Michigan beat Ohio State in Columbus. Ohio State hung with Georgia in Atlanta. Michigan wilted against TCU in Phoenix.
There’s a danger in sports to doing too much with the transitive property. In leagues like the NFL, you can often build one of those circles wherein, going transitively, every team has beaten everybody else. In Major League Baseball, this happens almost immediately, as soon as we’ve had a little interleague play. In college basketball, there are upsets upon upsets, at least most years. But in college football, the temptation is strong.
The source of this temptation—the temptation to view those three games listed above as indicative of how tonight might go—is that we have a very small sample of college football games overall, and we have an especially small sample of college football games between the best teams in the country. When we get games like those three, we want to make a lot out of them. After all, what else do we have?
We do have models. Movelor, our in-house rating system built mostly off of margins of victory and defeat, says Georgia should be a 9.7-point favorite tonight. SP+, ESPN’s Bill Connelly’s proprietary and very nuanced system, says the Dawgs will win by 10.9. FPI, ESPN’s other system which I *think* is based largely around yards per play, has UGA by 11.8. Bettors have bet the line to an average of 13.5 points, as of my last glance.
It’s dangerous to compare models too directly to betting lines, given certain margins in football games are more common than others thanks to the clumps of 2, 3, 6, 7, and 8 in which scores can occur. It’s dangerous to look too closely at models at their very tops, as well, as they’re often struggling to measure how, say, Georgia’s demolition of Mississippi State compares to Alabama’s demolition of Mississippi State. Still, this the best we can do: Our best expectation is that Georgia will win by two possessions tonight, a thought endorsed by our model, both of ESPN’s, and the famously accurate betting markets. TCU has somewhere south of a 25% chance to win. Let’s call it 20%. One-in-five. That’s our frame of reference.
How, then, does TCU make the one-in-five become the scenario that plays out? And how does Georgia make sure it’s the four-in-five? It’s a great question. TCU excelled against Michigan by selling out against the run in short yardage situations early, and by then breaking enough big plays late to keep the Wolverines away. In any game as a significant underdog, you’re going to have to take risks, and TCU took them. For Georgia, the game can be won in the trenches and in the secondary. Georgia doesn’t want to have to throw the ball to win. Georgia doesn’t want to have to make big third down stops to win. Georgia wants to pick up chunks on the ground, keep the Horned Frog defense on the field, and force Max Duggan into making bad decisions. It’s not all that dissimilar a script from what they wanted to do to Tennessee.
There are other hopes, though, and those bring us back to the questions from before. Maybe the Big Ten was great this year. TCU is certainly hoping so, and likely telling itself this was the case. Maybe the SEC’s down year was down-er than we realized as it was going on—perhaps Tennessee is a few steps behind our perception, and maybe Alabama really had some things going wrong, like they did back in 2018. Again, TCU is certainly hoping so, and likely telling itself this was the case.
Two ways exist to make a case for TCU: The first is that they will roll the dice and connect, and that Sonny Dykes will come out of this looking like Doug Pederson after Nick Foles outdueled Tom Brady in Minneapolis. The second is that contrary to all our data, TCU’s actually the better team, or close enough to better to make this hinge on things like turnovers and third-down conversions and kicks. Do we believe in either case? Not really. But who are we to tell TCU something different?
The Pack Are Back…to the Offseason
Aaron Rodgers’s future is a guessing game, but what isn’t a guessing game is what happened this year, and what happened last night. To get cliché, the Packers did not show up when they had to. Mental mistakes were too many. Big plays were too few. The team was just not good enough.
Have you ever played Madden or the old NCAA Football games on the hardest level with a mediocre team? You have to get everything right. The Packers, somewhat inexplicably, were that mediocre team this year. We didn’t believe it after they lost to the Giants. We started to believe it after they lost to the Commanders. We ignored it these last few weeks as they made their run. In the end, though, the mediocre Lions—boosted by some very fun and very in-the-moment playcalling and playmaking—beat them. They simply beat the Packers. Now, the offseason begins.
Gabe Kalscheur!
You know where TCU didn’t have a case? Its own basketball court on Saturday, where the Cyclones had it, blew it, and took it right back, the Kalscheur Renaissance continuing as the one-time freshman sharpshooter at Minnesota knocked down the game-winning three after missing a characteristic five shots from behind the arc earlier in the contest. The Cyclones shot 25% from deep and 33% from the free throw line and turned the ball over fifteen times, and they beat a tournament team on the road. The defense is excellent. The offense is significantly improved from last year’s. The roster is deep enough that Aljaž Kunc’s absence is hardly being felt. Now, ISU’s tied with the Kansas schools atop the Big 12 at 3-0, and they get Texas Tech at home tomorrow night as they try to keep pace. Tough game, but all of them are now.
The Top-Line Teams
Of the three teams we most believe in, UConn and UCLA and Kansas all took care of business over the weekend, UCLA dodging USC on Thursday after a rough second half while UConn answered the bell on Saturday, taking down Creighton, and Kansas won again on the road, this time in Morgantown. All three solidified our impression that they are good, well-rounded, and consistent.
Not necessarily well-rounded or consistent is Houston, but dammit do those guys play hard. With the game already put away against Cincinnati afternoon, Marcus Sasser was still forcing turnovers on inbounds plays after made Cougars buckets. Houston is the best team in the country. I don’t know if they can get through March unscathed, but they’re the best team in the country.
Also great is Tennessee, whose problem—they beat South Carolina 85-42, by the way—is not its consistency on offense but just how good that offense is. Although now that I say that: This is two straight games above 1.25 points per possession, and the better of the two came in Starkville against one of the SEC’s best defenses. Maybe Tennessee’s offensive ceiling is higher than we’ve been giving it credit for being.
Behind those five, we’re comfortable merging our categories. We’d been calling Arizona and Purdue “questioned” and the others good, but not great. Let’s just call all eight of Purdue, Alabama, Texas, Saint Mary’s, Arkansas, Arizona, Ohio State, Gonzaga, and Virginia good-not-great. My apologies to Rutgers, by the way. I thought they could win the Big Ten and I said so yesterday in our bets. I was very wrong.
**
Viewing schedule for the evening, second screen rotation in italics:
College Football
- 7:30 PM EST: National Championship – Georgia vs. TCU (ESPN)
College Basketball (best game by time slot)
- 7:00 PM EST: Colgate @ Army (CBSSN)
- 9:00 PM EST: Oral Roberts @ New Mexico (MWN)
NBA (best game, plus the Bulls, but the best game *is* the Bulls so how about that)
- 7:30 PM EST: Bulls @ Boston (NBA TV)
NHL (best game)
- 10:30 PM EST: Edmonton @ Los Angeles (ESPN+)
