Michigan Is This Year’s Georgia. They Just Don’t Look Like It.

Note: We have added Movelor’s final 2023 ratings to the bottom of this post.

We have national championship matchups. We’ve had them for a few days now. Before the thoughts, here’s where Movelor sees them:

• South Dakota State (76.7%) –10.5 vs. Montana (23.3%)
• Michigan (78.3%) –11.3 vs. Washington (21.7%)

The FCS game is straightforward, and betting markets appear to be in agreement with us. South Dakota State is a big, big favorite. You can make a case for Montana—the case goes that Montana State hung with SDSU and Montana whooped Montana State, and that while Montana wasn’t as impressive against NDSU as SDSU was, the Griz played the Bison later in the year and did still win. Even that, though, leaves you merely saying there’s a chance. South Dakota State is, from every angle, a decisive favorite in the FCS National Championship.

What’s interesting is that Movelor has Michigan as an even bigger favorite than the Jacks.

Washington hasn’t played a bad game in the last five weeks, which is to say they’ve played their best football in each of their last two games. Before that? Ugly. Here are Washington’s results in the games between the two against Oregon:

The narrative that’s been crafted here is that Washington struggled against ASU and Stanford but broke out of the funk. But the trend was broader than that. Oregon State, Utah, and USC were all respectable competition, but none of the three really turned out to be a world-beater. Washington State didn’t qualify for a bowl game. Washington has played spectacular football these last two games, and they played good football a lot of this year, but the whole of their body of work remains questionable in the context of a national championship. The thing about saying a team shows up for the big game is that you’re saying they don’t always show up.

By contrast, here’s how Michigan’s worst six games of the season went down:

These are not, mind you, a consecutive six-week stretch. They are Michigan’s six worst games. None comes close to Washington’s Arizona State game in terms of poor performance, and five of the six are still victories by 24 or more points.

Where we’re going here is that Michigan has been the best team in college football this season, and they’ve been the best team in college football by a lot. They’ve beaten teams ranked 3^rd, 5^th, 7^th, and 19^th in Movelor’s latest rankings, and they’ve walloped every other team who’s crossed their path. Michigan’s Movelor rating right now is 47.7, meaning they’re 47.7 points better than the average Division I football team. Georgia’s, to end last year? 47.7. That was after the TCU beatdown. Michigan has been more dominant so far this year than Georgia was at this point in the process.

It’s not just Movelor, either. ESPN’s FPI and SP+ each have the Wolverines favored over the Huskies by at least 9.8 points. DRatings, one of the only systems outperforming the Vegas spread on the season, has the line at Michigan –8.8. Ratings systems are in broad agreement: Michigan’s the better team here. And it’s not all that close.

The case for Washington is kind of like the case for a baseball team with one sensational pitcher. If Michael Penix Jr. makes every single throw, then yes, Washington could win. But unless Michigan self-combusts, Penix might need to throw close to a perfect game. He’s done that his last two times out. Can he keep it up?

To be fair, Michigan did plenty of combusting on Monday. It was a sloppy game, and while they answered the bell down the stretch, Alabama’s own combustions ultimately made a lot the difference. It doesn’t show up in the above table because it was still a 7-point win over Alabama, but Monday’s was not a great game of football. In a roundabout way, though, that illustrates how good this Michigan team is: They dicked around. They got too cute. Alabama stopped the sack party in the second half. Michigan still won. Michigan still beat a solid version of Nick Saban’s Alabama. Maybe Sherrone Moore decides he needs to run two flea flickers again, but if he doesn’t? If he runs the offense Michigan ran so well against Penn State? The one where J.J. McCarthy hands the ball off and Michigan’s big boys up front do the rest? Michigan should win by a touchdown at the very least. Unless Penix throws a perfect game.

There was a current after the Pac-12 Championship which said “Yes, Washington might not be that good, but Kalen DeBoer and Ryan Grubb might outcoach you.” It’s still possible that’s the case. The pair put together a slam dunk of a gameplan in their second win over Oregon, and they came out firing on all cylinders against Texas as well. But it’s hard to close the door on a team as good in the trenches as Michigan is in the trenches, and what nearly lost Washington the Sugar Bowl was not their talent deficit, but coaching. As the game turned into a contest to see which coach could do the dumbest thing (a race Steve Sarkisian won in part by not trying to score a touchdown on 4^th-and-4 before the onside kick, something which would have left the Longhorns only needing a field goal on their final drive and would have included a touchdown try equally unlikely to the one they ended up with), DeBoer and Grubb showed they could dumb it up with the best of them. In a dumb, dumb, dumb series of events, DeBoer and Grubb made the fourth down fake in the Apple Cup look more reckless than ingenious, viewed in context. Maybe the recklessness works this time, but poor game management can ruin an otherwise perfect game. It nearly did just two days ago.

So no, we aren’t buying Washington. But hey—we weren’t last week either.

A few other post-bowl game thoughts:

Talent

Michigan and Washington playing for the national championship is earth-shaking when it comes to the question of how much speed and size and strength matter in college football. It’s possible this is a Covid eligibility effect, or that there’s some other timing involved which makes the ripeness of the talent better than the 247sports talent composite implies, but I’m not sure we’ve ever seen this few five-star athletes play for a national title in college football. Maybe Clemson was in this spot in the early years of the ascent, but…we’ve hashed out our Clemson curiosities enough on this site for now.

What’s happening? Maybe we’re in a post-talent world. Maybe Georgia just didn’t maximize its potential this year, Alabama never fixed its inexcusable offensive line issues, and Michigan built its program around attainable strengths to such a degree that it was able to hang around and deal enough knockout blows. Either way, this is going to feel like a missed opportunity of a season for teams outside the Alabama/Georgia/LSU/Ohio State/Texas recruiting circle. It is a missed opportunity. This was the year to steal one, and Michigan or Washington is about to steal it.

The ACC and Florida State

Florida State defenders made a really big deal about a month ago about the ACC’s 2022 record against the SEC. That record was 6–4, and as we hashed out in greater detail at the time, it didn’t account for where each involved team stood in their respective league.

So, since conference vs. conference records outside of context matter for some, here’s one:

The ACC went 5–6 against the rest of the country in bowl games and their champion lost the Orange Bowl by 60 points.

I know we’re still early in the NIL era, and collectives haven’t yet figured out their gameplans for things like this, but you would think that a school signaling it’s willing to pay a full $120M to get out of the ACC (if it loses the lawsuit) would be able to come up with the dollars necessary to get its players to play a game in which a potential claimed national championship is at stake. Instead, Georgia was more competitive about the Orange Bowl than FSU was, and I don’t think anyone serious believes the result would have been close if FSU was playing its full roster. The Seminoles were probably better this year than the 15^th-best team in the country, but that’s where they finish the year in Movelor, and that’s worse than where they finished last season. I’m really not sure they took a step forward in the end. They dominated LSU, and then they didn’t do a whole lot else. Some of this is the ACC not affording a lot of opportunities for good wins. Not all of this is the ACC.

Are Opt-Outs a Problem?

Opt-outs were the story, and to the diehards, they made bowl games less enjoyable. As usual, though, the average sports fan—the swing voter between watching and not watching—holds more power, and so the reports hold that ratings tended to be up. Still, diehards do drive a lot in college sports, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see bowl game-specific NIL deals from boosters to players.

What I’m more concerned about, with opt-outs, is what they reflect about how important bowl games are to players. Sure, more might play if paid, but the fact these games require payment regular season games don’t is bad. I don’t doubt that the hyper-sponsoring of these games has an effect. I’m also worried about how much the “playoff or bust” narrative from ESPN in particular affects how college football fans, players, and even coaches view the college football season. This is especially worrisome with the 12-team playoff making itself a realistic goal for more teams, and therefore leaving more teams legitimately disappointed at the end of their respective seasons. I don’t know that “bowl games need fixing,” but the concerns are real, and I’m worried about what the playoff will do to college football in the long term. Playoffs or bust is a very NFL way to think, and college football doesn’t work as just a lower-quality version of the NFL. It works in a world where every game matters more than games matter in the NFL, in and of itself, where pride is the thing on the line more than getting to play one more game on a Saturday night on Peacock.

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Plenty more will be on its way from us as the national championship draws closer, and then as the offseason fully begins. It’s all interesting right now. Except for possibly Monday night’s second half.

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Final Movelor ratings, 2023: