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I think there were eight good teams.
Maybe seven. Maybe it was seven good teams.
This is ok. This isn’t a post about the playoff format.
But after a playoff first round which mostly served to reinforce our perceptions of the teams involved, seven or eight seems to be the number of top-tier teams in college football this season.
Of those seven or eight, six are still playing. One or two of them played their way out of this in November, good enough but not consistent enough. Four of them won this weekend, decisively. Two of them didn’t have to play this weekend, having secured byes by not only being good enough and consistent enough, but also taking care of business within their respective conferences.
This isn’t intended as disrespect towards Arizona State and Boise State. It’s been a magical season for each, and I wouldn’t personally mind seeing that magic continue past the Peach Bowl and the Fiesta Bowl. But from what we can tell, ASU and Boise don’t play football on the same level as Oregon, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Penn State, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, and possibly Mississippi. (Mississippi is the “or eight.” I don’t know whether they belong in that group or not. The more I think about it, the more I think they don’t, but they’re the question mark.) Those seven or eight teams are hard to put in order. We know Oregon’s the most accomplished by a country mile, but the Ducks are currently a Rose Bowl underdog in betting markets. We’re comfortable putting Penn State behind its Big Ten peers and Georgia ahead of Texas, but how does Texas compare to Penn State? To Notre Dame? To Oregon? We don’t know.
In that sense, you could call this a good year for this playoff system. It was selective enough to make Alabama earn a spot (Alabama didn’t). It was large enough to get the six good–and–accomplished teams into the mix. It will likely show us who is the best of those six. It will likely only be unfair to Oregon.
We were very close to having another team in Oregon’s shoes, a second team clearly both good and accomplished. Had Notre Dame simply beaten NIU (and gone on to play as well as they’ve played since, not necessarily a guarantee in that alternate universe), the Irish would also be 13–0 right now, and we’d say you could call this a good year for the BCS system. But, Notre Dame didn’t beat NIU, and instead we have these two underdogs in ASU and Boise, this one perfect résumé in Oregon, and five capable teams who played flawed football during the regular season. The presence of so many flaws is new to college football’s championship hunt, but it’s what this sport is now. This is the twelve-team era. You used to need to be more accomplished than even Georgia—the SEC champions—to have a national championship chance. You used to need to be better than Tennessee, the best team eliminated this weekend.
We should talk about Georgia for a moment, because in that universe where Notre Dame didn’t lose to NIU, even those calling this a good year for a two-team playoff would have had their critics. The last twenty years have seen such heavy Southeastern Conference dominance that a playoff without the most accomplished SEC team would feel illegitimate to many, myself included. This was the issue which tortured the committee last season. But Alabama didn’t beat Michigan last playoff, and Tennessee was run off the field Saturday night by Ohio State, and while Texas looked good and is good, Saturday’s was another B-plus performance from the Longhorns, a team whom the SEC Championship indicated is right about as capable as Georgia, especially now that Georgia’s reportedly starting Gunner Stockton. In short? While we’re still confident that the SEC is the best conference in college football, top to bottom, we still don’t know if its top teams are on par with the Big Ten’s. That’s the biggest question we’re waiting to find out as these next four weeks of football progress. Right now, it looks like the two current best teams in the country are going to meet in the Rose Bowl. Right now, it looks like those who want the national championship played in Pasadena are getting their wish.
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Indiana Isn’t There Yet
We talked about Notre Dame and Indiana on Saturday, but a quick recap, with two more days to think about it and those two days changing nothing about our reaction:
Notre Dame had the better athletes, and Notre Dame was the better team. The ten-point final score is convenient for Curt Cignetti optically, but Cignetti’s team was overmatched. Maybe it was his recognition of this which led him to play so conservatively. Maybe it was spite towards Kurtis Rourke after one of Indiana’s greatest all-time quarterbacks threw a devastating interception with the Hoosiers poised to take an early lead. Whatever the case, Cignetti took the ball out of Rourke’s hands until the game was out of reach, and Indiana’s run game had no chance against Notre Dame’s front seven. On the other side of the ball? Three yards and a cloud of dust. Or, you know, 98 yards and a stadium releasing decades of pent-up postseason frustration as Jeremiyah Love covered that ball with both hands and staked the Irish to a 7–0 lead.
That’s Who Kevin Jennings Is
I saw a little bit of criticism of Rhett Lashlee for coaching like Cignetti, and that felt extreme to me. The very thing which started the Kevin Jennings debacle in State College was Lashlee doing the smart, courageous thing and going for it on that early 4th-and-1 in the Penn State red zone. SMU would have gotten the first down, but Jennings threw to the endzone instead of tucking it on the bootleg and grabbing the necessary yard. It was a bad omen for an electric quarterback prone to making poor decisions, and two pick-sixes later, the rout was on. There was chatter at halftime about removing Jennings from the game, but that too would have been cowardly. Jennings gave SMU a chance to win. He also gave them a chance to trail by 35 points early in the fourth quarter.
Penn State’s getting a lot of love for their performance, and deservedly so. It was a strong performance. They dominated one of the twenty best teams in the country. But Penn State didn’t exactly move the ball at will, and if Penn State gets past Boise State, Penn State will deal with better defenses than SMU’s the rest of the way.
Texas’s Offense Clicked
It wasn’t a perfect showing from Texas’s offense, but it was very good, and for a unit which hasn’t looked itself since the Oklahoma game, that’s undoubtedly heartening. The issues for Texas are that the Longhorns seemed to fall asleep for a long stretch of a playoff game and that the defense had a terrible time covering Clemson’s receivers. Is Cade Klubnik that good? Did Texas’s cornerbacks have a rough but meaningless afternoon? Against Sam Leavitt, that kind of performance might lead to enough easy scores to make the Peach Bowl scary for the team in white. Against Dillon Gabriel or the Ohio State receiving corps, it could mean season over.
Maybe Michigan Deserves More Credit
In a weekend full of impressive performances, Ohio State was far and away the best team on any field, unless we’re getting something very wrong about a number of other teams in this country. Aside from a brief stretch around halftime when it looked like the Volunteers might claw their way back into things, the Buckeyes were on a different plane from Tennessee. Ohio State looked every bit like the national championship favorite their roster and most of their performances indicate they should be. But to address the performance which doesn’t indicate that:
Criticism of Ryan Day and Chip Kelly is warranted over their approach to that Michigan loss. Apologies to Indiana fans still reading, but they coached like Curt Cignetti coaches when he wants to make a 40-point game a 23-point final score, or a 30-point game a 10-point final score. Still, we might not be giving enough credit to Michigan. The Wolverines played four playoff teams this year. They beat one, hung with another, and didn’t get beat any worse by the other two than Tennessee or SMU got beat this weekend. There are the other two losses too—road defeats to Washington and Illinois—but for all our heavy criticism of Sherrone Moore early in the year, maybe things in Ann Arbor aren’t as bad as they appear.
Ohio State is a good program with a massive Michigan problem.
But maybe Michigan isn’t as terrible as we thought.
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How the national championship probabilities moved in our model’s eyes, in order of where they now stand:
- Oregon: 29.9% to 25.4%
- Ohio State: 14.6% to 22.7%
- Notre Dame: 29.1% to 21.2%
- Penn State: 8.5% to 13.4%
- Texas: 8.0% to 10.1%
- Georgia: 7.2% to 6.8%
- Arizona State: 0.5% to 0.3%
- Boise State: 0.2% to 0.1%
None of the teams who lost had better than a 1-in-200 title shot on Friday morning.
Not a lot of dramatic movement, with most of Ohio State’s leap over Notre Dame reflecting how Movelor, our model’s rating system, now thinks the Buckeyes are better than the Irish.
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To throw a quick bone to the FCS: the Dakota Marker rematch was awesome. Bryce Lance (yep, Trey Lance’s brother) had a day out wide for the Bison. With Montana State outplaying South Dakota, we’re set up for the most compelling FCS National Championship since the end of the 2019 season, when unbeaten North Dakota State and James Madison squared off. We really can’t quit the Curt Cignetti allusions today.
January 6th: Bobcats vs. Bison. Plenty more about that matchup when it arrives.
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