Before we talk about what Tennessee’s return to the national scene means for the national scene, we’d be remiss to not mention how shocking a turnaround this is from the end of the 2020 season. At the end of the 2020 season, Tennessee was facing the unenviable task of resurrecting its disintegrated program while playing in the SEC, something akin to welding the two halves of the Titanic back together during a hurricane. The Josh Heupel hire had upside, but even that seemed to be long-term upside, with the most optimistic path not putting Tennessee on the plane of Alabama until probably 2024. If this is real, the resurrection has happened unfathomably fast, and while Heupel deserves a load of credit, this is also somewhat alarming regarding Tennessee’s other recent coaches. It seems more likely than it did even three days ago that the bones were there all along, and that Tennessee was brutally underachieving. Good for them now, and great for them going forward in this brave new yellow-orange world, but also: What the hell, Tennessee? Were you sandbagging us?
We should also quickly touch on what this says about Alabama, which is…probably little, in the long-term picture. Alabama’s loss to Texas A&M last season showed some vulnerability that wasn’t there in 2020, but national powers go through this. Every now and then you get an invulnerable program, but more often, when dealing with college athletes, you’re looking at teams with flaws and susceptibilities and downright bad days. We’ll get some clarity over the next few weeks with what happened to Alabama, but our best explanation is that this team is uncharacteristically sloppy, and that this is part of the program’s ebb and flow, and that Alabama should no more be expected to relinquish their grip on the top of the college football world than they were entering the weekend, considering they’d played somewhere around this level against both Texas and Texas A&M and simply not taken the loss. The fact we’re asking if Alabama’s ok after a loss even the biggest Tennessee skeptics say came on the road by a field goal against a top-ten team demonstrates that Alabama is ok. That’s a pretty great loss, as far as losses go. But, they’re not dominant. The Tide are not dominant. And they are not inevitable, in their division, in their conference, or in the nation.
Now, the College Football Playoff:
We jumped the gun on Friday when we said Tennessee was in with a win. They’re still probably in if they finish 11-1, but it’s not guaranteed. Our model only labels them 35% likely to make the field. What’s up?
Some of this is Michigan. Michigan walloped Penn State on Saturday, leaving the Movelor top ten looking like this:
| Team | Movelor Rating |
| Georgia | 48.0 |
| Ohio State | 46.7 |
| Alabama | 43.7 |
| Michigan | 41.5 |
| Utah | 33.9 |
| Clemson | 33.3 |
| Tennessee | 32.7 |
| Oklahoma State | 32.6 |
| Minnesota | 30.4 |
| Texas | 29.6 |
Those are points on a neutral field, and they apply across the board, and what they mean in the case of Michigan and Tennessee is that our model expects Michigan, on average, to outplay Tennessee by 8.8 points per game the rest of the way, adjusting for schedule. Play at this level, if you’re Michigan, and you’ll close by losing close to Ohio State to finish with an 11-1 record of your own, only one win coming by a possession or less, and best wins (over Penn State, over Illinois) that might not match Tennessee’s for quality but are more impressive to our model, which accounts for margin. Movelor expects Michigan to lose on the road to Ohio State by eight points. Movelor expects Tennessee to lose on the road to Georgia by eighteen points. The committee may view things differently, but in a matchup of 11-1 division runners up, it’s at least possible Tennessee’s win over Alabama won’t be enough (this gets more likely if Alabama loses another one before the SEC Championship, or if Alabama gets steamrolled by Georgia).
There’s also the matter of Tennessee’s remaining schedule. With Kentucky looking better this weekend, South Carolina on the rise, and Georgia looming, the Vols have work remaining to do that does not match what Ohio State and Michigan and especially Clemson have in front of them. There is a lot that can still go wrong.
Finally, if Tennessee does beat Georgia, it could come back to work against them. The most likely SEC West champion remains Alabama, and in a neutral-site rematch, the Tide would likely be favorites. In our simulations, a 12-1 SEC loser almost always gets in the playoff, but “almost” is a big word.
What can Tennessee do to really lock up a bid, then? Going undefeated would, of course, do the trick, but if they do lose, they’d like it to be a close loss to Georgia. Margin matters. They’d also do well to really blow out Kentucky, South Carolina, and the more manageable opponents on the slate. Margin, again, matters.
Other games, other fallout:
Alabama’s (Mostly) Fine
Alabama just lost its 12-1 non-SEC Champion path, because Alabama can no longer go 12-1 without winning the SEC (the SEC Champion is getting in outside of the absolute wildest scenarios). Still, Nick Saban’s crew checks in at nearly exactly 50/50 likely to end up in the playoff, even with its Movelor rating down closer to Michigan’s than Georgia’s again. The Tide have a tough but manageable Mississippi State this weekend, and then they get a week off before facing LSU and Mississippi, and then they get Austin Peay before they play Auburn. Running that portion of the table is the expectation, and if they do that, they may be in even with a loss to Georgia (or a second loss to Tennessee). The committee’s instructions are to choose the best teams. You’d be hard-pressed right now to find someone making a serious case that Clemson is better than Alabama. That’s unlikely to change. The committee doesn’t always follow that instruction, but if Clemson has one loss, it’s probably going to be worse than even two Alabama losses combined. And with Texas continuing to surge, Alabama’s win in Austin isn’t looking too bad.
Michigan vs. Ohio State
We’re more than a month away from this game, and lots can go wrong for each team, but on the heels of that stomping in Ann Arbor, you could make a serious case for this sneakily being the game between the two best teams in the country. It’s one of those things we won’t know without hindsight, but I’m not sure this year’s Georgia is as good as last year’s, and I’m not sure this year’s Michigan is worse than last year’s, and I’m pretty sure this year’s Ohio State is a lot better than last year’s.
Syracuse Is Not For Real
Syracuse remains undefeated, beating a shorthanded NC State on Saturday at home as the ACC’s ability to escape nonconference disaster continues to pay dividends, the AP Poll salivating at a team Movelor has rated 49th in the country and SP+ has rated 38th and FPI has rated 24th. The big beneficiary of this is Clemson, who plays the Orange this coming weekend. Clemson—who mostly handled Florida State in Tallahassee, not a small deal but the kind of thing eventual SEC West champions do on their easy weeks—is getting a layup of a game that looks like a big deal, and this is the third time it’s happened. Wake Forest sits 20th/29th/29th in Movelor/SP+/FPI. NC State sits 41st/41st/33rd. Notre Dame—who Clemson plays in three weeks’ time—sits 14th/43rd/21st. North Carolina, the most likely ACC Coastal champion, sits 38th/47th/38th. The Sun Belt might be better in two years than this season’s ACC. But the Associated Press doesn’t know that, and if Clemson goes undefeated, it’ll likely be just fine. Until the national semifinals, that is.
USC Is Better Than We Thought
Having some familiarity with numbers, we are among those who—unlike the narrative—watched USC fall short against Utah on Saturday night and said, “Damn, maybe we were wrong,” and then followed that with, “Maybe USC’s good.” The narrative shared the first sentence—the narrative has been rather clearly wrong about USC for a long time—but in the second, the narrative watched the Pac-12 lose one of two playoff possibilities.
The Pac-12 is not dead in the playoff chase. They don’t have a team over ten percent in playoff likelihood, but they have two (USC and UCLA) over eight percent, and with Oregon still alive in the chase themselves, the Pac-12’s in better shape than the Big 12 by a wide margin. The playoff pecking order usually goes: Undefeated conference champions, one-loss power conference champions who are respected, one-loss SEC and Big Ten teams, one-loss power conference champions who aren’t respected. Nobody from the Big 12, ACC, or Pac-12 is going to fit in that second category. But there may be only three teams ahead of the third. UCLA still doesn’t have a loss. USC only has the one loss, and it could be favored in every game from here. If you add all the probabilities up, the Pac-12’s shot at making this playoff isn’t much worse than the ACC’s. It’s just distributed across multiple teams, rather than being carried by one.
Au Revoir, Big 12
We’ve more or less mentioned this above, but the Big 12 is very much on the ropes. TCU is the conference’s lone remaining undefeated team, but the chances they win out (or even win all but one) are low. Movelor is a lot lower on the Frogs than SP+ and FPI are, so some of our model’s doubt may be unwarranted, but trips to Morgantown, Austin, and Waco remain. Visits from Kansas State, Texas Tech, and Iowa State remain. The Big 12 Championship probably remains. TCU’s comeback to beat Oklahoma State was noteworthy and impressive and exciting as all get-out, but this team is somewhere between Syracuse and Clemson.
The Sun Belt Sets
Before getting into our miscellany, a goodbye to Coastal Carolina and James Madison from our radar, as each lost kind of badly. Georgia Southern took down the Dukes. Old Dominion rolled over the Chanticleers. The JMU loss was bad enough to plunge the team to 37th in Movelor. Coastal Carolina’s always been a loss waiting to happen.
Miscellany
Alright, the thoughts:
SEC
We shouldn’t make too much of Georgia beating Vanderbilt 55-0, but had they allowed points or not scored at will we could have made something of it, so the absence of that happening is, in a roundabout way, meaningful. The Dawgs appear to have gotten their things worked out. Now, a week off. Then, Florida and Tennessee back-to-back before dangerous trips to Starkville and Lexington. The SEC is something else.
Mississippi remains undefeated, but after a should-have-been-more 14-point win over Auburn, it’s fair to ask if these guys are more fun than good. This is a testament in part to how fun they are—because they’re pretty darn good—but the probability that they get to the Alabama game unbeaten is less than 50%. They’ve got to get through LSU in Baton Rouge. They’ve got to get through Texas A&M in College Station. In the conference race, they have at least a loss to give so long as it doesn’t come to Bama—they lead the West by one in the loss column, and only LSU and the Tide have yet to lose their second—but in the playoff race, they’re currently behind both Michigan and Tennessee in a hypothetical 11-1 lineup.
That respectable performance was big for Auburn, who hasn’t embarrassed themselves since September despite going 0-3 so far in October, but it may still be delaying an inevitable reset. We should note here, for Auburn fans: Most resets don’t work as well as Tennessee’s seems to be going.
The rest: Arkansas went to Provo and asserted itself over BYU, Kentucky bounced back with a firm win over Mississippi State, LSU and Florida played an unexpected barn burner that saw the Tigers pull away in the second half. By Movelor, the ninth-best SEC team is the 31st-best team in the country. Because the SEC has so many teams, that’s only equivalent to the sixth or seventh-best Big 12 team by percentile (the Big 12 has comparable depth to the SEC, but the SEC also has heavyweights). Still, it’s a lot of good teams. Especially in the West, where only Auburn isn’t actively good.
Big Ten
Had Illinois simply beaten Indiana earlier this year, we would have a whole lot to say about the Illini. Instead, we’ll merely acknowledge that their win over Minnesota was emphatic and impressive and leaves them in a heck of a race with Purdue for the West.
Michigan State bounced back, getting on the conference win board with a two-overtime escape from Wisconsin, who’s now in last place in the West and no longer holds those aspirations of a dramatic comeback, aspirations that were relatively reasonable entering last week. Movelor does still view the Badgers as the third-best team in the West, and merely a third of a point behind Illinois for the title of second-best.
Big 12
Texas is sticking around, and we’re still unsure if they’ll receive the Kelly Bryant Rule bonus or not when the first rankings come out, but we’re hoping to do some work on that this week and get you the information by this weekend. They escaped Iowa State on Saturday in Austin in a game each team both should and shouldn’t have won. Both SP+ and FPI say they’re better than Clemson. Movelor disagrees, but narrowly, and still has the Horns tenth-best in the land. It was not the dominant Texas we were expecting—and Oklahoma’s bounce back against Kansas (what a sentence) showed that Dillon Gabriel’s absence in Dallas was a pretty big deal—but Texas is still a good team, and they still control their conference fate as they go to Stillwater next weekend.
Oklahoma State likewise controls its conference fate, as do TCU and Kansas State. Those latter two play in Fort Worth on Saturday, and while Kansas State was idle this weekend, it got good news yesterday as Tulane entered the AP top 25. The AP Poll is dumb and almost as meaningless to playoff selection as it should be, but you’d rather have the narrative supporting you than working against you. It can’t hurt.
Pac-12
Oregon State’s got a solid little football team, and even with losses to Utah and USC they could get into the Pac-12 Championship if they win out and get just a little bit of help (thinking a three-way tie that involves Oregon and one of USC/Utah and then breaks their way). A nice win for them over Washington State in Saturday’s nightcap.
ACC
UNC escaped Duke, and the highly comedic embodiment of the farce that is treating the ACC as a power conference is that much closer to fruition. The Tar Heels take this week off and then finish the regular season playing Pitt at home, Virginia on the road, Wake Forest on the road, and Georgia Tech and NC State at home. That’s a tough slate—for North Carolina—but it still leaves the Tar Heels ahead of Kansas State and Texas in playoff probability, which is quite silly and more than a little fun. The demise of the ACC from its 2016 heights is an as-yet untold story. We should tell it sometime. Wake Forest is doing hero’s work keeping this league from really taking on the 2000’s Mountain West identity.
Categories
The top teams, in quality and relevance, exiting Week 7 (playoff probabilities in parentheses):
Favorites (>75% Playoff Probability)
- Georgia (87.1%)
- Ohio State (83.1%)
Contenders (>10% Playoff Probability)
- Michigan (59.4%)
- Alabama (49.7%)
- Clemson (39.4%)
- Tennessee (35.1%)
Factors (>1% Playoff Probability)
- UCLA (9.2%)
- USC (8.0%)
- Oklahoma State (5.7%)
- Oregon (5.7%)
- Mississippi (4.1%)
- Wake Forest (3.4%)
- Penn State (1.9%)
- TCU (1.8%)
- Utah (1.7%)
- Syracuse (1.3%)
Cotton Bowl Candidates (Movelor Top 25, <1% Playoff Probability)
- Minnesota (0.2%)
- Texas (0.7%)
- Texas A&M (0.0%)
- Cincinnati (0.1%)
- Notre Dame (0.0%)
- Kansas State (0.8%)
- Baylor (0.0%)
- Kentucky (0.0%)
- Illinois (0.6%)
- Wisconsin (0.0%)
- Arkansas (0.0%)
