Michigan’s (allegedly) stealing signs. Ohio State’s (allegedly) financing the hacking of Michigan’s computers. We have rankings now, and (allegedly) the best team in the country’s ranked second despite being the fifth-most accomplished. A backup quarterback is trying to hold the once and future Big 12 at bay. A prematurely anointed king of the sport is trying to salvage his dignity now that the going’s gotten tough. LSU is playing Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and the late-night Pac-12 game promises to be as wild as ever. College football’s Week 10 is upon us. Here’s what we’re ready to watch, with playoff probabilities for the relevant teams coming, as always, from our model.
The Good Ones
There are some very good games tomorrow, but there are none I’d describe as “big.” There’s nothing on the level of LSU–Florida State in Week 1, or Texas–Alabama in Week 2, or Ohio State–Notre Dame in Week 4, or Oklahoma–Texas in Week 6, or Oregon–Washington in Week 7. Nowhere in the country do we have two teams with legitimate national title aspirations entering direct conflict. It’s a dirty work kind of weekend. Here’s who’s trying to keep their loss column clean:
Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Kansas State @ Texas (11.9%) – FOX
Texas probably isn’t the best team in the Big 12. We’ve seen them lose head-to-head to Oklahoma, but we’ve seen Oklahoma lose head-to-head to Kansas, so it’s a reasonable question to discuss again. Checking the three ratings systems we trust the most, we see ESPN’s SP+ does indeed have Texas in the lead, 2.8 points better than the Sooners. ESPN’s FPI? It has Oklahoma in front, 0.2 points better than the Longhorns. Movelor? Our model’s rating system? It has Texas as the better of the two, but…
It believes Kansas State is the best team in the Big 12.
What’s happened here is not that our model or anybody’s has lost its mind. Kansas State has been playing really, really well, with their losses each at least a month in the rearview and both looking more understandable with the passage of time. In the last two weeks, Kansas State has beaten TCU and Houston by a combined score of 82–3. TCU’s having a bad year, but nobody has been beating TCU by 38 points. Nobody besides Kansas State.
Opposite K-State in Austin will be a Texas team playing a quarterback making his second career start. Maalik Murphy’s first full game under center was a success—Texas won, his stat line wasn’t ugly—but his connections with receivers weren’t crisp, and while Quinn Ewers isn’t 2019 Joe Burrow, Texas isn’t good enough to beat good teams without some good throws. This is a dangerous, dangerous game for Texas, one bettors have down to a field goal-decided affair. Texas is favored. Texas should win. But Texas might be playing the best team in the Big 12 tomorrow, and if Kansas State does prove that over these next few weeks and Oklahoma and Texas don’t finish atop this league, you can bet that they’ll hear about it from Big 12 fans for years to come.
Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Missouri @ Georgia (65.9%) – CBS
How good is Georgia? We’re not all that sure. SP+ says they’re the second-best team. FPI says they’re fifth-best. Movelor has them third. Consensus from those who craft the narrative has them first, or maybe second.
Part of what’s going on here is Georgia’s inconsistency. They whooped Kentucky; they lived out a Florida nightmare; they beat Auburn by only a touchdown. Part is the absence of Brock Bowers, an absence which could lead to some forgiveness from the committee if Georgia’s on the playoff bubble but more pressingly matters in that Georgia needs to win games anyway. Part is that Georgia has yet to play a top-30 team. Thanks to some weakening in the middle of the SEC this year and thanks to a quirky schedule, Georgia plays all three of its tougher opponents in the last three weeks of its conference schedule. This week, they host Mizzou. Next week, they host Mississippi. The week after, they travel to Knoxville.
None of even these three are among the ten best teams in the country. Even Missouri’s 12th-place ranking is more a facet of the committee not liking any two-loss teams enough to pick a fight than any ringing endorsement of the ability of these Tigers. But we will see Georgia play a slightly better team this weekend, and we’ll learn something from the exercise. It won’t be a final judgment—far from it—but we’ll learn something.
Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Oklahoma (7.2%) @ Oklahoma State – ABC
We said for a long time that Oklahoma had a loss to give, and we meant that, and we do think that if they win out, they’ll make the College Football Playoff one way or another (especially with the narrative down on Ohio State and the narrative exhausted by Jim Harbaugh’s program’s penchant for pushing lines). The problem for Oklahoma is that if you’re losing a team in the middle of the Big 12, there’s a decent chance you’ll do it again. Oklahoma now needs to win five straight games, the last of which figures to be somewhere in the realm of a tossup against Texas or Kansas State in Arlington, and that’s if the Sooners even get there. Oklahoma’s now only about 50% likely to make the Big 12 Championship.
The first next step, for OU, is to win in Stillwater in the final edition of Bedlam (for now). Oklahoma State was one of the worst Power Five teams in September, but they tore through their October competition, sweeping Kansas and Kansas State while going 4–0 overall and averaging 40 points per game. We mentioned that extra push for Kansas State to beat Texas, the school that nearly rendered K-State a mid-major. There’s going to be something like that going on for the Pokes against OU. It’ll just be about one hundred times bigger.
Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: Washington (19.4%) @ USC – ABC
Caleb Williams may still be the first overall NFL pick, and he may still have a great NFL career. His college career, though, has nearly already reached the point of qualifying as a disappointment. The Pac-12 got better, and Notre Dame got better, and the preemptive parental leveraging for a better NFL landing spot now looks silly and obnoxious.
Thankfully, Caleb Williams still has opportunities left.
USC is not a great football team, and I’m not sure they’re even a good one. They hardly beat Cal last week, they hardly beat Arizona before their two-game losing streak began, and even over the back half of September, they were unconvincing against some fairly bad teams. USC has allowed its opponent to score 40 points or more in four of its last five games, and it lost the one where it didn’t.
The issue here is that it’s unclear whether Washington is all that good themselves. Michael Penix Jr. rallied a bit last week against Stanford, but the defense was atrocious, and the whole team was bad two weeks ago, when Washington followed up its program-shifting defeat of Oregon with what we thought would be the dud to end all duds against Arizona State. (Washington proceeded to dud again.)
As with Texas, Washington is the favorite tomorrow. As with Texas, Washington’s in a lot of danger. Like Oklahoma last week, Washington probably has a loss to give. Like Oklahoma this week, a one-loss Washington who fell to USC probably wouldn’t be a Washington in whom we’d believe to win out.
Saturday, 7:45 PM EDT: LSU (2.6%) @ Alabama (23.1%) – CBS
The lone matchup between playoff contenders is happening on the fringe, where it has much less to do with the playoff than it has to do with the SEC West. This will probably be the SEC West Championship, when all’s said and done, and with LSU playing much better over its last two games and Alabama playing much better over its last thirty minutes of game time, the story coming out of this is likely to be that the winner has momentum as they enter their sprint towards Georgia. Whether that’s true or whether the less underwhelming team won will remain to be seen, but that’s the situation in the rivalry that has so often defined college football so far in the 21st century.
The Important Ones
Thirteen teams enter the weekend with better than a 1-in-40 chance at a playoff berth. These thirteen are also the only ones with better than a 1-in-200 chance. There are paths left for others to climb in (Kansas State at 11–2 could get a fresh set of committee eyes if enough chaos happens elsewhere; Missouri could still win the SEC), but in the most serious sense, this is currently a thirteen-team race. Here’s who else is trying to keep the volcano at bay:
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Ohio State (80.1%) @ Rutgers – CBS
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Texas A&M @ Mississippi (3.3%) – ESPN
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Florida State (67.2%) @ Pitt – ESPN
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Penn State (20.6%) @ Maryland – FOX
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Virginia Tech @ Louisville (4.1%) – ACCN
- Saturday, 5:30 PM EDT: Cal @ Oregon (37.6%) – P12N
- Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: Purdue @ Michigan (56.1%) – NBC
Mississippi is at the biggest risk among these teams, only favored by a field goal facing an early kickoff and talented (though massively flawed) Texas A&M. Mississippi already faces a fairly unbelievable path, but it’s far from being a program that would scoff at a 10–2 regular season record. That would be a gigantic accomplishment for Mississippi.
Penn State has a lot to prove, written off after the firm loss to Ohio State and then the escape to Indiana. They play a Maryland that just lost to Northwestern, and Penn State’s only laying 8.5 points. The upside here is that if Penn State plays like Penn State played over its first six games, they should rev everybody back up about them heading into the Michigan game next weekend.
Louisville isn’t all that believable a playoff contender—that’s why they have a 1-in-25 shot—but their last five games, if all goes according to plan, are Virginia Tech (H), Virginia (H), Miami (A), Kentucky (H), Florida State (N), and they only have the one loss. It is an abominable loss—Pitt is not someone to whom you can lose and still be taken seriously—but Louisville has a chaos route to the playoff, and more relevantly, they have a great path to making their first ACC Championship. Right now, they’re tied with Virginia Tech in the loss column. Win this, and they’ll be alone at 5–1 in league play.
Ohio State’s in a classic sort of trap game, facing a team that makes things low-scoring, is coming off a bye week, and is playing at home. There isn’t much upside for the Buckeyes, and there is a whole lot of downside. We don’t expect to pay much attention to the action in Piscataway, but it could certainly force our hand.
Oregon’s facing a dangerous team in Cal, and the fact Oregon is favored by upwards of three possessions says everything we need to say about how good many believe this Oregon team to be. I’m not sure when the last time was that a Pac-12 team looked like it could be this nationally competitive. It can change fast—Oregon did very recently lose to Washington—but at the moment, the perception is that Oregon is not just a playoff contender, but could put up quite a fight once there.
What a situation for Cal to potentially extinguish if they score 63.
Florida State and Michigan appear rather safe. Pat Narduzzi just threw his whole team under the bus after a 51-point loss, and Purdue’s best accomplishment so far this year is that they hung with Fresno State.
The Interesting Ones
The playoff is not the point. More college football worth watching, grouped by conference(-ish):
Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Notre Dame @ Clemson – ABC
Dabo Swinney is now hearing it from at least a small segment of Clemson fans, presumably those who have no idea what this program used to be and how far it’s come in Swinney’s tenure (how it did that, we will not further discuss right now). He’s got a great chance to rally against Notre Dame, and Notre Dame has a corresponding great chance to assert themselves as a top-ten squad, in quality if not the rankings.
Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT: Kansas @ Iowa State – ESPN
Kansas is riding high after beating Oklahoma, but an argument can be made that it was more Oklahoma who beat Oklahoma than the Jayhawks. Iowa State is favored here, and as one of five 4–1 teams in Big 12 play, Iowa State has a direct path to the Big 12 title game. It’s an unlikely path, but it’s direct. Plenty to prove on both sides of the field.
Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Iowa vs. Northwestern – Peacock
If you like college football and Iowa doesn’t interest you, I’m not sure you like college football. What a fascinating team. This weekend, they play at Wrigley Field, which is also interesting. This section is about interest! This game is interesting!
Saturday, 10:00 PM EDT: Oregon State @ Colorado – ESPN
Saturday, 10:30 PM EDT: UCLA @ Arizona – FS1
When we mentioned the late-night Pac-12 above, we were referencing UCLA and Arizona, the latter of whom has played like the second-best team in the league over its last three games. Oregon State and Colorado might play a good one as well, though. The thing about Colorado, or at least my current working theory, is that the quality of their top-end talent and the lack of any sort of time to build program infrastructure only exacerbates the already chaotic nature of Deion Sanders’s operation. They are a wildcard.
Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Jacksonville State @ South Carolina – ESPNU
Gamecocks! Jacksonville State’s 7–2, and they’re a big underdog, but they could eliminate South Carolina from bowl contention and give us yet another good Rich Rodriguez moment in 2023.
Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Tulane @ East Carolina – ESPNU
Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: SMU @ Rice – ESPNU
SMU has loudly entered the AAC discussion, and with it the New Year’s Six picture. They’ve got two losses, but each was to a Big 12 foe, and the committee just showed us what they think of the young men at the Air Force Academy who are preparing to defend our country in hypothetical foreign wars. They’ll try to beat JT Daniels and Rice after Tulane tries to make the latest notch on East Carolina’s belt of tragedy.
Saturday, 2:30 PM EDT: Army vs. Air Force – CBSSN
Air Force is either the best Group of Five team or very close, and they’re either the most accomplished or very close. Army is their next test. This one’s in Denver.
Saturday, 10:00 PM EDT: Boise State @ Fresno State – CBSSN
While Air Force fulfills its obligations elsewhere, the Mountain West still gets a mid-major blockbuster, with Boise State facing some limited danger of missing a bowl and also a potential chance at making the conference championship game. Fresno State would still like to leapfrog Tulane, and if they win out, they might. Right now, Fresno State is with Air Force, Tulane, and SMU as one of the four to watch for that New Year’s Six spot, one we’d say signifies the mid-major national championship.
Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: James Madison @ Georgia State – ESPN2
Saturday, 5:00 PM EDT: Georgia Southern @ Texas State – ESPN+
We didn’t get this out yesterday, so no preemptive talk about Troy–South Alabama, but the Trojans got a great big win over the Jaguars, keeping a one-game lead on the Sun Belt’s West division. In the East, Georgia Southern looks to keep its lead on the conference championship slot while JMU tries to stay undefeated. The Sun Belt is good now. It’s not about to be good. It’s just good.
The FCS
If there is a “big” game this weekend, it’s in Brookings. It should be, rather. North Dakota State’s stumble has made the Dakota Marker stand a little shorter this year. FCS games of note, again grouped by conference(-ish):
Saturday, 2:00 PM EDT: South Dakota @ Southern Illinois – ESPN+
Saturday, 3:00 PM EDT: North Dakota State @ South Dakota State – ESPN+
Betting lines aren’t out yet for the FCS, at least where we’re looking, but Movelor has South Dakota State favored by 14 over the Bison. This is not the game it’s been. But then again…what if it is? Either way, NDSU’s still one of the better teams in the FCS, making this a big measuring stick for SDSU. You could even call it a measuring marker.
Down in Carbondale, SIU and South Dakota are each 6–2 overall, and I would guess it’d be hard for a 7–4 team to make the playoffs. Byes are in play for these guys.
Saturday, 3:00 PM EDT: Northern Arizona @ Montana State – ESPN+
Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT: Sacramento State @ Montana – ESPN+
In the Big Sky, Montana State has to rally from the Idaho loss and deal with a Northern Arizona team that’s made big noise on a few occasions this season. Montana, meanwhile, has completely resurrected itself since the NAU loss (that was one of the big noise occasions) and tries to keep the Cat-Griz game the de facto Big Sky Championship.
Saturday, 1:30 PM EDT: Furman @ Chattanooga – ESPN+
The de facto SoCon championship is happening in Tennessee, where Furman is three wins away from an undefeated conference season (they’ll be a big favorite in the next two) and UTC is wrapping up its FCS regular season, with only Alabama left before the playoffs. Movelor has Furman by 3.5. It should be close.
Saturday, 1:00 PM EDT: Villanova @ New Hampshire (Flo)
Saturday, 1:00 PM EDT: William & Mary @ Albany (Flo)
The CAA gets a little more love from the polls than it deserves, but through that or independently of that, all four of these teams have a playoff chance, making these high-leverage games. Not bad teams. Just maybe not always as good as their ranking.
Saturday, 4:00 PM EDT: Nicholls @ Incarnate Word – ESPN+
Saturday, 5:00 PM EDT: Austin Peay @ Eastern Kentucky – ESPN+
In the Southland and over in the UAC, we see a familiar script: Incarnate Word and Austin Peay are both possibly top-ten teams (especially Austin Peay), and they each are facing one of the final threats in the way of their respective conference titles.
Friday, 7:00 PM EDT: Princeton @ Dartmouth – ESPNU
Tonight (wow, this is the only Friday night action to make the cut), Princeton looks to keep itself to the one Ivy League loss while Dartmouth tries to throw the league into even greater chaos and reinsert itself into the title hunt (seven Ivy League teams are either 3–1 or 2–2).
Saturday, 3:00 PM EDT: Southern @ Alcorn State – ESPN+
Last, the SWAC West might have its championship. Both these teams are 4–1 in conference play, tied atop that division with most of the schedule complete.
