no stranger to life as a sizable underdog. They beat NDSU by 25 last year in Grand Forks. Montana won’t take them lightly. We would expect South Dakota State to pummel Incarnate Word, who almost made the national championship in 2022 after launching Cam Ward’s career in 2020 and 2021. G.J. Kinne, the head coach from those seasons, is off to Texas State, but the Cardinals are interesting, and it’s possible based on last weekend that the Jacks have fallen off.
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To plug a little of our other content…our model has College Football Playoff bracketology and Week 2 picks, and Stuart and I posted two more blog post-y blog posts yesterday, his on Notre Dame’s quest to get back atop the sport and mine on the Big Ten’s helpfully weak bottom half. We also published this week’s college football futures bets from our portfolio. Plenty more to come tomorrow, and a little more on the way this evening. (I was wrong about this being the time the Big 12 adds UConn.)
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We do need to tell you that we found two issues today with our model.
First, due to—I wish I was kidding—a copy and paste error, the model was often treating the FCS National Championship, Orange Bowl, Cotton Bowl, and CFP National Championship as toss-ups. This has led it to likely overrate a lot of fringier national championship candidates’ chances while underrating Georgia, Alabama, and a few other top-tier teams. This didn’t affect average CFP ranking, win projections, or playoff probability. It only affected national championship probability. That’s a big one to mess up, though. Our apologies.
Second, we found an incorrect number in one of our formulas. We use a normal distribution to convert point spreads into win probabilities, and our published win probabilities were relying on an incorrect standard deviation, a variable carried over from our college basketball model possibly two whole years ago. This hasn’t affected any of our season-long probabilities, but it affects the numbers listed in Movelor’s weekly picks. An example: We listed Notre Dame this week as a 99.0% favorite against Northern Illinois. They are actually a 99.7% favorite, per our model’s math. Overall, the effect was much like that: It pulled win probabilities slightly towards 50%.
We’ve updated Movelor’s Week 2 picks to correct for the second one. We’ll run a set of simulations before tomorrow morning to correct the first. Our apologies for the ways in which we’ve led you astray.
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