In college football, it is very difficult to be very good. Being good is hard too, it’s hard to win eight games, but to reach the mountaintop takes more, and usually only occurs after years of climbing. We see this often in the College Football Playoff, when the very best teams in the country meet one another and…usually don’t play all that competitive of a game. Most College Football Playoff semifinals end in blowouts, and it’s not unusual for the national championship to be decided by multiple possessions. If the top ten is Everest, the top five is the moon, and the very top position in the sport is somewhere out past Pluto, far into the galaxy.
This is the structure which makes it so noteworthy when a top team gets beaten, and which makes it especially noteworthy when the top team in question is thoroughly outplayed. Alabama did not simply lose on Saturday night. This was not Clemson losing to Pitt in 2016. Alabama was beaten on Saturday night, soundly beaten, thoroughly outplayed by a Texas team that might finally, really, truly, at long last, after many false alarms, after much joking, after more than a decade of overpromises and underdeliveries, be back among the nation’s elite.
For Alabama, the season is far from over. This was a nonconference game, and it looks unlikely to go down as the most damaging defeat a playoff contender suffers this year. Alabama’s margin for error is small, if it exists at all, but if Alabama wins out from here, Alabama will win the national championship, and it’s not unthinkable that Alabama might win out from here. In 2017, Alabama flopped at Jordan–Hare Stadium against Jarrett Stidham and Auburn. A month and a half later, Tua Tagovailoa took over for Jalen Hurts at halftime and won the Tide their fifth national championship of Nick Saban’s tenure. But Jalen Milroe is not Hurts, and backup quarterback Tyler Buchner is no Tua, and Saturday night’s venue was not Jordan–Hare, with Texas not as proven as that 2017 Auburn team—an inconsistent but high-ceilinged outfit which had pulverized Georgia two weeks before that Iron Bowl.
This was Alabama’s first two-score loss in a game other than the national championship since that Iron Bowl, meaning it’s the program’s worst loss in at least six years. Making matters worse, the Tide have been a step behind Georgia already each of the last two seasons. Last year, it was probably more than a step. Nick Saban is 71 now, a number that feels bigger than it felt on Friday. Steve Sarkisian, the offensive coordinator who took over in 2019 and in two years built the Tide offense into the historic Devonta Smith-led juggernaut, is no longer in Tuscaloosa. He’s in Austin now. And his Longhorns just loudly announced their presence in the playoff picture.
Texas’s playoff path remains far from easy. The Longhorns still have to play Oklahoma in Dallas and Kansas State at home in Austin, not to mention TCU, Texas Tech, and even a Kansas team which could potentially cause some trouble. Then, there’s the Big 12 Championship, where Sark will almost certainly have to beat a top-15 team in the rankings. But with a good chance of surviving the selection process should they reach it at 12–1 and one heck of a best win on the résumé, Texas’s biggest external threat is less their upcoming opponents and more the one they just beat. There’s a chance Alabama is no longer Alabama, and if they aren’t, Texas is not what the college football ecosystem currently believes them to be. Internally, they have to maintain focus—ask an honest Texas person and they will tell you this has been hard in previous regimes—but externally, Texas has most likely done the hardest thing they will have to do until 2024. Quinn Ewers still doesn’t look consistently spectacular, and there were missed tackles here and there, but Texas more than held its own in the trenches and the overall talent has long been there in Austin. Movelor, our college football model’s rating system, may only have the Longhorns 15th, but it’s fair to doubt that this early in the season, with most prediction systems still zeroing in on the quality of the teams while trying not to overreact to single games. This is a weakness of Movelor, and one we’re exploring ways to correct for next year, but Movelor should correct itself within the next few weeks, and if Texas overperforms Movelor’s expectations this Saturday by as much as they did in Tuscaloosa, they’ll be comfortably inside the top ten, right there with Florida State, challenging the Big Ten–SEC duopoly.
What I would say we learned, then, is that Alabama is not the best team in the country right now like we thought they might be. It could be Texas, but they still have proving to do, and part of that proving is avoiding peaking too early. With Ohio State and Tennessee struggling to make it look easy, and with Michigan and Penn State thought to lack the raw speed necessary to keep up with the SEC’s best, and with Florida State in the same boat as Texas, that leaves us back at Georgia. No, the Dawgs haven’t looked flawless in the early going, and yes, as we heavily discussed last week, they have significant off-field issues right now which imply bad things about their focus and discipline. But a weaker Georgia is still, right now, probably the best team in the country, and possibly comfortably so.
About the SEC, though:
Many a fan and commentator has giddily recounted these last three days that the SEC is only 3–6 so far against the rest of the Power Five. It’s true. Those numbers are factual. But we’re going to dig a little further.
We’re going to use a combination of Movelor and the AP Poll for this, and here’s how we’re going to do it: In each of the SEC’s nine matchups so far against a power conference team, we’re going to list where each school lines up in its conference using whichever of Movelor and the AP Poll make this exercise look worse for the SEC. So, we will say Texas is only the second-best team in the Big 12, because Movelor has them behind Kansas State, and we will say Miami is the ninth-best ACC team, because that’s where Movelor has them even though the AP Poll has the Hurricanes fourth in that conference.
The SEC’s wins:
- 3rd-best SEC team beat 12th-best ACC team
- 6th-best SEC team beat 8th-best Pac-12 team
- 8th-best SEC team beat 9th-best Pac-12 team
The SEC’s losses:
- 2nd-best Big 12 team beat 2nd-best SEC team
- Best ACC team beat 4th-best SEC team
- 6th-best ACC team beat 9th-best SEC team
- 3rd-best Pac-12 team beat 11th-best SEC team
- 9th-best ACC team beat 12th-best SEC team
- 8th-best ACC team beat worst SEC team
The SEC, then, has won the games it should if the conferences are all even, has lost the games it should with the exception of the one tossup, and this is using the least charitable approach we can muster towards the SEC. Is the SEC down this year? I would argue that it is. It only has one team who looks certainly capable of winning the national championship, rather than its recent standard of two. That’s still one more than any conference has, though, and while the depth is lacking—behind the third or fourth-best SEC team, it gets very unimpressive—it’s about to restock with two more consensus top-25 squads in Texas and Oklahoma. I hate the approach which only judges conferences by their best teams, and I do think it’s possible that the SEC is going through what it went through back in 2016, and I hope that there won’t be a blind default which places an 11–2 SEC team in the Playoff at the expense of an undefeated Air Force or a similar program. But I’m not sure how far down is down, I’m not sure we aren’t going to see Alabama rally and become that 11–2 team, and if anything, this is probably a blip. Get your shots in while you can, I guess.
The Playoff Picture
Last week, we used 1-in-30 as our cutoff for where a team’s playoff chance was good enough for us to talk about it. This week, we could go anywhere from 1-in-25 to 1-in-50. There’s a natural break, and it happens after 19 teams. Here are those 19, their chance, and how they spent their weekend:
Georgia: 55.1%
Georgia only beat Ball State by 42 points, allowing a whopping three points to the visiting Cardinals. At halftime, they only led 35–0.
Still, the Dawgs failed to score until the second quarter and they only managed 3.5 yards per rush on 28 attempts, both of which could be interpreted as displays of vulnerability. They host South Carolina next week, and South Carolina has not looked good, but it was pretty bad in 2019 when it won this game. The difference there was that Georgia had not yet, as a program, figured out how to play offense, but it’s not impossible for South Carolina to beat Georgia. It has happened two whole times in the last ten meetings.
Penn State: 36.7%
Now it gets interesting. Movelor cares a lot about margin, and it parses the exact margin pretty heavily and the exact opponent pretty heavily. It splits hairs between Delaware and Youngstown State, and it splits hairs between a 56-point win and a 28-point win. This is a somewhat flawed approach, but I think it has merit, and as always I would stress that Movelor is very simplistic and our playoff probabilities therefore get more precise as the season goes on. I’m not confident that Penn State is better than 1-in-3 likely to reach the playoff, and I’m not confident that Ohio State is only 2-in-7 likely.
All that being said, Penn State has played the best of themselves, Michigan, and Ohio State so far, Penn State has the best quarterback in the conference, and Penn State was one of the six best teams in the country last year. (TCU deserved their ranking, TCU beat Michigan, but Penn State was better than TCU.) These probabilities have four teams lumped between 27% and 37%. It’s not outrageous for Penn State to lead that pack. Also, we’re going to learn a lot more about these guys on Saturday. Illinois isn’t great, but they’re going to be the second or third-best team any of these first six teams have played when Saturday’s over.
Florida State: 35.6%
This is one upside of Movelor’s fastidiousness with blowouts. It’s giving Florida State the credit it deserves for obliterating Southern Miss. Is Southern Miss much? No. But they’re a lot more than Charleston Southern, and Movelor’s treating them as such. Florida State climbed a lot this week in Movelor’s eyes, and with Alabama opening up so much space, FSU is filling it. There still isn’t a ton of margin for error here—if FSU loses once and it’s an ugly margin, they’re probably toast because the ACC is so weak behind them—but Florida State’s median record in our simulations is already up to 11–2, and they’re likelier to win the ACC than Georgia is to win the SEC.
Michigan: 30.8%
Michigan rolled tidily over UNLV, and we’re still waiting to learn about these guys, and we’re still going to have to wait. We’d thought we might learn more by the end of the month, with a trip to Lincoln coming, but that trip doesn’t look as interesting as it did last week. Maybe Minnesota will give us a useful data point come October 7th.
Ohio State: 27.8%
Ohio State’s issue these last two years has been an inability to beat Michigan despite being capable of competing with Georgia, which is such a wild sentence that it’s hard to think much of it. They beat a Youngstown State team we have in the FCS top 25, but it was a hard game to learn much from. I guess one thing to say here is that you could treat our model’s probabilities as the midpoints within a wide range of possible “true” probabilities. Ohio State could be 15% playoff-likely, they could be 40% playoff-likely, our model is still zeroing in. Our best guess is 27.8%.
Tennessee: 20.9%
Joe Milton played a little poorly against Austin Peay, and like Youngstown State, Austin Peay is respectable within the FCS, but if Tennessee struggled against Old Dominion, it would pique our interest, and our interest is piqued. In the end, it was a comfortable victory, but this is one where—like Oklahoma State last year—Movelor might just be too high. We’ll learn more about the Vols this weekend in Gainesville. We’re starting to learn things! We have had two major lessons and now the smaller ones are going to start.
Alabama: 19.1%
Yep, still this high. Have you looked at their schedule? They get all three of Mississippi, Tennessee, and LSU at home, and they don’t play Georgia in the regular season. Alabama is going to either fall apart or be favored to win every game until the SEC Championship. 1-in-5 doesn’t feel unreasonable at all.
Another thought here: Arguments in favor of Texas are arguments in favor of Alabama. Arguments against Alabama are arguments against Texas. Texas won that, squarely, but it was not a punking. It was not Duke vs. Clemson. So, breathless reports on Texas returning to glory should not be accompanied with claims that Nick Saban is toast. Maybe both end up being true, but we’re not there yet.
Oregon State: 18.1%
The Pac-12’s best playoff hope? Our model thinks so, and it also has Oregon State as very narrowly the Pac-12’s best team. (Movelor has the five good Pac-12 teams all within one point of one another.) The Beavers beat the holy heck out of UC Davis, a team we’ve got about a point better than Virginia Tech. It’s not the most impressive thing to do, but it’s what good teams do. Oregon State handled that game like one of the best teams in the Power Five, and that’s exactly what they are.
Kansas State: 17.6%
After last year’s loss to Tulane, there was a lot of concern about Troy coming to K-State, but Kansas State had a fine time, only sitting within one score for 42 seconds after their third offensive possession. Troy isn’t the best team in the Sun Belt, but it’s the conference favorite because James Madison still isn’t fully transitioned to the FBS. Kansas State smoked a respectable mid-major.
Oregon: 17.6%
Our second Pac-12 entrant, the Ducks escaped Lubbock on a trio of fourth-quarter field goals after trailing by nine midway through the second half. The Ducks struggled on the ground, but they moved the ball well through the air, forced a bunch of turnovers, and made all six of their kicks. Those were six important kicks, and they helped Oregon survive a survive-and-advance kind of game.
Notre Dame: 17.2%
The Irish keep looking good, pulling away from NC State and rarely appearing to be in serious trouble in a game that had a long lightning delay after the first quarter. Notre Dame’s schedule from here includes two games which should be cakewalks, two games against playoff contenders, and five games against respectable ACC competition. That’s pretty conventional for a Power Five team at this stage in the season. This is not 2018, when the schedule failed to give a good measuring stick.
USC: 16.1%
Movelor has the Trojans as the Pac-12 favorite, really liking what the conference did with the USC schedule. I’m curious if this was intentional, or if it was predetermined by the league. If it was intentional, it might have been smart. It would be sad, but get your playoff payouts when you can.
USC beat Stanford 56–10, and that is less impressive than what Oregon State did to UC Davis, but it’s still good. Also, it continues to point towards competence on the defensive side of the ball, which is important for this team.
Texas: 14.2%
Finally, Texas. Again, Movelor will catch up soon if it’s really lagging behind on these guys, and 1-in-7 isn’t all that far from 1-in-5, where Tennessee’s at (it’s a tight pack right now in this third tier). Texas’s problem is that if you adjust for location, its results against Rice and Alabama were only eleven points different from one another. Maybe the Rice game was a product of looking ahead to Alabama or taking it easy in an easy win. Maybe Rice—who just beat Houston—isn’t as bad as we’ve thought. But equally plausible is that Texas is inconsistent and talented, a description which has been true of this team ever since Colt McCoy graduated. Can they do it? Yes. Is their ceiling the highest it’s been since McCoy? Yes. Will they hold it together? We do not yet know, and for as good as the win was, and for as deep as the schedule is, the potential losses would be kind of bad. Worse than potential losses for the Pac-12 contenders.
Utah: 13.6%
Utah, like Oregon, survived and advanced, pounding away until Baylor caved in. It was not pretty, it was not inspiring, and neither of those things will matter if these guys can keep winning until Cam Rising returns. Once he’s back, we’ll get a better idea. Until then, they can probably beat Weber State and UCLA without him, and avoiding disaster with those is all they have to do.
Washington: 13.4%
Washington rolled over Tulsa, but again, not as convincing as what Oregon State did to UC Davis. The Huskies get to play a Michigan State program in turmoil on Saturday. That’s one where they need to take care of business, and with our model unaware of the Mel Tucker situation, it’s one where if they do take care of business, our model’s going to think highly of it. This is part of what makes the slow reaction to surges like those of Florida State and Texas helpful. It helps head off overreactions.
Oklahoma: 9.3%
After looking like they could be a title contender against Arkansas State, Oklahoma was merely fine against SMU. SMU isn’t bad—they should win seven or eight games—but we were expecting more from the Sooners than a three-point lead with ten minutes to go. Importantly, the defense still looks good, and that’s something Brent Venables was brought in to make happen. They now get Tulsa next week (tough stretch for Tulsa) before Big 12 play begins. I think the Shootout is late this year because September has five Saturdays. We’ll have more intel on both OU and UT heading into that one.
Louisville: 6.8%
Louisville did what they had to against Murray State, who—unlike UC Davis and Youngstown State and Austin Peay—is a terrible FCS team. We still know very little about Louisville, and we still love their schedule. I’m surprised they aren’t receiving a single AP Poll vote, but if they beat this bad Indiana team in Bloomington, that will probably come, and if they don’t, well, we don’t have to worry about Louisville any more.
Iowa: 4.4%
One of two teams to move up into this terrain, the Hawkeyes beat Iowa State on Saturday in an ugly game that still bodes well for Kirk Ferentz’s team. It wasn’t that Iowa did something all that good, but they avoided doing something bad, and that already cannot be said of their Big Ten West competition. Illinois lost to Kansas. Wisconsin lost to Washington State. Minnesota looks like a worse version of Iowa. With no Ohio State or Michigan on the schedule, Iowa has a very realistic path to 11–1 despite only being a top-20 team in good scenarios. From 11–1, they get one shot to shock the world. That’s how the Big Ten West works.
Mississippi: 4.0%
The other team to enter the edge of the fray, Mississippi beat a Tulane team playing without Michael Pratt. Kai Horton didn’t play badly, but he wasn’t Pratt, and Mississippi avoided a loss. Was it a great win? Not really, but the quality of it is only going to matter if Mississippi goes 11–1 or 11–2, each of which is a scenario in which Mississippi would have either beaten Alabama or the SEC East champion, rendering the Pratt parsing mute. Is it possible it’ll matter? Yes. It’s a very slim possibility, though.
Other Thoughts
- Colorado is definitely a solid football team, and is much better than Movelor (which is projecting them to go 4–8) has them. Colorado is unlike anything we’ve seen in college football history, and we continue to be proven wrong. But. I’m not sure they’re one of the country’s 25 best teams. Nebraska shot themselves so badly in the foot that they have fewer toes left than the coach who beat them, and TCU did the same thing, and some of that could be a Colorado effect but a lot of it’s probably just bad football. I’m excited to see where water finds its level with these guys, and it keeps looking higher and higher, but it’s hard to make a case for more than eight wins. All seven good or solid Pac-12 teams are on the schedule. It is a hard conference schedule.
- I’d forgotten just how electric Jalon Daniels is. Kansas let Illinois back into the game on Friday night, but that was a scene in Lawrence, and the Jayhawks are probably better than they were last year, and I would expect them to beat BYU and enter that Texas game at 4–0.
- Miami walloped Texas A&M, but I don’t think we should be ready to sing Miami’s praises too loudly just yet. Florida State? Impressive. Texas? Impressive. Miami? Let’s give them a few more weeks. Or months. The ACC is very open behind FSU, but Miami has a lot of proving left to do. Texas A&M had proving to do itself. Beating a team we already knew could be mediocre mostly says that you beat a mediocre team. (That said, Miami fans should absolutely get excited about Tyler Van Dyke, and the schedule sets up extremely well to get to the UNC game at 5–0, so whether Miami’s good or bad, we’re probably going to be talking about them.)
- Tulane’s loss extinguished the Green Wave’s fringe playoff hopes, but with Fresno State requiring double overtime to beat a not-good FCS team in Eastern Washington, and with Air Force beating Sam Houston but not pulling away, Tulane’s still got a great chance to win the informal Group of Five championship and represent mid-majordom in a New Year’s Six bowl. Also, it was impressive how well the program weathered Pratt’s absence. Tulane had the game within a touchdown with two minutes to play. That’s an accomplishment.
- We alluded to this earlier, but the Mel Tucker stuff is disgusting, and Michigan State failing to escalate the issue to the proper authorities with more haste is mind-blowing. Maybe I don’t understand the recommended sexual harassment protocols, but it would seem to me that these accusations—which come with a lot of detail—are the kind of thing officials shouldn’t learn about from USA Today.
- We’re still very skeptical about UNC, and even more so after they struggled to put away Appalachian State. Great game, probably not good teams. One way to think about the ACC behind Florida State is a series of paper tigers preparing to get ripped apart. The problem is that because there are so few good teams and the one good one (Florida State) might be really good, it’s up to the paper tigers to rip one another, and it’s hard for paper tigers to rip. UNC hosts Minnesota next weekend in one of the weekend’s biggest games. I think we can count on the Gophers to make it ugly. I’m not sure we can count on them to win.
- That was a really cool scene at Washington State, and paradoxically, it is getting a lot more shine than it would have were Wazzu not about to become a mid-major. They would rather not have this all be the case, but that is one backdoor benefit. As for the team: I think Movelor’s right to have them around 30th in the country. The Pac-12 has five good teams, two competitive teams, and I don’t know where exactly Colorado lies among those seven.
- Montana State gave South Dakota State a hell of a game, requiring some heroics from Mark Gronowski and the Jacks in the last two minutes. North Dakota State probably isn’t great again, and South Dakota State isn’t what some of those NDSU teams were, but this sets up for really fun FCS playoffs in that there are so many teams so close to one another in quality and potentially a tight top three. Also: Weber State hit Northern Iowa in the mouth. The Big Sky has depth up top, and Utah might have a tough game coming up on Saturday.
- The FCS got three wins over FBS teams, with Southern Illinois beating Northern Illinois, Fordham beating Buffalo, and Idaho smoking Nevada. This brings the FCS to 3–77 against the FBS on the season, which is surprisingly poor. Meanwhile, five more FCS teams lost to teams outside of Division I, bringing the subdivision’s record to 22–8 in those games. This doesn’t say anything too meaningful, but it’s interesting to track, and what it does demonstrate is how football quality starts to overlap more and more across divisions the further down you go. The FCS is a fascinating little beast. Some non-scholarship, some scholarship, three conferences which don’t really participate in the national structure—just a lot going on.
