The real winner this weekend? Well, probably Dan Lanning. Or Ohio State. Or maybe Montana State, if you’re doing this on a per capita scale. But before we get to all the action, a credit to Week 4: It was hyped, and it delivered. That was a fun weekend of college football.
Addressing five of the biggest questions, then going through the playoff picture team by team:
How Good Is Ohio State?
Ohio State visited a Notre Dame that’s even by low estimates a top-15 team. They visited on a night many within the Notre Dame world were calling the school’s biggest home football game since 2005. Ohio State played Notre Dame in Notre Dame’s Super Bowl, and Ohio State won, weathering punch after punch to win by inches as time expired.
And yet.
Some of those punches were self-inflicted.
And Notre Dame did some self-punching of its own.
The result is that we continue to not really know what we have with the Buckeyes. They are supremely talented—if they have six first round picks next spring, no one should be surprised—but there are questions. Those questions begin at quarterback.
Kyle McCord looked spooked at the start of that game-winning drive, threw what was nearly a game-ending interception, and rallied enough that it was, in the end, a game-winning drive. My impression, having spent Saturday in the tailgate lots in South Bend, is that Ohio State fans hate Kyle McCord. My impression, having watched Kyle McCord (albeit in person, so not in high definition), is that he’s a good, solid, smart quarterback. He’s no C.J. Stroud, he’s no Justin Fields, he’s no Dwayne Haskins and he’s different from Braxton Miller and Cardale Jones. But Alabama won a lot of games with Mac Jones, and Mac Jones was better than McCord probably is, but you don’t need a Heisman contender to win a national championship. It helps, but it’s not necessary. This isn’t the NFL. It’s more like baseball, where Kyle Hendricks can outduel Jacob deGrom in the right situation.
Still, the questions are there. The game was trench warfare, and all that tells us is that Ohio State and Notre Dame are evenly matched in the trenches, with each offensive coordinator appearing wary enough of the other team’s secondary that they mostly tried to avoid testing it. If Notre Dame is a top-5 team, then that’s great for Ohio State. If Notre Dame isn’t, Ohio State is going to finish 10–2 at best. We got another data point, but it’s not telling us a lot. Ohio State is close to as unknown as Michigan still is.
Does Notre Dame Still Have a Viable Playoff Path?
The losing team here was going to be in a hole, just as the loser of Alabama and Texas was going to be in a hole and the loser of Florida State and LSU was going to be in a hole. The four-team playoff doesn’t actually incentivize these massive nonconference matchups like people sometimes credit it for doing. It’s not that the losses are damaging themselves—the committee gives lots of respect to teams for playing these games—but losing them is always a little likely, and losing them always eliminates the margin for error. We still haven’t seen a two-loss team make the playoff. There have been two-loss teams objectively among the nation’s four best.
The question, then, is how big Notre Dame’s hole now is. Our model’s answer? 8.0%. 1-in-12, or thereabouts. The model had Notre Dame up around 1-in-7, it’s now at 1-in-12. The chance hasn’t quite been cut in half—we’ve known this would probably be Notre Dame’s hardest game—but it’s not a good chance. One thing with this? It wasn’t a good chance already.
If you break Notre Dame’s schedule up into parts, you get three seasons. There were the first four games—Navy, NC State, Tennessee State, Central Michigan—a series of tune-ups for Ohio State with one imitation of a test tossed in to add spice. There are the last four games—Pitt, Clemson, Wake Forest, Stanford—which boil down to “Clemson & Friends,” three games any ranked team should win punctuated by a trip to see a good–not–great Tigers team. These middle four—Ohio State, Duke, Louisville, USC—are the gauntlet, and it was going to be a gauntlet regardless of how this game went. Duke is better than anyone expected, and Louisville is meeting the high end of the expectation window, but road games against power conference teams in between visits from Ohio State and USC were always going to be dangerous, and the Ohio State and USC games were always going to be enormous. Had Notre Dame won, they were still only looking at maybe a 1-in-3 chance of a playoff berth. It was always going to be a situation where they’d have to beat a great team and even then possibly get help. It is still that situation.
So, yes, Notre Dame can still make the playoff, and they almost definitely need to win out to do that. The question—and we don’t need to answer this yet, because other things will probably answer it well before it’s relevant—is whether they’ll need help even if they do win eleven games. If Ohio State goes 10–2, if USC goes 9–3, if Clemson can’t finish the year ranked (and they’ll be 9–3 at best if Notre Dame beats them, sitting at 2–2 already)—Notre Dame’s schedule isn’t going to be as strong as it was at a glance. This isn’t a criticism of Notre Dame, but it’s part of the game they choose to play as an independent. They can put themselves in situations where they’re dependent upon their foes to help them out. It’s further complicated when one of those foes—Ohio State, in this case—is also their theoretical competition for that playoff berth.
I will say, though I doubt Notre Dame will make the playoff and that was always a thing to doubt: Notre Dame just hung with one of the three most talented teams in the country, and Notre Dame can point to three specific soul-crushing mistakes in the last two possessions (the botched handoff, the incomplete screen, the ten men on the field) as tipping points leading to their demise, meaning—they shouldn’t have happened, and they’re easier to control than being big and fast and strong. The game was at home, the game was in September, there are caveats to have. But I’m not sure Notre Dame has competed at this level on the national scene since Brady Quinn almost beat Matt Leinart in 2005. Even the win over Clemson in 2020 came during a funky Covid season against a quarterback not named Trevor Lawrence (DJ Uiagalelei had a great game, but I think we can all infer that Trevor Lawrence would have had a better game). Maybe Ohio State’s not one of the best teams; maybe this is some smoke and some mirrors; I know both Tyrone Willingham and Charlie Weis flashed greatness. But I would think Notre Dame should feel very good about where Marcus Freeman has this program at this point in his tenure. He’s learning, and he’s still right around where Brian Kelly had the team at its ceiling. That’s not too shabby.
Is Penn State the Best Team in the Country?
In State College, Penn State looked at a ranked opponent and laughed. By the time the game ended, everyone else was laughing too. The Nittany Lions allowed four first downs while receiving four turnovers from a team that really is probably among the country’s 25 best. No, that team’s strength is not its offense (far from it, as is well-documented), but then maybe we should talk about Penn State scoring touchdowns on each of their first three possessions in the second half. It took a while, and the defense did the heavy lifting, but Iowa’s defense might be the best in the nation. Doing what Penn State did is something when it’s done against Iowa’s defense. It was a tough, tough task—Penn State only averaged 4.1 yards per play despite running an outrageous 97 plays, and Penn State resorted to converting on fourth down four separate times without failing once—but Penn State made a statement, and they are currently the team in the country who has given the fewest reasons to doubt. The only thing keeping Penn State down in the AP Poll is the lack of a national attention-grabbing win and AP Poll voters not being used to Penn State being this good. You shouldn’t take past seasons out of the picture when guessing about the best team, but if you did, you wouldn’t have much debate between Penn State and Georgia.
Even including those past seasons, Penn State has a case. Movelor, our model’s rating system, has James Franklin’s team as the best by three points. Their quarterback has a comparable pedigree to those of the starters at Ohio State and Michigan. The defense looks every bit as good. Georgia has looked underwhelming for four straight weeks. The Pac-12 teams and Texas and Oklahoma can (and should!) all believe this of themselves, but to bring those recent seasons into this, those programs are vastly less proven than Penn State, who went 11–2 last year and won ten of those games by two scores or more. These guys are good.
ESPN’s SP+ and FPI, both of which we respect, do disagree. SP+ has the Nittany Lions 10th, casting heavy doubt on the offense. FPI has the Nittany Lions 4th. But SP+ can be a bit of a whipsaw, and it is famously difficult to account for teams as unusual as Iowa in college football modeling. We’ll find out down the line, but it’s possible Penn State is the national team to beat. They shouldn’t be better than Georgia—if anyone besides Alabama or Ohio State is better than Georgia, Kirby Smart has missed a step—but they might be better than Georgia.
Was that Oregon or Colorado or Both?
I would venture that we’ve been among the bigger Colorado “haters” early in the season, and I confess to being frustrated that we didn’t build our model in a way that better accounts for teams who change their whole roster in the offseason, something that’s only been done a few times now in the power conferences but does shake things up. Movelor has the Buffaloes 107th in the FBS, narrowly behind Boston College and Eastern Michigan. That is wrong. Colorado is not that bad, nor are they necessarily bad at all. But, Colorado has now failed to cover Movelor’s spread in each of its last two games, making Movelor 2–2 on Colorado vs. The Spread on the season. That’s a decent argument for Colorado being bad.
If Colorado is bad, that isn’t a negative reflection on Deion Sanders’s ability to coach and program–build. The guy was tasked with remaking the worst team in one of the two worst Power Five conferences last year. Once they beat TCU, they’d already surpassed all reasonable requests. But Colorado is a fascinating team, and Colorado gets a lot of attention, and Colorado’s quality as a team is an important question for college football because its answer helps tell us just how much better a program can get over one offseason.
This is a long way of getting to Oregon, who might be one of the best teams in the country. As we said in the Penn State discussion: Oregon fans should absolutely believe they’re a national championship contender right now. For one thing, they are, our model has them as the sixth-best team in the country, but for another, this is sports fandom, and Oregon has done nothing a champion wouldn’t do in each of its four games so far. If your team is doing that and you aren’t hoping on a championship, you’re missing out on a lot of fun.
I will say: If a team is missing one of the best players in the country, and that team isn’t thought to be particularly deep, that team should be a lot worse. One answer to what happened in Eugene is that Colorado really missed Travis Hunter. But the bigger answer is that Oregon bears the shape of a national power, with a fiery offense and a capable defense, and that whether Colorado is an eight-win team missing its best player or the 107th-best team in the country, the result might look the same.
How Bad Will the Pac-12 Cannibalization Get?
Among the most important developments of the weekend: Oregon State picked up a loss. Oregon State had been in the mix to be the Pac-12 favorite, one of five teams scrambling for that throne, and Oregon State lost to Washington State, a good team by all accounts but not one of those five.
To recap the broader situation, here are the Movelor ratings and rankings for the top seven teams in the Pac-12:
6. Washington: 36.1
8. Oregon: 34.9
14. Utah: 30.9
15. USC: 30.5
18. Oregon State: 29.3
25. UCLA: 25.5
31. Washington State: 23.6
With the narrative so high on USC, and with Utah still lacking Cam Rising but 4–0, 3–0 against power conference competition, and the reigning decisive Pac-12 champions, let’s not try to break those two away from Washington and Oregon. Instead, let’s say that there are four contenders, two teams who are tough to beat, Oregon State somewhere between them, and Colorado lurking around with a lot of upside but also plenty of downside. There are then Arizona and Cal, each of whom are fine teams trying to make a bowl, and then Arizona State and Stanford, two of the worst four or five teams in power conference football. That means there are two cupcakes in the Pac-12, two teams any Pac-12 champion should beat, and eight teams you need to really worry about. Here’s how the remaining schedule breaks down for each of the four bona fide contenders, worrying about only those eight teams and comparable nonconference foes:
- Washington: Oregon (H), USC (A), Utah (H), Oregon State (A), Washington State (H)
- Oregon: Washington (A), Washington State (H), Utah (A), USC (H), Oregon State (H)
- Utah: Oregon State (A), USC (A), Oregon (H), Washington (A), Colorado (H)
- USC: Colorado (A), Notre Dame (A), Utah (H), Washington (H), Oregon (A), UCLA (H)
That’s five games to worry about for every team, or four if you do exclude Colorado. That is a lot of worrying. That’s also before we even get to the Pac-12 Championship.
It helps the Pac-12 that only one of the games is a nonconference game. It’s possible someone elevates themselves and cleans their plate, but it’s also possible this all acts a little like a bracket and, thanks to six of the fifteen games coming between the four, someone has to win. Also helping is that the Pac-12 being this strong should mean a 12–1 Pac-12 champ makes the playoff field. There are scenarios where that doesn’t happen, but they’re limited.
The fear of cannibalization is high, though, and it’s hard to argue with it. Washington has to go to USC. Oregon has to go to Washington and Utah. Utah has to go to USC and Washington. USC has to go to Notre Dame and Oregon. It’s a lot of games where the conference could have too many things go wrong, and while these four schools no longer have incentives for collective success, I think I’m right in my impression that the broader college football fan would be sad if we didn’t get a Pac-12 team in the playoff this year. The league is too much fun this season to come up empty in December.
Thankfully, our model is pretty bullish on this working out. Despite only having USC ranked 15th in the country, it has the Pac-12 second in Expected Playoff Teams, which is just the sum of all the playoff probabilities of a conference’s teams. It’s not a great metric—I don’t think the Pac-12 is actually likelier to send a team to the playoff than the SEC is—but having this high quantity of contenders does bode well for the league. The SEC is the best conference in college football, but thanks to its nonconference struggles, it only has two teams in which it can put much realistic hope. The Pac-12 has four. More can go wrong, but more can go right.
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Within the playoff picture, there isn’t all that natural a place to draw a line. Our model has one team with better than a 50/50 chance, three more above 1-in-3, four more above 1-in-5, two more above 1-in-7, two more above 1-in-10, four more above 1-in-20, and so on down the line. Washington is ten times likelier than Oregon State to make the Playoff, but it’s hard to define a category that includes Washington and leaves out Oregon State without unfairly cutting off Oregon or Oklahoma or Michigan. So, we’re going to just list the top 22 playoff contenders, drawing the line after 1-in-40. After that, we’ll talk about the teams who dipped out of the picture as well as the lurking undefeateds remaining below the line.
Penn State: 63.4%
We’ve talked about what Penn State did, so let’s talk about what’s to come. Next week, Penn State plays an early kickoff in Evanston against a Northwestern team who just got a gritty, emotional win. Maybe a trap game? It’s at least a risk. After that, there’s a week idle and then a visit from UMass. After that, it’s the game in Columbus. All of this means that Penn State probably won’t help its case over the next three weeks. It shouldn’t hurt it, it should notch two blowout wins, but we aren’t going to see Penn State against quality competition for nearly a month, barring a big surprise out of Northwestern.
Florida State: 42.0%
Florida State beat Clemson, and we haven’t talked about it at all yet. This isn’t to say it’s a small deal—that was a crucial win. But where Florida State has settled is a traditional place for recent ACC contenders: They’re the second-likeliest team in the country to make the playoff but Movelor only has them ranked 9th. In other words, their situation is better than they are. This is of their own doing—they’ve accomplished a lot already, winning what might be the two toughest games on their schedule—but it’s also the ACC situation: Unless the ACC is really stepping up, which is a possibility, it’s a great league out of which to make the four-team playoff. It’s the easiest power conference to win and it’s treated comparably to the others by the committee.
You can make two cases for Florida State, and both depend on what you make of Labor Day Weekend. One case is that they’ve played great football in three games now, beating the third-best SEC team and the second-best ACC team and surviving a weird game against Boston College. The other is that they’ve looked better than they are, with their stars getting a ton of attention as they’ve beaten a scuffling LSU and a post-dynasty Clemson and struggled to get past Boston College. As usual, the truth is probably in the middle. Florida State is probably a good team, one of many who could compete with anyone on any given day, but they’re right around the middle of that pack.
One last note here: Florida State had a loss to give, and it might still, but it especially had this loss to give. Losing at Clemson would have left Florida State in a pretty good position, especially if it was close. They can still lose once, but a lot of those remaining potential losses are bad even if the margin is small. So, they may not have risen much in the eyes of our model, and that is why.
Ohio State: 41.3%
Since we looked at what happens next for Penn State, let’s do the same for the Buckeyes: They’ve got Week 5 off, and then they play Maryland in Columbus and Purdue in West Lafayette ahead of the Penn State game. Maryland should still be undefeated for that matchup, and we’re approaching the part of the season where that means they’ll probably be ranked by default, but Ohio State will be a heavy favorite. It’ll be something of a test, but it shouldn’t be as much of one as Iowa was for the Nittany Lions, or as Notre Dame was for Ohio State.
Georgia: 37.6%
Georgia just keeps coasting, and not in a good way. They led UAB by as many as 35, and some of this was the function of how quickly some of Georgia’s own drives ended in touchdowns, but they allowed 21 points to a very bad team. Out of context, it looks perfectly fine, but one of these weeks, they’re going to need to play like a national champion if they’re going to remain the national champion. Still, with the SEC’s second tier so low, we might be waiting until the SEC Championship for that to be the necessity. Maybe that’s why they aren’t turning it up just yet. Maybe there’s truly some conscious attempt at pacing going on here. It would feel odd and risky, but there’s evidence to support champions being better teams in December and January than they were in September.
Washington: 30.7%
Washington just keeps doing Washington, and we’re all taking notice. They led Cal 24–6 after one quarter and 45–12 after two. They scored touchdowns on five of their first seven drives. Cal isn’t great, but they’re respectable competition.
As with so many of these teams, we don’t fully know what we have in the Huskies, but what we’re seeing is pretty good, and Michael Penix Jr. should probably be the Heisman favorite if he isn’t already.
Oregon: 25.2%
The Ducks now go to Stanford before their idle week, and then the schedule picks up. Dan Lanning’s team has crushed the opening act, but that’s the easiest test to pass.
Oklahoma: 22.7%
Oklahoma didn’t do a whole lot of scoring against Cincinnati, but they were never in serious trouble and they moved the ball well through the air. They’ll get another game against the bottom half of the Big 12 this Saturday, with Iowa State coming to Norman.
Texas: 20.5%
Finally, Texas looked good against a team that isn’t good, answering the request that they smoke somebody by stomping all over Baylor. They get Kansas this weekend in a ranked matchup that probably shouldn’t be. We love Kansas football, and they’ve done good things so far, but we’re still waiting for proof that they’re among the country’s 25 best teams.
Michigan: 18.0%
Michigan handled Rutgers, turning the most uncertain moment of the game into a 71-yard pick six which proved to be the dagger. Michigan’s defense is so good, and SP+ has Michigan as the best team in the country, but Movelor is concerned about the lack of offensive firepower, and having watched JJ McCarthy play against TCU, it’s tough to have too much belief in these guys. They can certainly win the Big Ten, they’ve proven they can beat Ohio State emphatically, but could they really win a title? Penn State’s potential ascent is also interesting here. In case it matters: A three-way 8–1 tie between Ohio State, Penn State, and Michigan would come down to who has the best combined conference record between their Big Ten West opponents. Michigan’s are Purdue, Minnesota, and Nebraska. Ohio State’s are Purdue, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Penn State’s are Iowa, Illinois, and Northwestern. I’m not sure who that favors but I don’t think it’s Michigan, and while 11–1 might still earn playoff admission for a Big Ten East runner up, it makes margin matter all the more.
Alabama: 16.2%
Alabama sent Mississippi to bed early, holding Lane Kiffin’s offense to seven points while completing 17 of 21 passes themselves, for an average of 10.7 yards per attempt. They leaned heavily on the run, but that’s probably what they have to do, and against most of their schedule, it should work out just fine. Plenty of tests remain, but the Tide are very much still in this, and that Texas result in Waco bodes well for them.
USC: 11.4%
We don’t want to pounce on USC too hard, since they’ve now posted good defensive results twice and poor defensive results twice, which is an improvement from last year. Also, they were definitely looking ahead to Colorado. Justifiably so. Still, the Trojans only beat Arizona State by two touchdowns, and it was about as close as it looks. They only led by a field goal halfway through the third quarter, and they entered the fourth quarter only ahead by six. It is probably fine, but it’s the kind of thing that can look concerning in a pack this thick (Movelor has the 5th through 18th-best teams all within 7.5 points of one another). It is concerning, to be fair. Did you see that schedule above? Did you see what was going on in Eugene and South Bend on Saturday?
Utah: 10.5%
Utah continues to survive, with Cam Rising evidently not yet ready but the Utes winning anyway, surviving a visit from a solid UCLA team by holding that solid UCLA to seven points. Utah returned Dante Moore’s first pass for a touchdown, and while it struggled on offense, it didn’t let the Bruins into the red zone until late in the third quarter en route to a 14–7 win. Utah has had a lot of games now where a win is a win, but given they’re playing their backup quarterback, that’s not a bad thing. They play early this week, meeting Oregon State in Corvallis on Friday night.
Notre Dame: 8.0%
Again, Notre Dame’s still in this, but these next three weeks are rough, and the crowd is going to be out in Durham following College Gameday. It’s a small stadium, so maybe the total volume won’t be much (I admittedly don’t know), but there will be nothing lacking about the atmosphere if Duke’s upset of Clemson is any indication.
North Carolina: 7.4%
Movelor’s coming around on UNC, putting them on the verge of entering the top 25 after the Tar Heels took care of Pitt on the road Saturday night. Pitt got after Drake Maye a lot, but UNC had more firepower, and when you can beat conference foes with raw firepower, that says a lot about where you’re at as a team. Next up is a week off, and then a meeting with Syracuse, whom we’ll visit in a moment. Importantly for this probability, UNC does not play Florida State during this regular season.
Louisville: 6.9%
Another team who doesn’t play FSU is Louisville, whom we’ve been talking about for a while and who keeps winning but continues not to rise. They have yet to run into the tests this schedule presents, but they did run away from Boston College on Saturday.
Syracuse: 5.6%
Syracuse survived Army, but now it gets hard. The next three games are home against Clemson, on the road against UNC, and on the road against Florida State. We will find out what we have with Syracuse, but the quality of the team looks, at a raw level, pretty comparable to that of UNC and Louisville.
Tennessee: 4.4%
Tennessee smoked UTSA, as they should have. Movelor’s still high on these guys from last year, but I understand the skepticism. They’re probably better than the 23rd-best team in the country, and Florida does continue to win games, but the Gators didn’t look elite against Charlotte, and that doesn’t reflect well on the Vols. Are they the SEC’s second tier? We’ll get another data point as South Carolina visits Knoxville on Saturday.
Duke: 4.0%
It isn’t impressive to blow out UConn, but the fact it was the expectation says a lot about where Mike Elko has this Duke program. Include them in that mix of Louisville, Syracuse, and UNC when it comes to quality. The difference is that they have to play not only Notre Dame but also FSU.
Kansas State: 3.5%
Kansas State ran all over a UCF team which had a lot of believers. Like Tennessee, some of Movelor’s belief in the Wildcats comes from last year, but they remain a Big 12 contender, and they do not play Oklahoma in the regular season.
Oregon State: 3.1%
Oregon State’s still alive in the playoff picture, but the margin for error is gone. In the Pac-12? You could reach that conference championship with two losses. We don’t know exactly how it will play out, but there’s a decent chance a 10–2 team’s in the Pac-12 Championship. The bigger problem is that they could only score 14 over the first three quarters against a Washington State team whose defense is not a calling card.
Washington State: 2.8%
Enormous credit to Washington State, who met the moment and is the only team entering our mix this week. It’s not particularly likely that they become a serious Pac-12 threat, but they play neither USC nor Utah, drawing all four of Arizona, Arizona State, Cal, and Colorado. Keep an eye on that.
LSU: 2.8%
After inspiring a lot of confidence against Mississippi State, Brian Kelly’s LSU needed a field goal in the closing seconds to finish off an Arkansas team who just lost to BYU at home. It was a more concerning result than the loss to Florida State was at the time it happened. Although. Florida State is looking a little less like a national champion than they were back then, too. The Tigers go to Oxford this week in the game which might finish off any playoff hopes.
Dropping Out: Mississippi (2.3%), Iowa (1.5%), UCLA (1.4%), Clemson (0.2%)
This is somewhat a function of where we drew the line, but all four of these Week 4 losers were on the fringes of possibility, and all four are now a little too low to give specific mention. There isn’t a believable path without winning the game they just lost, or—in Iowa’s case—without looking like they’d seen a football before (you could still theoretically sport a good defense without ever seeing a football, I would offer).
(We will have a broader Clemson discussion on the site today or tomorrow, but that is a separate conversation, partly because it’s long and partly because it’s not about the playoff.)
Other Undefeated Teams: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Kansas, Miami, Fresno State, Air Force, James Madison, Georgia State, Marshall, Liberty
There are 27 undefeated teams remaining in the FBS, and 16 of them can be found above. Of the remaining eleven, five are in the Power Five.
Within those five, our model is lowest on the quality of Miami, which is ironic given the Hurricanes are the highest-ranked of the five by AP Poll voters. Miami’s a big question mark. They looked great against Temple, Texas A&M looked bad against them, that win over the other Miami looks better now than it did at the time, and it didn’t look bad back them. They were just so bad last year that it would constitute quite the turnaround were they to become a real threat to make the playoff field. Their chance, per our model, is 1.2%.
We’ll get a good answer on Kansas on Saturday, with the Jayhawks in Austin. We’ll get a good answer on Kentucky as well, as Florida tries to lower the number of undefeated SEC teams to two. Maryland gets Indiana, so we probably won’t learn about them until they play Ohio State. Missouri plays Vanderbilt, so we’ll be waiting for them to play LSU in two weeks’ time to make more judgments there. Miami? They’re off this week, and then they play Georgia Tech. There’s a good chance they go to Chapel Hill on October 15th with the same number of losses as their opponent: Zero.
Air Force and Fresno State remain on a Mountain West collision course, with Movelor looking astute in having that as the case since the season began. Those two do not play in the regular season, so there’s theoretically a chance the Mountain West could have a championship between two 12–0 teams, but that’s unlikely, and it’s even more unlikely either will be in the playoff contention, with their only combined Power Five opponents Purdue and Arizona State and neither exactly what Notre Dame was for Cincinnati in 2021.
All three Sun Belt undefeateds are in the East Division of that league, but they don’t play one another for another few weeks. They likely won’t last that long, but there’s a path, and it’s worth noting that the Sun Belt has the highest average Movelor rating of any Group of Five league right now. That is a big deal, and it is surprising, but it’s been trending in that direction for a few years now.
Liberty doesn’t play much of a schedule, so undefeated is on the table for them. Movelor doesn’t have it as likely as it is for Fresno State, Penn State, Florida State, or Georgia, but they’re right there with Ohio State for fifth on the list.
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Two other areas we watch:
In the Group of Five, Fresno State still leads the pack across the board. They’re ranked the highest, Movelor has them the highest, and our model has them projected to finish with the highest CFP ranking in that category. South Alabama lost to Central Michigan, continuing to underperform as everybody’s sleeper. Wyoming remains compelling, taking down Appalachian State on Saturday in Laramie. I personally think the NCAA’s rule impacting James Madison’s postseason eligibility is good and smart, but people are mad about that, and I get that too. At some point, you just have to have some rules, and none of them are going to be perfect.
In the FCS, Montana might be in trouble, and I mean that in the big picture. The Griz lost to Northern Arizona on Saturday, and Northern Arizona is not among the good Big Sky teams right now. It’d be interesting to do a bigger dig on this, but you could make a case that Montana should have the most resources of any FCS program. That isn’t happening, and meanwhile, Montana State just beat a good Weber State team 40–0 in Ogden. It is a Bobcat state right now, and that bothers some people. Also in the Big Sky, Eastern Washington upset UC Davis, keeping their comeback tour alive, while Idaho took down Sacramento State. That’s it on the top line. All Big Sky this week. A lot of MVFC teams were off.
