ESPN has taken a lot of blame in the college football world recently for the things people don’t like about college football. I would say it’s taken too much blame. ESPN is offering schools money. The schools don’t have to take it.
What I do think we should all take a deep breath and rip on ESPN about is this Week 1 schedule. There are too many bad games. FOX deserves its share of the blame too, their prize fight is last year’s worst Power Five team playing the defending national runner-up on the road; and the Big Ten and ACC are at fault for the games they’ve chosen to schedule; and some of this is specific schools not scheduling competitive games themselves (looking at you, Michigan—you’re overdue); and some of this is on Indiana for using up a power conference spot with such an impotent football program. But. If we’re going to hold ESPN’s feet to the fire for college football not matching our fickle, conflicting ideals, we really ought to complain the loudest about the first full Saturday of college football lacking a single big game. There are fun games, sure. There will probably be good games. It’s going to be a great weekend of college football, because this is college football and college football is great. But there are two games this weekend we can be full-on excited to watch, and one of those, tonight’s, is only that exciting because it’s our first real taste of college football consequence.
Here’s what’s going on, from Thursday through Monday. We’re breaking games up into three categories: The big game, the interesting games, and the dormant volcanoes. We’ll go in reverse order.
The Dormant Volcanoes
- UT Martin @ Georgia (Saturday, 6:00 PM EDT, ESPN+)
- Middle Tennessee @ Alabama (Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT, SECN)
- Ohio State @ Indiana (Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT, CBS)
- East Carolina @ Michigan (Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT, Peacock)
- West Virginia @ Penn State (Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT, NBC)
- Virginia vs. Tennessee (Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT, ABC)
- Tennessee State @ Notre Dame (Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT, NBC)
- Colorado @ TCU (Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT, FOX)
- Oregon State @ San Jose State (Sunday, 3:30 PM EDT, CBS)
- Southeast Missouri State @ Kansas State (Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT, ESPN+)
- Nevada @ USC (Saturday, 6:30 PM EDT, Pac-12 Networks)
- Portland State @ Oregon (Saturday, 3:00 PM EDT, Pac-12 Networks)
- Rice @ Texas (Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT, FOX)
There are currently twenty teams which Movelor, our college football model, gives better than a 1-in-20 chance of making the College Football Playoff. Thirteen of those twenty should be disappointed if they don’t utterly obliterate their opponent this weekend. We’ve listed them by decreasing playoff probability here.
Movelor is not the complete and total judge of who is capable of making the College Football Playoff. Nobody is this early in the season, and probably even for a few more weeks. Movelor and other voices of reason held for a long time last year that TCU would not continue to get away with their repeated dances with death. This is sports, though, and these are 18 to 23-year-old men. Magic happens. TCU got away with it.
I say all that to say that just because a certain team isn’t one of our model’s twenty playoff-likeliest doesn’t mean that we, The Barking Crow, are writing them off. We also aren’t trying to say that Movelor has these teams lined up in perfect order. Nobody does. This is college football, not a Newtonian physics thought experiment featuring a spherical object in a vacuum. We just had to draw the line somewhere, and Movelor’s as good a tool to do that with as any.
Why are these games dormant volcanoes? Well, the likeliest thing is that you won’t even notice they’re there. If you do notice, though, it’s going to be dramatic.
(We’re including Colorado/TCU in this category and not the next one because it feels disrespectful to the college football coaching industry to say that one offseason of Deion Sanders in Boulder can take the Buffs from near the bottom of the whole FBS into legitimate competition with what is at least a middle-of-the-Big-12 team in TCU. We get it, we get that there’s interest, we get why FOX would pick this from their meager list of games to make their biggest game of the week, but betting markets have this a three-touchdown game. It shouldn’t be close. If it’s close, either Deion Sanders is one of the best football coaches in the world or TCU has had something go very, very wrong.)
The Interesting Games
- Florida @ Utah (Thursday, 8:00 PM EDT, ESPN)
- Nebraska @ Minnesota (Thursday, 8:00 PM EDT, FOX)
- Louisville vs. Georgia Tech (Friday, 7:30 PM EDT, ESPN)
- Stanford @ Hawaii (Friday, 11:00 PM EDT, CBSSN)
- Fresno State @ Purdue (Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT, BTN)
- Boise State @ Washington (Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT, ABC)
- UTSA @ Houston (Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT, FS1)
- South Carolina vs. North Carolina (Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT, ABC)
- Texas Tech @ Wyoming (Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT, CBS)
- South Alabama @ Tulane (Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT, ESPNU)
- Coastal Carolina @ UCLA (Saturday, 10:30 PM EDT, ESPN)
- Northwestern @ Rutgers (Sunday, 12:00 PM EDT, CBS)
- Clemson @ Duke (Monday, 8:00 PM EDT, ESPN)
Some of these are generous inclusions, but we tried to fill time slots, and we were able to fill almost all of them. Were San Jose State a little better, we could put them and Oregon State into the Sunday afternoon vacancy, but it would be rude to Oregon State to call that interesting, and Oregon State’s going through enough right now already. We like Oregon State. We will not disparage them by saying you should watch them play (against San Jose State, we mean).
The crown jewel of these happens tonight. The second-biggest game of the weekend is Florida’s visit to Utah. Quarterback Cam Rising’s expected to be out for the Utes, Florida’s hoping to take a step forward in Billy Napier’s second year, Utah’s among the Pac-12 favorites but has shown some wild inconsistency game-to-game over these last two seasons. Aside from LSU vs. Florida State and any volcanoes which do erupt, this game offers the most of any these next five days in the way of playoff implications. If Utah loses, its own chances and the Pac-12’s collective playoff likelihood will dramatically drop. Not that sending a team to the playoff can save the Pac-12 now, but those are still the stakes.
Also tonight, we get Matt Rhule’s debut at Nebraska, the new guy taking the second-most popular Cornhusker sport up to Minneapolis, where he’ll meet a Golden Gophers crew going through a decent amount of roster turnover and a smattering of scandal (Stu wrote about the Fleck Bank in July, if you missed it). The Big Ten West is open enough that whoever wins this game is justified in dreaming some dreams. It should also be a little messy and a little close.
Jeff Brohm is making his Louisville head coaching debut tomorrow, and Brent Key is entering his first full season as the head coach at Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech made a little noise down the stretch last season under Key, but that noise consisted of upsets over ACC teams who probably didn’t deserve to be ranked. That said, Louisville’s an ACC team, so we’re already through the looking glass on that one. There’s a wide range of possibilities here. Most of them will probably lead to a team getting more anticipation than it deserves.
In the late game tomorrow, we get another head coaching debut, with Troy Taylor (he who likes airplanes) coming over from Sacramento State, which he built into one of the FCS’s best programs in recent years. (Side note: We don’t have any FCS games in here not because we aren’t covering the FCS, but because Eastern Washington is coming off such a bad season that they’ve managed to make a rematch of a recent national championship into a boring affair.) Taylor’s first task will be beating a Hawaii team who won a lot of hearts last weekend by hanging in there against Vanderbilt. There is a weird collection of measuring sticks at play here, but if you’re the sort who wants to watch college football at midnight on the Friday night of Labor Day Weekend, I’d imagine that’s exactly the funkiness you seek.
In the early slot on Saturday, Fresno State goes to Purdue, and Fresno State’s a character to watch. They won ten games last year, they won the Mountain West, they held Washington State to six points in a bowl game. Movelor has them narrowly ahead of Tulane as the likeliest Group of Five representative in a New Year’s Six bowl this year, projecting them right now to meet Notre Dame in the Peach Bowl. This is a huge game for those chances, and again, we’ve got a coaching debut: Ryan Walters steps into the job at Purdue, coming over after working as Illinois’s defensive coordinator these last two years. (I realize we have not said much here about Purdue and that is because there is not much there to say. Purdue is a lower team in the worse division in the second-best conference. The fact they’re favored here shows that Fresno State isn’t *that* much a team to know.)
Washington’s a popular sleeper (which means they’re not a sleeper, but I digress), with last year going well and Michael Penix Jr. back for more. The Huskies play a Boise State team which did win ten games last year, and only lost one that was embarrassing, but still hasn’t been what it used to be. Maybe the Broncos step back forward this fall, but we don’t have a huge indication that’s coming. That said, given schools like Boise State tend to succeed more through developing lowly-valued recruits than landing stars, I’m not sure how we would see it coming if it was on its way.
UTSA and Houston is a fun little one, a showdown between two of Texas’s largest cities’ city schools. Neither should be dreaming of a New Year’s bowl game, but this is one of those local pecking–order matchups which can make nonconference play so special.
South Carolina plays North Carolina, and I’m surprised South Carolina isn’t ranked in the AP Poll. Not that they should be, they probably aren’t one of the country’s 25 best teams, but I thought that those who foster the narrative had agreed to put a whole lot of wind in Shane Beamer’s sails. We’ve heard so much about South Carolina for the last couple years, and now that they beat Tennessee and Clemson on back-to-back weeks last November, the line goes dead? This is backwards. Across the field, the narrative continues to do heroic work hyping a program that is now just 30–22 in four years under Mack Brown and hasn’t exactly been making much progress as the ACC has gotten worse. The Tar Heels have a spectacular quarterback in Drake Maye and have shown very little else to indicate they’re ready to be a nationally competitive football program. This game should have fireworks (Spencer Rattler is still the QB in Columbia), but ultimately, it’s unlikely we’re seeing two teams who matter much in the national picture. UNC: You can return a lot of production, but it needs to be good production for that to help you.
One team that could matter in that national picture? Texas Tech. The Red Raiders scored wins over Texas, Oklahoma, and Mississippi last year in Joey McGuire’s first season, and they’re expected to contend for a Big 12 Championship appearance, if not the title itself. This is a tricky first test, though, playing Wyoming at elevation. We continue to wait for Craig Bohl to figure it out in Laramie, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
South Alabama is getting a lot of love, returning most of the roster which went 10–3 last year. They play Tulane, which everyone seems to agree is the Group of Five’s best team (Movelor has Fresno State as likelier to make that bowl game because of scheduling, not because it thinks poorly of the Green Wave). I’m personally skeptical that this will be a great game—South Alabama went 5–2 in one-score games last year—but I am wrong about plenty of things, and if it isn’t a great game, it’ll probably make Tulane look good, which will turn into its own little narrative.
Late at night on Saturday, Coastal Carolina visits UCLA, and UCLA is a curious creature. They wilted down the stretch last year, but only the Arizona loss was one to blink at, and they beat both Washington and Utah with some style points thrown in. Dorian Thompson-Robinson is gone, but a lot of production returns for Chip Kelly, and it might be worthwhile to remember now that Chip Kelly hasn’t lost more than four games in a season since 2019. (Covid helped that, but it’s still three years!)
Sunday’s early game shouldn’t be interesting, but the Big Ten’s worst two teams on paper meet at an interesting time. (Sorry to Indiana fans, by the way. I didn’t mean to take it out on you guys earlier. I know you’re trying your best. I don’t know why the Big Ten scheduled you to play Ohio State this weekend either.) Northwestern, of course, is dealing with a hazing scandal and the accompanying coaching transition, its first real changing of the guard in more than twenty years. Rutgers, meanwhile, is looking for its first six-win season since its inaugural year in the Big Ten.
On Monday night, we’re told we see a rising Duke program meet a Clemson on the decline. Is this true? I’m not sure. Duke got a lot better last year in Mike Elko’s first on the job, but it’s hard to point at a single win and say it was definitely impressive. The ACC was so bad last year. That did not receive enough national attention, and it’s skewing a lot of perceptions. Also? Just because a team got better last year doesn’t mean they’re going to keep getting better this year. That’s an easy way to think, but it’s not necessarily how things work. Clemson, for its part, might be able to reverse the recent decline. Their recruiting numbers are much better than they were in Dabo Swinney’s early years as head coach, and there’s a lot of chatter about an offensive resurrection in Cade Klubnik’s sophomore campaign. This is a tough situation for Clemson because all eyes are going to be on them and there isn’t much upside to playing Duke, but the same was true of Notre Dame last weekend, and we walked away from that thinking very highly of Notre Dame. Maybe Clemson can do the same here.
The Big Game
- LSU vs. Florida State (Sunday, 7:30 PM EDT, ABC)
The crown jewel of the weekend, the one making all the frustrations with other schedules pale, the game with which not just college football season but the entire American autumn makes its triumphant entrance…
LSU and Florida State are meeting in Orlando.
(Does it really have to be in Orlando and not Tallahassee?)
This has gotten a little warped by memory, but last year’s LSU–Florida State game was far from pretty. It was only exciting at all because Florida State nearly blew a 14-point lead over the game’s final nine minutes, and it got exciting through LSU fumbling a punt, FSU fumbling on a 3rd & Goal play from the 1, and LSU getting an extra point blocked after marching 99 yards in one minute and twenty seconds. Exciting? Yes. A good game between good teams? You could be forgiven for not thinking so at the time. That was the correct interpretation of what your eyes were seeing.
This year, the situation is supposed to be different. Florida State went on from that win and finished 10–3, beating Florida for the first time since 2017 and ending the year right on the edge of the top ten. In Mike Norvell’s third season, the Seminoles seemed to finally turn a corner, and with Jordan Travis and Jared Verse leading back a large collection from last year’s roster, expectations are very high for them in this middling ACC. The ACC is Clemson and Florida State and then a great, big gulf, and this is a chance for Florida State to assert itself as the team to beat between that pair.
It’s a big game for the ACC as a whole, too. The ACC, as we’ve said maybe five times now here and five hundred times elsewhere, is struggling. This is not the conference of Jameis Winston and Trevor Lawrence. Since Clemson’s 2018 title, the Tigers have been beaten soundly by 2019 LSU, been blown out by 2020 Ohio State, and missed the playoff twice, while the rest of the conference has offered up Kenny Pickett and a quirky little Wake Forest as its next-best things. The Pac-12 demonstrates what can happen when you go too long without having nationally competitive teams. Florida State has a chance on Sunday to make a case for the conference.
There is no overarching conference question surrounding LSU. LSU speaks only for itself. There also isn’t much of a question of whether LSU will ever make it back to the mountaintop. LSU has won national titles with Les Miles and Ed Orgeron. LSU will win another title again, most likely pretty soon.
The question for LSU is this season. It’s Brian Kelly’s second year, and he’s probably coaching the most talent he’s ever coached, something which speaks to Kelly’s own struggles with recruiting over the years and also to LSU’s institutional capability on that front. Jayden Daniels might not be a great Heisman candidate right now, and the program might still be getting its groove back after a rough ending to the Coach O era, but the size and speed and power across the LSU roster is always immense, and with Kelly known for winning games throughout his career, it’s foolish to count these guys out.
What this is for LSU, then, is one of many playoff quarterfinals. The college football season isn’t really one big single-elimination tournament, like we sometimes like to say, but there are games you have to win if you want to make the playoff, and for LSU, this is probably one of them. For one thing, if LSU can’t beat Florida State, it’s hard to see LSU beating both Alabama and the eventual SEC East champ. For another, if LSU can’t beat Florida State, it’ll either have to beat both Alabama and the eventual SEC East champ or it’ll have to make the playoff as a two-loss team, something which is very possible and has also never happened.
Florida State can afford to lose this game. If Florida State loses this game close and Clemson plays poorly on Monday, Florida State may be favored over each of its remaining opponents, with a few of those—Boston College, Syracuse, probably a couple others—cakewalks even in conference play. Winning the next twelve in a row after this one is a realistic hope for Florida State. It’s not a realistic hope for LSU. For playoff purposes, LSU needs this worse.
What’s going to happen?
It’s hard to find any objective rating system or prediction market which views this as anything but a game where LSU is a narrow favorite. What that really means, though, is simply that we are all very confident that we should not be confident about LSU. Welcome to college football season. We don’t know what’s going to happen.
