Welcome to our college football newsletter. If you like what you read and want similar posts delivered to your email inbox, subscribe to our Substack. It’s free!
**
When it comes to evaluating the strength of a conference, there are two approaches.
The first is to look at the whole league. This is more common in the numbers world, and it’s a more reasonable way to answer the stated question at play: How good is a conference?
The second is to look at the league’s best teams. This is more common in the world of sports debates, and it’s a good way to answer the pertinent question for media companies like ESPN: Whom do fans care about?
This difference in approach is an important distinction. A lot of the time, when media and fans talk about how good conferences are, they aren’t really talking about the relative strengths of conferences. Instead, they’re asking how many of the best teams in the country belong to each league. This second thing, the answer to the second question, contributes to TV ratings. TV ratings drive conference revenue. Conference revenue helps drive how good a conference’s teams are in the future. The second approach answers the more relevant question, which is why it supplies the answers so often used. The first approach answers the literal question itself.
They say, today, that the SEC has fallen. They say the SEC is no longer the best conference in college football. This is not exactly true. The SEC is still, top-to-bottom, better than the Big Ten, and better than all the other conferences as well. In our model’s Movelor power ratings (power ratings which do care about bowl performance and have beaten betting markets in a growing sample of College Football Playoffs), more than half the 16 best teams right now hail from the SEC. The average SEC team is about four points better than the average Big Ten team, a gap comparable to that between the Big Ten and the Big 12.
It isn’t true that the SEC is worse than the Big Ten. What is true is that the SEC’s best teams are not the best in the country. Of those nine top SEC units, only one wakes up this morning in Movelor’s top five. That team didn’t even make the playoff. It lost to Kentucky, Florida, and LSU.
This absence of any national power from the SEC is an unusual happening. Even when the bulk of the SEC has struggled in recent times, the league’s best teams have often poured cold water on any skepticism, mainly by winning a ton of national championships. The SEC went through a tough stretch in the middle of the 2010’s, but Alabama carried it through the mire, and despite yielding the national championship last year, the league featured plenty of national contenders to open this season, led by last year’s respective Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and SEC Championship runners-up.
What went wrong, then, for the SEC?
That’s the thing. Nothing really went wrong for the SEC as a whole. Mississippi’s on the rise. Florida’s on the rise. Tennessee and South Carolina both had great seasons. Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas A&M are, for the long term, trending in the right direction. The SEC finished this season with a significantly stronger average Movelor rating than last year’s SEC, beyond what you’d get from adding Texas and Oklahoma. The SEC is getting stronger.
What went wrong for the SEC is that Alabama and Georgia faded, and that Texas has been lethargic for the last three months. (We discussed Texas at some length yesterday. Maybe they figure it out, but if they continue playing like they’ve played, Ohio State will peel their skin off.) Alabama’s fade is understandable. This was Kalen DeBoer’s first season in a new place, and while his team should have been better and had two (!) inexplicable no-shows, we expected some degree of drop-off. Georgia’s decline is more surprising, but it makes a lot of sense. After years of off-field issues indicated a lack of focus within the program, Georgia crapped out in the quarterfinals with a performance headlined by turnovers, penalties, and a dropped pass.
Next year, the SEC should be very good again. With so many Big Ten programs in serious no-man’s land, the SEC should again be—in the literal sense—college football’s best conference. But at the top? Ohio State isn’t going anywhere. Michigan is already showing plenty of signs of bouncing back. Notre Dame, Oregon, and Penn State are rising, and schools like Arizona State and Indiana showed how quickly teams can achieve national prominence in the free transfer era. There are plenty of SEC teams who can take the step forward and compete for a national title. But right now, three of the four best teams in the country belong to the Big Ten. The only one who doesn’t is Notre Dame.
**
Enjoying what you’re reading? Subscribe to our free Substack to receive it directly in your email inbox.
**
Speaking of Notre Dame…
Notre Dame 23, Georgia 10.
Georgia’s roster featured fourteen former five-star recruits. Notre Dame’s featured one. Georgia’s roster is expected to send three players to the first round of this year’s NFL Draft, and fourteen to the draft in total. Notre Dame is expecting seven players to get drafted, with only one going in the first round. (That one—Benjamin Morrison—has been injured since September.) Georgia had to play its backup quarterback, but its starting quarterback played so poorly in every notable game this year that no one is seriously pinning the game solely on Gunner Stockton. Notre Dame beat Georgia. Notre Dame soundly defeated one of the most talented teams in the country.
How did the Irish do it? Coaching, in both broad and narrow senses. Let’s start with player acquisition.
Lacking the NIL resources or recruiting pipelines Georgia enjoys, Marcus Freeman’s staff did the proverbial Herb Brooks thing from Miracle—they assembled the “right” roster, not the “best” roster. As plenty of others have pointed out, the game was full of key plays from veteran Notre Dame transfers. With the exception of Riley Leonard, though, every one of those transfers was a role player. Like Billy Beane or Theo Epstein finding undervalued hitters in the early 2000’s, Notre Dame picked up key specific assets who could help them win:
- RJ Oben, the backup defensive tackle whose strip sack of Stockton became the most consequential play of the game.
- Beaux Collins, the 55th-ranked receiver in last year’s portal who caught Notre Dame’s lone offensive touchdown.
- Jayden Harrison, an even more lowly-regarded receiver whose kick return for a touchdown pushed the game towards out–of–reach territory.
- Mitch Jeter, the long-injured kicker who got his body healthy just in time to go three-for-three on field goals, allowing the Irish to score every time they got inside the Georgia 45.
- Jordan Clark, the nickelback who’s been pressed into heavy usage in the wake of Morrison’s injury and was hardly noticed in yesterday’s game, a very good thing to say about a defensive back.
- Rod Heard, the corner who successfully defended Lawson Luckie on Georgia’s final scoring chance.
Even Leonard is no five-star, a quarterback with major passing difficulties whom Notre Dame prized for his character and leadership, traits which came through in the aftermath of the disastrous NIU loss and again a dozen times since. Yesterday, they showed up when the young man with significant NFL dollars awaiting him exhibited no qualms about going airborne for a game-clinching first down.
Notre Dame got the right players. Then, it developed them, development that was equal parts culture, skill work, and training. It was skill work which led Adon Shuler to jump the snap on Georgia’s first red zone play, punishing Trevor Etienne and sending the football bouncing across the Superdome turf. It was training which allowed bodies like Oben’s and Gabriel Rubio’s to hold their own against a Georgia offensive line which by every physical right should have gained five yards each rush. It was culture which empowered Rocco Spindler and Pat Coogan, each demoted to the second string in August, to hold their own against the likes of Nazir Stackhouse for three hours after leading the Irish out of the tunnel, American flag in Coogan’s right hand. The Notre Dame players who are healthy right now are, almost uniformly, playing as well as they could possibly be asked to play.
Finally, scheme and in-game strategy, to bring this back to the coaches once again. It’s fair to say that Mike Denbrock and Al Golden are the best offensive and defensive coordinator in the country. It’s unlikely that Marty Biagi is the best special teams coordinator, but he sure causes headaches for his counterparts.
Moneyball wasn’t all about winning with little money. The real idea behind the movement was using money in an efficient and therefore effective way. Notre Dame has plenty of money. It has for a long time, and it probably always will. In committing such a large share of that money to Denbrock and Golden, Notre Dame used the money with extreme efficiency. For the price of two transfer quarterbacks or four transfer five-stars, Notre Dame grabbed the two best coordinators in college football. The result? Missing a second-team All-American at defensive tackle, Notre Dame held Georgia to a sack-adjusted 4.0 yards per rush, and a sack-inclusive 2.8 yards per official running play. Offensively, the Irish could hardly move the ball through the air, but they nonetheless completed a respectable 60% of their passes, consistently forcing Georgia to tackle. Leonard’s 5.7 yards per carry made him the most successful offensive player of the game on either side of the ball. Denbrock and Golden covered their vulnerabilities and exploited Georgia’s, daring Mike Bobo and Kirby Smart to do things they were uncomfortable doing.
It’s a luxury to be able to shell out upwards of four million dollars a year for two assistant coaches. But it’s also a luxury to have a head coach under whom those assistants feel they can work. There are reasons Mike Elko once left Brian Kelly’s Notre Dame staff for a parallel position in College Station. There are reasons Denbrock was willing to leave LSU, where he’d just produced a Heisman winner, to coach Riley Leonard in South Bend. Brian Kelly is one of the most successful football coaches of the last twenty years. But in a sport where confidence is paramount, it turns out humility is a necessary asset at Notre Dame.
Marcus Freeman has always excelled at the interpersonal side of coaching football. Privately, we don’t know how it plays out. We only know that before his hiring as head coach, his players publicly lobbied for his promotion to the role. On the public-facing side, we do know what’s happening. It’s humility. While his first-round playoff opponent hammed it up on College Gameday, Freeman stayed silent until the game was complete. No matter who was responsible for the ten–men–on–the–field debacle against Ohio State last fall, Freeman requested the blame. Yesterday, it took a press conference interruption from his quarterback to stop Freeman from deflecting credit for the fourth-down punt substitution which pushed Kirby Smart over the edge.
Denbrock and Golden deserve a massive share of credit for the transformation of Notre Dame’s football program. Freeman deserves credit for being capable of stepping backwards and allowing that to happen.
One more moment of humility from the 38-year-old: This August, after two years of struggling with game management decisions, Freeman hired a PFF analyst—Anthony Treash—to guide him through games. Yesterday, as in many contests, Treash could be seen consulting Freeman from behind the head coach’s right shoulder. Freeman could be seen deferring to his judgment.
Notre Dame is not the best football team in the country. That’s Ohio State right now, and it’s Ohio State until Ohio State makes it otherwise. Notre Dame’s playing at its ceiling, and Ohio State is playing better.
Still.
It’s very hard to be the second-best team in the country when you have one five-star athlete on your entire roster.
Marcus Freeman is showing how good a football team can be without elite talent. That’s the story of this Notre Dame team.
**
Our model’s updated back on the site, and it’s got Notre Dame a 3.7-point favorite against Penn State in the Orange Bowl. In national championship probabilities, Ohio State’s number ticked a teensy bit downwards following the Notre Dame win. The Buckeyes check in a little shy of a 50/50 championship likelihood. The Irish are down around 1-in-3. Penn State? 1-in-7. Texas, the last SEC team standing, sits at about 1-in-13. This is a small sample, but Movelor has outperformed betting markets across the eight playoff games so far, and as we alluded to above, its long-term performance in playoff games is strong.
More to come early next week about the semifinal matchups. These next few days, the plan is to take a peek at the coaching and quarterback carousels and to try to convince you to watch the FCS National Championship. We’ll see you then.
**
Thanks for being here. If you like what you just read and want similar posts delivered to your email inbox, subscribe to our free Substack.
