Iowa State is in a world of hurt, sitting at 3-3 after a trio of losses decided by an average of about four points. One of those—Baylor—was on the defense. One of those—Kansas—was on the special teams. One of those—Kansas State—was on the offense. It’s the kind of season we expected all spring and summer, with so much roster transition, but it’s not the season we expected three weeks ago, when the Cyclones were undefeated and the trip to Lawrence still felt like a relatively safe date.
From here, ISU goes on the road to play Texas before taking its week off. After that, it’s Oklahoma at home, West Virginia at home, Oklahoma State in Stillwater, Texas Tech at home, and TCU in Fort Worth. Currently, Movelor has two of those as Cyclone wins, two as Cyclone losses, and two with spreads thinner than a quarter of a point. SP+, to offer a second opinion, has both the Movelor tossups as Cyclone losses.
In the worst paradigm, then, Iowa State needs to take care of business and steal one game if it’s going to make a bowl, with one of the two best theft opportunities coming after a week idle and coming before the end of October. That’s not the worst place to be if making a bowl is the goal, and making a bowl is, suddenly, the goal. Every competitive Big 12 team has conference title aspirations until they don’t, and once they don’t, making a bowl is the aspirational floor, aside from beating the archrival (which Iowa State’s already done). But with that said…
It wouldn’t be a disaster if ISU missed a bowl game. The 2023 recruiting class is still projected to be the program’s best in the modern era. Matt Campbell seems equally likely to stick around whether Iowa State finishes 8-5 or 4-8. Postseason streaks are benchmarks of a good program, but the more important thing is being a good program, and barring a thorough collapse or a rousing finish, our perceptions of the Iowa State program should be largely unchanged by this year. It’s still in the upper half of the Power Five—a remarkable leap from a few years ago—and it’s not in the upper quartile, but the trajectory remains upward. The most important thing for this program’s long-term future? It’s not making a bowl. It’s recruiting the talent necessary to be a conference title (and thereby playoff) contender in a couple years. Making a bowl can help with that, but it can’t replace it.
Jeremiah Williams Got Hurt
Temple transfer Jeremiah Williams, among those expected to share point guard duties at Iowa State this winter, is going to miss the entirety of the upcoming season due to an Achilles injury. News came out about this on Friday.
Overall, it’s a loss, but mostly a depth loss. There seems to be some expectation on Williams in the Cyclone blogosphere, but it shouldn’t have been there. He was injury-plagued and hardly adequate at Temple. This isn’t to criticize him as a person, but on the court, he was a project. Now, Jaren Holmes is the clear guy bringing the ball up, and that should have been the plan already. Holmes isn’t sensational, but he’s a steady enough hand and he brings tons of experience. Behind him, there isn’t much on that end of the court—which is the real impact of this injury—but I’m not sure Iowa State actually lost a starter, as has been the narrative.
Packers Panic?
What a terrible loss by the Packers.
On the one hand, it’s easy to believe the Packers will be fine. They’re still gelling, the offense has more or less been improving, the Giants are probably bad but they’re also 4-1, and the Vikings aren’t great but they’re on the surer side of the playoff race.
On the other, that’s two bad losses in the hole for the Pack. Two losses to mediocre teams. A two-game gap behind the Eagles with trips to Buffalo and Philly and a potentially rehabilitated Miami still on the schedule.
The common thread between the losses is that the offense wasn’t great and the defense had a few odd gaps. The offense was mostly what it’s been: Out of sync. The defense was just absent in some strange moments. The team can’t really lean on any one unit right now, or even one facet of the game—getting the running backs the ball, for instance. And with no firm floor, games like Sunday’s against the Jets are unnecessarily scary. It might be nice in December to have the bye week that late, but now wouldn’t be the worst time for it.
Yordan Álvarez Made a Moment
Well, the Mariners were exciting again.
Comebacks were the theme on the first day of the Division Series, with both AL winners initially trailing and both NL losers making it plenty interesting after looking dead in a ditch. In Houston, FanGraphs says the Astros were worse than a 1-in-20 underdog after recording the second out of the ninth with their ultimate hero still in the hole. In the Bronx, the Guardians were up over 70% favoritehood in the third inning, but failed to break through and watched Harrison Bader immediately erase their lead. In Atlanta, the Phillies were never in terrible mathematical danger, but they turned a 7-1 lead into a 7-6 victory and made David Robertson’s absence immediately conspicuous. In Los Angeles, Evan Phillips worked out of a jam in the fifth where the Padres, a seeming lost cause from the start, had put the tying run on first with nobody out.
We wrote yesterday that the Game 1 pressure was on the favorites. Each was on the right side of a starting pitching mismatch, each was playing at home after nearly a week off, each was looking at a starting pitching mismatch in the disadvantage category in Game 2. Now, the pressure flips, even onto the Phillies. The Guardians need Shane Bieber to come through. The Padres need Yu Darvish to come through. The Mariners need Luis Castillo to come through, and the Phillies need Zack Wheeler to come through, and each of those two bullpens needs the shortest of memories. For the first three of those, it’s about avoiding a 2-0 hole. For the Phils, it’s about taking this opportunity to put one of baseball’s best teams against the wall.
Those AL sides can wait until tomorrow. For today, it’s the NL, in Atlanta in the late afternoon and in Los Angeles at night (the games start at 4:30 and 5:30 local time, respectively, but we can’t dive too deep on time zone oddities right now).
Darvish vs. Kershaw is the headliner, and it’s worthy of celebration. These are two of the best pitchers of their generation, and while a single game can make that look not the case, when runs are scored it’ll be an accomplishment by the offense scoring them. Clayton Kershaw’s had a ridiculous year, sporting a 2.57 FIP and 2.51 xERA, each comfortably in the top ten among hurlers with at least 120 innings. The fact the threshold is that low tells a lot of the tale—the guy’s missed time again—but he carved up the NL West all year, when healthy, and he’s ready to do it one more time. Yu Darvish, meanwhile, has been his steady self. Twelve months of struggles four to five years ago continue to shape the narrative on him, but since the 2019 season began, he’s been a top-twenty pitcher by fWAR despite lacking a single incredible 162-game campaign like those of Corbin Burnes and others ahead of him. On the bullpen side, the Dodgers were mostly able to keep their arms fresh, with only Phillips and Alex Vesia going over 25 pitches or one inning of work. The Padres leaned heavily on Steven Wilson and Pierce Johnson, but those two aren’t part of the high-leverage design. They played their roles, they’ll likely be held out tonight unless it’s quite wild, everyone will get a day of rest tomorrow. Overall? The Dodgers are a decent favorite, but Darvish gives the Pads a heck of a chance, and we may see high-leverage Josh Hader. Heart-accelerating stuff.
Zack Wheeler is trying to pull another rabbit out of the hat. Since returning from injury with three starts remaining, he’s faced 14, 21, 17, and 22 batters in his four starts (in order). The last of those was his strong outing against St. Louis in Game 1 of the Wild Card Series. Presumably, he’s stretching back out, and he offered 96 whole pitches on the altar of October in that game, but he’s not in workhorse territory yet like Aaron Nola is, and with the Philadelphia bullpen taxed yesterday (only José Alvarado looks both good and relatively fresh, and Zach Eflin keeps dancing with disaster), a workhorse-like performance would be rather helpful for Rob Thomson and his mates. Across the way, you could argue Kyle Wright has broken through, winning 21 games this year, but it was the man’s first productive MLB season and his FIP and xERA, while still solid, were notably worse than his ERA. Atlanta’s best relievers are ready. That’s important.
It’s an opportunity for the Phillies to very nearly put Atlanta away. It’s an opportunity for the Dodgers to stick the dagger in the Pads. It’s more playoff baseball, and the stakes are palpable.
Kyle Larson: Out
NASCAR’s playoffs have taken on the air of a video game twenty years into the simulations. Ross Chastain and Christopher Bell—mostly nobodies entering last season—are among the championship contenders, while Kyle Larson, believed by many at this time last year to be the best driver in the world, period, is done, eliminated Sunday alongside Daniel Suárez, Austin Cindric, and the concussed Alex Bowman. Chase Elliott does lead in points by a solid margin, and all of Joey Logano, Denny Hamlin, and Ryan Blaney are in the remaining eight (the others are William Byron and Chase Briscoe), but with so many races feeling like a wide-open roll of the dice, a playoff format which so emphasizes winning is looking less desirable. It feels like drivers and teams used to, with the old car, have more control over whether or not they won on a certain day. Now, that’s gone, and it makes for a fun regular season but the playoffs are struggling to entertain.
Of course, Larson’s absence came directly as a result of his own mistake. The guy hit the wall. But in a normal season, this would have been a shocking, dramatic, thrilling moment. In this one, it elicited mostly a shrug. I’d guess this will even out over time—teams will find more advantages, NASCAR will adjust the car to make short tracks more entertaining, road courses will slowly be removed from the circuit—but for this year and likely next year, it feels too random.
Is Max Verstappen Good or Is Everyone Else Bad?
Max Verstappen clinched the F1 season championship on Sunday morning, winning the rain-shortened Japanese Grand Prix, waiting ten or fifteen minutes, and learning that through penalty to Charles Leclerc, he was the champ. It was a fitting end to the campaign, which has been marked as much by Verstappen’s dominance as it has Ferrari’s failings and Mercedes’ competitive vanishing act. Throw in a mix of technical confusion with how the points worked? The perfect culmination of Formula 1 in 2022.
Verstappen is having an otherworldly season, and I, like 95% of the rest of us, am not a long-time follower of F1, but the lack of industry excitement leads me to think this season either is mostly just about everyone but Red Bull failing to compete or is at least close enough to that to make everyone unsure. I heard more about Lewis Hamilton’s dominance back in the years when I wasn’t watching a single race. Nobody seems to care that Verstappen’s breaking records. F1’s lost the plot.
Housekeeping
Well, we’ve caught up a little. Still haven’t relaunched Gelo—that’s a priority for tomorrow, with the Senators starting their season—and with that, the betting schedule has also been pushed around a bit as well. Here’s where the current thought is, with Power Five action tomorrow night:
- Thursday: MLB Futures, NFL Futures, NHL Futures, CFB Futures x2
- Friday: MLB Futures, Soccer Futures x2
If we pull that off and scan the Cubs news feed and a few others, we’re fully caught-up. Send good vibes. Longer-term, here’s what we’re thinking for our winter futures schedule:
- Monday: NBA Futures
- Tuesday: CFB Futures, CBB Futures
- Wednesday: NFL Futures
- Thursday: NHL Futures
- Friday: Soccer Futures
Ok. I’ll stop telling you about schedules now. This is procrastination.
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Viewing schedule:
- 4:35 PM EDT: Philadelphia @ Atlanta – Game 2, Wheeler vs. Wright (FOX)
- 8:37 PM EDT: San Diego @ Los Angeles – Game 2, Darvish vs. Kershaw (FS1)
