Ohio State’s defense is likely excellent. Loaded with first-round talent and now having enjoyed a season and a half under Jim Knowles, it looked the part yet again on Saturday, stuffing Penn State repeatedly en route to one of the most one-sided one-score wins you can find. We knew Penn State might lose—we expected Penn State to lose, in fact—but we did not expect Ohio State to make Penn State look so unimpressive. Notre Dame didn’t score many against the Buckeyes either, but they at least moved the ball. Penn State hardly did that.
The biggest question leading into the weekend was whether Penn State could hang with the best in the Big Ten, and therefore some of the best in the country. Our answer? Probably not. It’s not entirely clear, but it sure didn’t look like Penn State was capable of competing with the nation’s best. Questions abound, and there’s still time for teams to get better, but at the very least, Penn State appears a step behind Ohio State. This matters as a reflection of Penn State and Ohio State’s long-term trajectories. It also matters within the playoff picture. Here’s where that latter part stands, with five regular season weeks to go. Probabilities, as always, come from our college football model.
Leading the Pack: Ohio State (78.7%), Michigan (65.9%), Florida State (65.0%)
Ohio State has, more likely than not, done it. Barring a blowout against Michigan, a disaster against an inferior Big Ten foe, or a surprising lack of help elsewhere, Ohio State has put itself into the College Football Playoff. The likelihood of any of those three things happening is high enough that we’re far from calling it assured, but Ohio State’s win over Penn State was a big, big deal. That was the game Ohio State needed to win, and Ohio State won it. Now, they need to take care of business for four weeks, watch some timber fall around them, and go compete with Michigan in Ann Arbor. Ohio State is our likeliest playoff team.
Behind them, it’s effectively a tie between Michigan and Florida State. Michigan looked spectacular on Saturday, scoring a neat and tidy two touchdowns per quarter through the game’s first 45 minutes of play. They shut out Michigan State, scored on both offense and defense, and pushed themselves into the top spot in Movelor, our model’s rating system (the Wolverines are still second in ESPN’s FPI). Michigan is likely just as good as Ohio State, if not better, and they get to play the Buckeyes at home, but they do still have to survive a trip to Happy Valley, not to mention the big controversy surrounding their staffer allegedly getting caught breaking NCAA scouting rules.
How much did Michigan’s alleged spying matter? We’ll see. On the one hand, it’s been a little puzzling how Jim Harbaugh’s program has competed so well within the Big Ten these last two and a half years despite not recruiting at Ohio State’s level. On the other, we may be making too much of two specific games, and we were comfortable accepting the physicality explanation before this development offered us an alternative. The Penn State game might be the first real test of post-spying Michigan. If not that, it’ll be Ohio State. If Michigan has known what plays are coming, they shouldn’t anymore, especially for that last one, where it sounds like Ohio State has been preparing to alter its signals all season. It would appear that Michigan’s floor, even if this was the most consequential, is somewhere around where Penn State stands. That’s still really good. It might not be playoff good, however, and the risk for Michigan is that they look up after playing Ohio State and find themselves with one good win (at Penn State) and one big loss (to Ohio State), with the latter combining with this scandal to convince the playoff committee to leave them out. That’s the scenario in which the perception of this scandal could count. If they’re 13–0, it won’t, and if they’re 12–1, it won’t, and if they’re 10–2, it won’t. But if they’re 11–1 and don’t make the Big Ten Championship, the margin of that loss is going to be a big deal, and so is what all has been uncovered about the sideline scheme.
Arguably an even bigger winner than Ohio State this weekend was Florida State, who withstood a significant challenge from Duke and emerged overwhelmingly likely to make the ACC title game. Duke did lose Riley Leonard again in the process of the game, and the Movelor/SP+/FPI aggregate still says the Seminoles would be a 6-point underdog against Ohio State in a neutral-site game (7.5 points against Michigan), but Florida State has nearly reached November undefeated, and they might even have a loss to give. No one has a clearer playoff path than Florida State, and the Noles might not look like the best team in the country, but they do appear to be good enough to navigate this road.
The Second Wave: Georgia (34.0%), Oklahoma (33.4%), Penn State (33.6%)
Odds are best that only two of the teams above make the playoff, and that one of these teams makes it, and that one then makes it from the coalition below. That’s not exactly how it works, but the probabilities do add up that way.
Georgia didn’t play this weekend. The Dawgs were idle. They get Florida in Jacksonville on Saturday.
So much of the Georgia conversation is revolving around how good they are without Brock Bowers. Not enough of it is asking how good they are with him. They’re only 8th in FPI. They’re only 5th in Movelor. Neither of those systems has them a better team than Alabama, and even SP+, which does, only has it as a 1.2-point gap. Some of that is based on data acquired in Bowers’s absence, but most is the sleepwalking Georgia’s done in virtually every game this year besides the one against Kentucky. Georgia’s ceiling is still higher than any other ceiling in the country, but they’ve only hit it once in seven tries, and they had their best player around for most of those seven.
What Georgia does have going for it is an undefeated record, plus the reality that if they finish the year 12–1, they’ll probably get the playoff nod, especially if they win the SEC. It would take a strange sequence of events for 12–1 Georgia to not make the playoff. They have a loss to give. They might need it, though, with (counting the SEC Championship) four games remaining against teams currently in the top 25 according to all of Movelor, SP+, FPI, and the AP Poll. And that doesn’t even count Florida, who’s just outside that top 25 in all four.
Oklahoma was also idle this weekend, but they had a game, and that was a problem. The Sooners looked like they’d beaten their best rival and spent the subsequent two weeks celebrating accordingly. Oklahoma nearly went down to UCF. They survived, and they’re fine, and the rest of their schedule is tricky but not particularly hard, but as the shine from that Red River win wears off, opinions vary on how good this team actually is. They’re much more Florida State than they are Ohio State.
Penn State remains alive, and Penn State may be the most interested in Michigan’s sign-stealing. If Michigan just lost a meaningful advantage, that should make more of a difference for Penn State than for anybody else. Ohio State has a chance to beat even the best Michigan. Penn State would benefit from Michigan being a little weaker.
The Nittany Lions’ playoff equation includes a lot more variables than just how hurt Michigan is by the exposure of their alleged scheme, and the most important piece remains how well Penn State plays over the rest of the season. But with Iowa going down and taking with it most hopes of Penn State winning the three-way tiebreaker, James Franklin’s team is almost definitely going to need to get in as an 11–1 team, and that makes the Michigan game their Super Bowl, even if they acknowledge the risks around it.
In the Picture: Washington (24.1%), Alabama (21.5%), Oregon (15.5%), Texas (10.4%)
This is a motley crew, but they occupy the no-man’s land between the core contenders and those we aren’t taking all that seriously, so they find themselves together here. Washington is 1-in-4 playoff likely; Texas is 1-in-10; you could say Washington belongs more with the 1-in-3 crowd above than with this one. If so, please copy this blog post into Microsoft Word and cut and paste accordingly. Ctrl-X is a shortcut for cut, if you’re on a PC.
Washington did its best Oklahoma impersonation on Saturday night, struggling against—of all the teams in the world—Arizona State. The Huskies trailed entering the fourth quarter. The Huskies trailed after their first fourth-quarter possession ended with a field goal. The Huskies did not take the lead in this game until there were fewer than nine minutes left, and they did so only when Arizona State threw an interception inside the Washington red zone and Michael Powell returned it for six. Former Heisman favorite Michael Penix Jr. did not score a touchdown against arguably the worst Power Five football team this year. Neither did anyone else on Washington’s offense.
Still, Washington’s in a pretty good place as far as the playoff is concerned. You can get away with those kinds of games, provided you don’t make them a habit, and it’s easy to chalk the performance up to a post-Oregon hangover. The reasonable expectation is that Washington gets right against Stanford and then enters a tough final stretch with a loss to give. They probably won’t survive all of USC, Utah, Oregon State, Washington State, and (more likely than anyone else) Oregon without losing twice, or losing once badly enough to get beaten out by another one-loss team, but Washington isn’t hurt so much by the game itself as by what it says Washington is capable of doing on their bad days. If the Huskies do more of this, it’s curtains for them on the national stage.
Alabama got a nice win over Tennessee, and they did it in encouraging fashion, their often-struggling offense scoring on its first four second-half drives to blow past Tennessee after a rough first thirty minutes. There are some doubts about Tennessee’s defense, but even so, Alabama answered the bell, and they’ll head into their week off with the most momentum they’ve had all year. As we said above: Two of the three rating systems we reference say Alabama is better than Georgia. They’ve lost possibly all of their margin for error, by losing to Texas, but our model is not alone in labeling them the SEC favorite.
Oregon was the one team among the Oklahoma–Texas–Washington–Oregon club who did not sleepwalk this weekend. That, or they just won comfortably enough that we didn’t notice. Through 59 minutes of football, Oregon led Washington State 38–16. Bo Nix might not be the best quarterback in college football, and the Ducks have a long way to go to stand prominently in the national title conversation (as that 1-in-7ish number implies), but he should probably keep his second Saturday in December clear. Just in case.
Texas did everything Oklahoma did, but against Houston, and they also lost Quinn Ewers to an AC joint sprain. Maalik Murphy has a lot of hype (and behind him, Arch Manning of course also has plenty of expectations), but Texas only has one week against BYU before Kansas State comes to town, and all three of Movelor, SP+, and FPI have K-State in the top 15. The Oklahoma loss didn’t kill Texas’s playoff hopes, but it brought them to the gallows. Unless Ewers manages to only miss a game—and perhaps even if he does come back—the Longhorns may need to pull off an escape just to stay in the picture for two more weeks.
In the Hunt: Oregon State (5.9%), Mississippi (3.5%), Utah (3.0%), LSU (2.8%)
Oregon State was idle and didn’t move much in these simulations. Mississippi held off Auburn on the road and rose a little bit. Utah beat USC in Los Angeles on a last-second field goal and held steady. LSU scored 62 points against Army, allowed zero, and more than doubled their playoff probability, though part of that is other fringe characters clearing out. The Tigers are a consensus top-ten team in those rating systems, their losses came to a playoff favorite and a fellow fringe contender, and they’d most likely have to beat both Alabama and Georgia within those respective states if they were to become a candidate. We’ve yet to see a two-loss team make the four-team playoff, but LSU has the best shot of any team in that category.
Au Revoir: North Carolina (0.2%), Tennessee (0.1%), Duke (0.1%), Iowa (0.0%)
Notably absent here is USC, whom Movelor has been out on for a while now. It was a matter of time before the Trojans took their second loss. They just aren’t good enough right now.
In a similar boat is UNC. The Tar Heels may only have the one loss, but what a loss it was, and how bad this team must be capable of playing if they are capable of losing that game.
Duke’s loss was expected, but it still extinguishes their playoff hopes, and it leaves Florida State as the only ACC team with better than a 1-in-100 playoff shot. The ACC has a better playoff chance than the Pac-12, the Big 12, or even the SEC, but they don’t have a diverse portfolio. It’s FSU or nothing for that league, and it’s the league which arguably needs a playoff team the most this year within the broader picture of conference strength and realignment.
Iowa’s loss to Minnesota was controversial, but it’s the kind of thing that happens when you struggle to pull away from teams because you’re incapable of putting points on the board. The Hawkeyes’ fringe chance recedes to 0.0%, and it isn’t even one where we’re rounding down from 0.01% or something.
Undefeated!: Air Force, James Madison, Liberty
Our other three undefeated teams all survived the week, Air Force after using some misdirection but in an unusual way. Normally, that’s just how their offense works, but this time, it was by feinting as though their starting quarterback, Zac Larrier, wouldn’t play against Navy. Larrier was far from dominant against the Midshipmen—Air Force only scored 17 points—but he did enough that the Falcons won comfortably, and in weeknight games, both James Madison and Liberty did the same. Liberty faces a long road to a New Year’s Six bowl, and James Madison is ineligible, but Air Force leads the Group of Five pack, and even without that, undefeated seasons are a special thing.
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Other miscellany:
- SMU’s catching up to Tulane in Movelor, which is finally coming around on the Mustangs. Similarly, we’re noticing Troy’s candidacy for the first time, the Trojans having been overshadowed for a while by JMU. Add them to the mix for that Group of Five NY6 spot, a mix which includes Air Force, Liberty, Fresno State, Tulane, and now Troy and SMU. Going off average final CFP ranking in our model’s simulations, it goes in that order.
- Kansas State torched TCU, and we mentioned this above, but the Wildcats are back into Big 12 spoiler territory, though trying to rectify all their results against one another remains a challenge.
- Clemson is effectively out of the ACC title race after losing to Miami. Miami doesn’t have much hope themselves, but that’s a reassuring win for a program that looked, briefly, like it had made it nowhere in Mario Cristobal’s first two seasons.
- With Iowa going down, Wisconsin’s back into the lead in the Big Ten West. They now get to play Ohio State at Camp Randall coming off a big Ohio State victory. I wonder if the Badgers wish it was an 11 AM kick.
- There’s Conference USA football tonight, with Western Kentucky trying to upset Liberty and get back on track. Elsewhere, New Mexico State plays Louisiana Tech, with bowl eligibility and a continued presence in the Conference USA title picture on the line. Tomorrow, Jacksonville State visits FIU, and I have yet to see it explicitly confirmed that the Gamecocks won’t be allowed by Conference USA to play in the conference championship (that piece isn’t up to the NCAA during the FBS transition, by my understanding), but it’s possible I’ve missed it. I haven’t looked hard in a little while. In the later game tomorrow night, UTEP visits Sam Houston, the FBS’s last winless team (but not its worst!).
- Toledo took down Miami–Ohio on the road, and with that the Rockets have nearly wrapped up the MAC West. Miami’s race with Ohio continues in the East. Each now has one conference loss as they prepare to meet head to head.
- Mississippi State and Arkansas scored a combined ten points against one another. That feels like something we should mention. In other under-the-radar SEC news, Missouri beating up South Carolina is the kind of thing good teams do. You don’t always make your statements against your best competition. Sometimes, you do it by showing that an inferior opponent really is inferior.
- Georgia State grabbed a nice win over Louisiana in the Sun Belt. Looking forward to them playing Georgia Southern on Thursday. That’s the kind of weeknight football we really want.
- Northern Iowa pounced on North Dakota post-NDSU, shutting out the Fighting Hawks. Southern Illinois held its own against South Dakota State, spending much of the fourth quarter within a touchdown. Youngstown State beat Illinois State on a last-second field goal in a 41–38 game. South Dakota stayed unbeaten in MVFC play with a win at Indiana State. All of that leaves the Missouri Valley with eight teams among Movelor’s 18 best, with Missouri State not far off at 28th. It’s going to be very fun to see who all makes the playoffs from that conference.
- Montana State pulled away from Sacramento State on national television, and I will miss the late-night Big Sky these next four weeks. Excited for it to return, informally, with the playoffs. Elsewhere in that conference, Eastern Washington pushed Weber State to 3–5 despite Weber still sitting in Movelor’s FCS top 25. The good leagues in the FCS are deep and competitive.
- Incarnate Word looked shaky against McNeese, trailing 24–7 at the half and 24–14 entering the fourth quarter. They got the win, but they haven’t been all that impressive this year, with a lot of Movelor’s appreciation for them a combination of last year’s effects still holding over and a 60-point win over a non-Division I opponent. The pack has caught them, and we might see UIW start dropping through the rankings fast even if their rating holds steady.
- Furman got a big win over Western Carolina, and they were never in terrible trouble along the way. They rise to 4th in Movelor’s FCS rankings, trailing only South Dakota State, Montana State, and North Dakota State. Good company.
- Austin Peay won a thriller over Southern Utah, and they stay in the Movelor top ten, ranked 7th. Not their best game, but wins are wins. Ideally, they and Central Arkansas will both be unbeaten in UAC play when the head-to-head happens in the FCS regular season’s final week.
- The CAA isn’t good, but it has a lot of decent teams, and both Delaware and New Hampshire won big on Saturday, as did Richmond.
- SEMO’s path from 1–4 to a playoff berth is still alive, the Redhawks playing their first game not decided by one possession since September 9th. They won over Tennesee Tech, 28–3, leaving them and UT Martin both 3–0 in Big South–OVC play.
- Lafayette got a huge win over Holy Cross, shuffling up the Patriot League and setting up a potential three-way tie between the Leopards, the Saders, and Fordham. The rest of that round robin happens over the next three weeks.
- Harvard got beat by Princeton, extinguishing what was becoming some serious excitement, or at least what passes for it around Ivy League football these days. Seven of that conference’s eight teams are now either 2–1 or 1–2. Five of them are 2–1. It isn’t as fun as it sounds.
- North Carolina Central didn’t look convincing against Morgan State, but they won the game, which was their MEAC opener, even this late in the year. Four to go for the HBCU national championship favorites. Florida A&M took care of business at Texas Southern to maintain control of the SWAC, where a big tie is brewing in the non-FAMU West Division.
- The NEC still exists for now, and Duquesne held onto its lead on that conference by withstanding a furious St. Francis comeback. SFPA trailed that game 31–7 entering the final play of the third quarter and ended up attempting a 45-yard field goal that would’ve tied it with ten seconds left. Quite the finish in Pittsburgh.
- Davidson kept rolling in the Pioneer League, beating Valpo 42–21. Drake is also unbeaten in league play, though, and Davidson and Drake do not play each other.
- Presbyterian lost to Marist, and by enough points to hold onto the crown of the worst Division I team in Movelor’s eyes. They sit 1.2 points behind UAPB and 2.5 behind Wagner heading into Week 9. Valparaiso and Stetson are also in the mix, and MVSU hasn’t left it.
