It’s Going to Be a Shootout: Oklahoma, Texas, and the Rest of College Football’s Week 6

If you take away the Alabama game, Oklahoma and Texas are in the same place entering tomorrow’s Red River Encounter. Each is 5–0. Each has a quarterback hanging around the Heisman conversation. Each has won all their games by double digits. Each is aiming for one last Big 12 title to add to the collection before embarking on this new SEC journey. Each is trying to make the College Football Playoff. Each harbors realistic national championship ambitions.

If you take away the Alabama game.

The AP Poll is at its most arbitrary this time of year, and that is quite a feat, because the AP Poll is one of the least reasoned things our unreasonable species has produced. Before the season, it’s useful: It’s a ranking of how good each team is expected to be. After the season, it’s useful: It’s a ranking of how much each team accomplished. In between, it’s some nebulous combination of the body of work and the quality of the team, with some of those preseason expectations thrown in alongside a hearty dose of recency bias. Our diligent, scientific, objective measurement of team quality, Movelor, says these teams are nearly equivalent in quality, or at least that’s its best guess. The AP Poll does a strange dance where it says Texas beat the 11^th-ranked team, so they’re ranked 3^rd, and Ohio State beat the 10^th-ranked team, so they’re ranked 4^th, and Florida State beat the 23^rd-ranked team, so they’re ranked 5^th, and Georgia and Michigan and Oklahoma and Kentucky and Miami and a few others all have yet to lose and yet to be pushed to a close game so they all fall somewhere between 1^st and 20^th. It’s a weird little craft, the AP Poll, but what it reflects here is the following mindset from the broader college football narrative:

Texas has proven something. Oklahoma has something to prove.

What’s at stake tomorrow? At its core, it’s a rivalry. Its two schools who work closely together as universities but love to beat the other, two schools where the blood isn’t all that bad but the desire to win is strong. This isn’t Texas vs. Texas A&M. This isn’t Oklahoma vs. Oklahoma State. This is Texas vs. Oklahoma, the kind of rivalry where both schools enjoy winning more than they hate losing. That’s how it works when a rivalry isn’t particularly nasty.

Nationally, defining the stakes is a bit tricky. This is more certainly true for Texas than Oklahoma, but each probably has a loss to give in its quest for an invitation to the College Football Playoff. Each will likely be favored from here in every game before the Big 12 Championship, where there’s a realistic chance the two will meet again. It’s not so simple that 12–1 guarantees a playoff berth—the stronger 12–1 in the hypothetical where they split two meetings would belong to tomorrow’s loser, because the committee cares about conference titles—but neither team is facing playoff elimination tomorrow. What they’re facing, rather, is an opportunity to get on the doorstep.

Each of Texas and Oklahoma currently checks in at about a 3-in-10 playoff likelihood in our model’s estimations. We don’t have that broken up into conditional probabilities—where each would stand with a win, where each would stand with a loss—but we do have average final records: Oklahoma’s average record heading into playoff selection is 10.8–1.8. Texas’s is 10.4–2.1. Whoever wins will necessarily impress Movelor, the model’s rating system, so in addition to converting their 50% chance of a win into a 100% realized win, they’ll likely improve their future forecast. This means: Whoever wins is looking at an average record of 11–2 or 12–1. The winner of this game is going to not only be favored in every individual game until the Big 12 Championship (and probably even there), but they’ll be favored collectively across them all, favored to go 5–1, with 6–0 a comparable possibility to 4–2.

In real world speak, what this all means is that this game is an opportunity in which the winner will put themselves on the best playoff path in the country, one on which merely meeting expectations the rest of the way will more likely than not put them into the field of four. Assuming no disaster for Florida State, the winner of tomorrow’s game in Dallas will join the Seminoles as one of the two teams with the clearest playoff shot in this whole 133-team sport. Like Florida State, there will still be doubts about whether they’re the best team, or even among the best four, but their path will be clear and believable in ways that are true for none of Georgia, Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, or any of the Pac-12 contenders. The task for them the rest of the way will be to win five more games as a favorite, avoid losing badly or to a bad team in the sixth, and then win their conference championship. There will be other fringe scenarios, but they will have that little to worry about, and helping matters, they’ll have dealt a conference loss to their toughest potential championship game competition. Oklahoma doesn’t get to play Kansas State. If Texas wins this, they’ll quite possibly knock Oklahoma’s Big 12 fate out of its hands.

For the loser, the gate will not close. The path will remain believable. For Texas, it will likely mean winning out. For Oklahoma, it will likely mean winning out and getting the tiniest bit of help on that Kansas State front and over in the Pac-12. Winning out isn’t improbable for either team, too, especially before the presumed rematch. But the difference between needing to win all six of a team’s next six games and needing to win five of them is a massive one, and with every bit of added help needed from other sources, the gate squeaks that much nearer to shut. Tomorrow’s game, then, is a contest to control one’s fate. It’s a rivalry, more than that, and that’s the beautiful thing about college football. But it’s also an on-ramp to the playoff freeway. The loser’s going to have to take the back roads.

The game itself, plus 33 others:

The Big One

Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Oklahoma vs. Texas (ABC)

Prior to last season’s beatdown, Oklahoma had won four straight in the matchup and six of seven, including the 2018 Big 12 Championship which put the Sooners into that playoff. The beatdown Texas bestowed on OU last fall was so intense, though, that Texas leads on the aggregate scoreboard over both those periods, their 49–0 victory washing out a whole bunch of one and two-score defeats.

What went wrong?

Oklahoma’s spin is that Dillon Gabriel was hurt, but Dillon Gabriel wasn’t accounting for 49 points on his own. Oklahoma had a bad, bad year last year, and they’ve played well enough so far this season that it’s mostly been forgotten, but the Sooners finished with a losing record, and the Texas loss was their second straight by more than four touchdowns. Oklahoma underwent some major growing pains in Brent Venables’s first season as a head coach, and the shadow of all that still hangs over the program. This is why the narrative—and the AP Poll, following it—are so low on the Sooners. All objective evidence from this season so far suggests they’re every bit as good as Texas, but we’re less confident in what we have when it comes to OU than we are with UT. We saw Texas beat Alabama. We know they’re good. Oklahoma’s most educational opponent was either SMU, Cincinnati, or Iowa State. It’s hard to learn much from those three games. What does this mean? You could say that our best guesses at how good Oklahoma and Texas are land in the same place, but that with the uncertainty wider on Oklahoma and the memory of last year so fresh and relevant, their floor is a lot lower right now.

What we know about each team is that its offense can most often score. That has been one of our favorite aspects of these meetings in recent years, and we can expect more of the same tomorrow. The lowest score the winner of this game has managed since 2009 is 24 points. They’re both going over 24 tomorrow, or we’re in for a gigantic surprise. Neither Dillon Gabriel nor Quinn Ewers is likely the best quarterback in the nation, even if you remove Caleb Williams from the conversation and only worry about how skillsets apply to the college game. But each is very good, Ewers in the pedigreed, makes–great–throws way; Gabriel in more of a playmaking, free-wheeling form. This is Gabriel’s first Red River Conflict, but he’s enough of a veteran that the pressure piece isn’t a concern for him. Others on Oklahoma might find the moment too big, but that’s true of Texas as well. The point is that Ewers’s experience in the game does not outweigh Gabriel’s experience in college football as a whole. Texas is going to do more on the ground, and Oklahoma is going to do more in the air, but each should move the ball.

The defenses aren’t as great of strengths, but neither defense is anything close to bad. SP+ has Texas’s in the top ten. The Longhorns have held four of their opponents to two scores or fewer, while Oklahoma has held each of its opponents to 20 or less. This is the area where we know more about Texas, because we saw them pounce on what Jalen Milroe gave them in Tuscaloosa, but each of these two has been a fierce, comprehensively effective unit, and you would expect that especially from OU given what Venables accomplished as coordinator during his past life at Clemson. They will most likely struggle to keep up with the offenses, but that is not because they are bad at what they do. That is because these offenses are good.

Overall? I disagree with betting markets, who put Texas a full five points ahead right now and have surged past that. I’m not, however, confident enough to make that one where I’ll put money where my mouth is. Texas could easily win this game by more than five points. Texas is probably the better team. But it’s very, very close. More than anything, I’m excited for our fourth Big Game of the year so far. Kudos to Texas for involving themselves in half of those.

The Good Ones

We’ve got five more good ones, more than enough meat to take you through the rest of the day before we get to the purely fun stuff at night (talking Oregon State/Cal, which we’ll get to far below). Of these five: Four involve at least one undefeated team, two involve one serious playoff contender, one involves two undefeated teams, and two—yes, two—involve a team that might win the national championship. Here’s what’s happening, and what’s at stake.

Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Alabama @ Texas A&M (CBS)

I’ll say it: I think Alabama might be the best team in the country. It’s more likely to be the case in January than it is now, when they’ve had more time to improve, but I am far from out on Jalen Milroe’s ability to do enough that this team wins games, and I believe in the depth of talent to hold up better over a full season than that of, say, Texas. I think you can make a compelling case for seven teams right now as the best in the country, and I don’t think Alabama is among those seven, but that isn’t going to stop me from assuming the Tide are really, really good until they definitively prove otherwise.

Having said all that, betting markets are very high on the possibility the Tide will definitely prove otherwise tomorrow afternoon. All week, the line on this game has hovered around Alabama –2.5, and yesterday, it dipped close to even money. To be honest, I don’t understand it. Alabama might be down two starters, and Texas A&M has had a good three weeks, but saying Texas A&M is anything more than a talented team with a lot of issues is throwing a whole lot of respect in Miami’s direction. You get into a logical whirlpool fast with Texas A&M.

Something I’d love to explore sometime is whether more upsets in college football happen at night. I’m curious if crowds are louder, or if there’s something at play involving player’s body clocks. I have so many memories of shocking college football results happening at night, but I don’t know how accurate a sample those memories are. Anyway, this is not a night game, and the sun shouldn’t set until the game is long over. It’s supposed to be cooler and cloudier than it’s been in Texas of late, but it should feel like the College Station version of a nice fall day, with a little bit of wind. Expect volume, but I don’t know that Kyle Field will be quite as much a madhouse as it was in 2021.

The thing the Aggies are thought to do exceptionally is play defense. That’s what’s got them up to 11^th in SP+ and 16^th in FPI. They’re especially stingy against the run, so I can see a logic here which says Alabama is going to need to throw the ball to win, but where I get confused is that Tyler Van Dyke averaged 12.5 yards per pass and threw for five touchdowns on thirty attempts against this team. Tyler Van Dyke is a good quarterback, but it’s puzzling to me that there is so little confidence in Alabama’s offense to make something vaguely similar happen.

Movelor isn’t all that low on A&M. It has them 22^nd, still mighty skeptical of the Hurricanes (whom it ranks 51^st) while other systems have come around. The truth here is that Texas A&M and Miami are linked in every objective and subjective measurement. Pairings like this are often the case in the early and middle college football season. If Texas A&M is good, Miami is great. If Miami is great, Texas A&M isn’t necessarily bad. We’re waiting on that second data point, and we’re still waiting on it from Alabama, too, at least to an extent. We’re getting to know all these teams, and they’re all settling into their pecking order, and tomorrow is going to tell us a lot about both these guys, but more relevantly, it’s going to tell us about Alabama. Lose, and Alabama could still win the SEC but their playoff dream is in the ashes. Win, and Alabama retains a clear playoff path, and maybe even a viable one, depending how they compare to Georgia. Win big, and I’m probably going to repeat myself. Alabama might be the best team in the country.

Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT: Kentucky @ Georgia (ESPN)

Alabama should not be the best team in the country. Alabama, who lost by ten to Texas in a game that wasn’t particularly weird (it wasn’t Michigan vs. TCU, for example, where red zone failures made a few plays highly important), should not believably be the best team in the country, especially because they don’t appear to be all that inconsistent. This is how much Georgia has opened the door. Georgia has all the rights to being the best in the land, but they keep winning in unimpressive fashion, and it’s at the point where if we take that at face value—that’s how Movelor works, it takes everything at face value, a method which works pretty well for it—Georgia is not as good right now as Alabama. That’s part of where we’re getting this Alabama theory we’ve been discussing. Georgia has yet to impress.

Maybe the impressive performance comes tomorrow night. Georgia’s at home playing a Kentucky team that just ran the ball down Florida’s throat, destroying them from inside like they fed a grenade to a gator. Kentucky’s 5–0, and there’s a chance they’re a real contender for various accolades, but more likely they’re a little better than the teams Georgia has looked sluggish in defeating. The Wildcats are good, but it’s unlikely they’re a top-15 team, which makes the question here less if Georgia will win and more how Georgia will win.

If Georgia loses, which is almost always possible, we have a bigger story than Texas vs. OU and we can handle that story tomorrow night. If Georgia wins, though, what does it look like? Does the offense click? Does the defense stuff Ray Davis repeatedly at the line? Does Brock Bowers’s Heisman candidacy become more than college football journalists getting bored with the quarterbacks and remembering how cool the tight ends are in the professional version of this sport?

Georgia will most likely have a lot of chances to prove itself. But taking what they’ve done at face value, this is not the best team in the country.

Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: Notre Dame @ Louisville (ABC)

Notre Dame and Alabama are kindred spirits right now, and I would guess it brings some of our Notre Dame readers instinctive giddiness to see that spelled out, given how much Alabama has stood as the emblem of what Notre Dame is chasing over recent years. It isn’t that Notre Dame’s arrived, of course—though this really could be a better Notre Dame than the ones that have lost badly in their recent playoff and championship appearances. It’s that Notre Dame and Alabama each suffered an early loss, and each face a road from here that is passable but far from smooth.

We’ve liked Louisville’s ACC chances and sneaky playoff chances all year. We’ve written about Louiville more than most have. That does not, however, mean we like Louisville. They just have a great schedule for making the playoff, which is a theme in the ACC (and not because of the nonconference pieces). An example? They play Notre Dame on the heels of two straight Irish night games which came down to the final minute, and they themselves played on Friday last week, giving them an extra day to rest and prepare. They play Notre Dame at home in a game that’s way bigger for their fanbase than it is for Notre Dame’s. This is the recipe for a college football upset, and with Gameday elsewhere, it’s not getting spotlights shined all over it like last week’s similar recipe in Durham. Last week was not the trap game for Notre Dame. This is the trap game for Notre Dame.

If Notre Dame can get through it, we may learn some things and we may not. A lot of what we’re looking for is whether they look recovered enough from the trench warfare against Ohio State and Duke that they can enter the USC game on something resembling a level physical field. If Notre Dame cannot get through it, Louisville is going to become a real playoff contender even if they are hardly one of the best 25 teams in the country. I don’t know if this would be good or bad for college football, but if Louisville wins this game, you are going to see the weirdest contender in the history of the four-team playoff go to Pitt next week, and quite possibly go to Miami on November 18^th at 10–0. We’ve had fringe top 25 teams in power conferences make it deep into the season with undefeated records, but we haven’t had one whose undefeated record includes a win over someone as good as we think this Notre Dame team is. This could get bizarre.

Saturday, 3:00 PM EDT: Washington State @ UCLA (P12N)

The Cougars are in Los Angeles this weekend, trying to stay undefeated for at least one more week. The Oregon State result looks better after a week idle than it did at the time. With the Beavers beating up Utah (the same Utah team who shut down UCLA), that win over Oregon State looks less like an Oregon State fizzle and more like one good team escaping another. We aren’t ready to call Washington State one of the Pac-12’s good teams yet (we’re still more inclined to say that about Oregon State, to be honest, even given that result in Pullman), but if they can beat a decent UCLA team on the road, we’ll start giving them longer looks. They go to Eugene in two weeks, but Oregon’s going to be coming off Washington for that game. Let’s hang that gun on the wall.

Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: LSU @ Missouri (ESPN)

Finally, there’s something fun about watching early kickoffs at Mizzou on TV. I think it’s that it doesn’t look like power conference football but the place is still packed? The stadium’s a little too small, and the camera angle’s a little too weird, and Missouri’s colors are unique among college football’s biggest programs. Missouri is probably among the worse undefeated teams remaining, but this is an advantageous game in which to look great, coming against an LSU team that had high expectations but has now already lost twice. It is not believable that Missouri’s magic will not eventually run out. That’s more believable for Kentucky than it is for Mizzou, and it’s not particularly believable for Kentucky. But it’s possible Missouri will spring another upset here like the one over Kansas State and insert themselves into the space where we can’t not talk about them. To be fair? That’s where TCU sat last year in our eyes around this time.

For LSU, this is a really important game. To be a great program, it’s important to have a high floor, and while LSU has gone about its championships differently than other programs of its stature (LSU is more boom and bust than Alabama or Georgia or other peers), that isn’t a guarantee of landing another Joe Burrow and Justin Jefferson for the same season sometime. Brian Kelly’s teams have a history of seeing the bottom fall out. This is where the Tigers need to draw a line in the sand. If they don’t, their year could enter veritably ugly territory.

The Important Ones

Games involving a playoff contender and/or an undefeated Power Five team:

• Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Maryland @ Ohio State (FOX)
• Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Virginia Tech @ Florida State (ABC)
• Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Syracuse @ North Carolina (ESPN)
• Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: Michigan @ Minnesota (NBC)
• Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT: Georgia Tech @ Miami (ACCN)
• Saturday, 10:30 PM EDT: Arizona @ USC (ESPN)

It’s a shame Minnesota is having its worst year in a while, because this would have been a good chance to get a read on Michigan. Instead, we’re watching for the same thing we’re watching for with most of these others: Is the good team going to show vulnerability? Florida State and USC and Michigan are all in the mode of taking care of business. Miami probably thinks of itself in that mode as well, as they should, but we’re highly suspicious of Miami, so we don’t. They’re more like North Carolina for us—an ACC team with a sensational playoff path but a lot left to prove. Movelor would have each worse than a 14-point underdog against Alabama right now, and that sounds about right.

Speaking of UNC: Syracuse isn’t a layup. They didn’t compete with Clemson, but Clemson has a lot more talent than UNC and a lot more experience winning as the better team. UNC has found itself in this “maybe they will” territory often in the second Mack Brown era, and they haven’t broken through, and this is looking like a trap ahead of the visit from Miami next weekend.

The first one on this schedule but the last one on this list, Ohio State hosts Maryland in what should be business as usual but does present a great opportunity for Maryland to show they’re more than the Big Ten East’s best JV team. We are obsessed with the Big Ten East three-game season, and before the season we looked a little at Iowa and Wisconsin as the teams who could change that plot, but Maryland has appeared so far to be every bit as good as the Badgers and the Hawkeyes. Maryland is undefeated heading into this, and they haven’t had to break too many sweats. What this does for Ohio State, in turn, is give the Buckeyes a chance to establish that they are in fact a national championship-caliber team. Win big, and that’s the takeaway. Struggle, and their tenuous grip on second in our perceptions of the Big Ten East triumvirate starts to slip.

The Interesting Ones

Games involving an undefeated Group of Five team:

• Saturday, 2:00 PM EDT: Marshall @ NC State (CW)
• Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT: Fresno State @ Wyoming (FOX)

There are other Group of Five undefeateds (Air Force, James Madison, Liberty), but Liberty played last night and the other two are off this weekend, meaning it’s only Marshall and Fresno State here. Each of these should be tight. Marshall’s given us reason to believe they can hang with NC State, NC State struggles to blow teams out anyway, and Wyoming has been a constant presence in this season’s college football plot even if they aren’t a main character themselves. The game in Laramie is one of the games most likely to jack up the Mountain West race and the race for the Group of Five’s spot in a New Year’s Six bowl. We’re expecting both those races to come down to Fresno State vs. Air Force, but this is right there with Air Force’s trip to Boise as the toughest game left on either of those teams’ regular season schedules.

Others that could be worth your while:

• Friday, 7:30 PM EDT: Kansas State @ Oklahoma State (ESPN)
• Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Rutgers @ Wisconsin (Peacock)
• Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Purdue @ Iowa (Peacock)
• Saturday, 6:30 PM EDT: Colorado @ Arizona State (P12N)
• Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: Arkansas @ Mississippi (SECN)
• Saturday, 10:00 PM EDT: Oregon State @ Cal (P12N)

Kansas State continues to run the Big 12 government in exile, trying to beat Oklahoma State tonight soundly enough to get people to notice them again. If the Big 12 is to become a three-team race, Kansas State is the likeliest spoiler, and it’s worth a reminder that their loss did not come in conference play.

In the Big Ten West, Wisconsin tries to establish itself as the division favorite against visiting one-loss Rutgers from the East, while Purdue and Iowa each enter at 1–1, the former with hopes of this devolving into one of those four-way tiebreakers.

Colorado has faded from the spotlight, but they play a bad Arizona State team this week in a game which should tell us more than the ones against Oregon and USC. Colorado is not at the level where we can glean much from how they play against a top-15 team. If they show they don’t belong on the same field as one of the worst teams in the Power Five? That tells us something. It tells us their floor is higher than we’re concerned it might be.

Mississippi still just has the one loss, and Arkansas is good enough to make that one interesting. Lane Kiffin’s team is in a spot where it’s really unlikely they’ll make the playoff but they could conceivably get to the top ten by the time they play at Georgia in November, making them a present character if not a consequential one.

And in the late night action, we get to see whether Oregon State can make this midseason stretch a little run towards playoff relevance. After this week, the Beavers host UCLA, visit Arizona, visit Colorado, and host Stanford before running into Washington and Oregon to close the regular season. That’s a manageable leadup, and if they’re in a state where they can beat Cal comfortably, it bodes well for a longer-term rally.

The FCS

The big ones:

• Saturday, 6:00 PM EDT: Southern Illinois @ Youngstown State (ESPN+)
• Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT: Montana @ UC Davis (ESPN+)

The way the FCS landscape looks right now is that South Dakota State is on one plane, Montana State is on the next, and then about a dozen teams are trying to join North Dakota State on the third while North Dakota State tries not to fall off. Among the better of those dozen is SIU, but they play a tough one in Youngstown tomorrow evening against a desperate Penguins team. The thing about the MVFC is that teams’ schedules are sometimes too hard to let them into the playoff even if they’re definitely good enough to play in it. Youngstown State might be in that boat, and SIU could quickly flip to that situation from their current one, with both SDSU and NDSU on the schedule ahead in addition to South Dakota.

Montana is in a longer-term place of panic, having recently lost a game a team of their stature shouldn’t lose, falling by two touchdowns at Northern Arizona. If they were still having a bunch of playoff success, we’d be saying this is just a down year, but a lack of recent deep runs and the ascent of Montana State makes this all more concerning. They’re an underdog down at UC Davis, and while a win is a lot to ask, they need to knock somebody off at some point this year if it isn’t going to be an offseason of dread. The options for that upset are this game and those against Idaho, Sacramento State, and the Bobcats. This might be the best chance.

The good ones:

• Saturday, 2:00 PM EDT: North Carolina Central @ Elon (Flo)
• Saturday, 4:00 PM EDT: Western Carolina @ Chattanooga (ESPN+)
• Saturday, 5:00 PM EDT: Southeast Missouri State @ Central Arkansas (ESPN+)

Some interest in North Carolina: NC Central is the MEAC favorite and is getting some love in the polls but is a big unknown, while Elon just took down William & Mary to grab the CAA lead. It’s a funky time for a big nonconference game, but the FCS is not the FBS.

In other nonconference action, SEMO tries to right the ship after a heartbreaking loss to SIU and then a stunner at the hands of Eastern Kentucky. Central Arkansas’s a tough team to do that against, but if SEMO doesn’t get it done, their at-large chance is over.

In the SoCon, we’ve got a good one between Chattanooga and Western Carolina, two of the league’s three remaining unbeatens in conference play. The current thought is that neither is Furman but that the winner of this is Furman’s main challenger.

The important ones:

• Saturday, 3:00 PM EDT: North Dakota State @ Missouri State (ESPN+)
• Saturday, 5:00 PM EDT: Southeastern Louisiana @ Incarnate Word (ESPN+)
• Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT: South Dakota State @ Illinois State (ESPN+)
• Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT: Idaho @ Cal Poly (ESPN+)

Put Incarnate Word on that plane alongside NDSU. Southeastern Louisiana is having a terrible time, 0–5 after making the playoff last year, but we’re still trying to figure out what UIW is post-G.J. Kinne. Illinois State and Missouri State are each on the edge of the top 25 in quality, adding some interest there. Cal Poly isn’t much, but we’re trying to see how high Idaho’s ceiling is, so that’s another to keep an eye on.

The interesting ones:

• Friday, 7:00 PM EDT: Cornell @ Harvard (ESPN2)
• Saturday, 1:00 PM EDT: Butler @ St. Thomas (Midco Sports Plus)
• Saturday, 1:30 PM EDT: Yale @ Dartmouth (ESPN+)
• Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT: Florida A&M @ Southern (ESPNU)
• Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT: Northern Arizona @ Weber State (ESPN+)

The Ivy League might be expanding again in quality after its recent contraction into anarchic mediocrity, with Harvard’s upset of Holy Cross breathing some life into the league’s national perception. The Crimson are trying to follow that up as we type this with a win against what should be an overmatched Cornell. Tomorrow, Yale tries to shake off the upset by what should have been an overmatched Cornell while Dartmouth looks to establish themselves as an Ivy League favorite.

In the SWAC, we’ve got a big one between FAMU and Southern, a potential preview of the SWAC Championship and a chance for FAMU to shut the door that much harder on any Jackson State hopes of getting back into the mix in the East. More broadly, this is an opportunity for Florida A&M to beat another solid team, something which would help legitimize them nationally.

Weber State’s game against Northern Arizona shouldn’t have too much consequence, but the Beekeepers (sorry, he got to me) are still trying to rally after Montana State decleated them in Ogden, and NAU turned on the feisty switch against Montana and has yet to turn it off. That’s one where we don’t know what to make of either team but they’re both going to play in a lot of important games, so we will pay some attention.

And, in the little old Pioneer League, St. Thomas can’t make the playoff yet because of their Division I transition but they can still finish atop the conference standings. They’ll meet one of their two primary competitors for that status in the form of the visiting Butler Bulldogs.