We have some idea of what this Ohio State team is. They have an enormous base of talent. They’ve won in a tough setting on the road. They’re led by the best wide receiver in the country. Their defense, in a twist, appears mighty. We don’t know Ohio State well, but we have a good idea of what they are, and they’ve been so centrally in the spotlight for so many years that our familiarity with their program is comparable to our familiarity with Alabama. We know the Buckeyes well. We know them well enough to know what all the questions are.
We don’t know Penn State as well. The Nittany Lions are undefeated, and they have a ranked win to their name, but the ranked win was so decisive (31–0 was the final) that it seems to have had the effect of devaluing the accomplishment. Penn State made Iowa look so bad that it became hard, in hindsight, for Penn State to have looked good. Beyond that? Their toughest games were on the road against Illinois and home against West Virginia. Not exactly precise measuring sticks at this altitude.
So, as Penn State visits Columbus in what’s poised to be the first leg of a three-team Big Ten East round robin, we’re ready to learn. We have some idea of what this Ohio State team is. We don’t have a great grasp on Penn State. There are a number of ways that could work.
College football’s Week 8 weekend, ahead:
The Big One
Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Penn State @ Ohio State (FOX)
Impressions of Penn State are wide and varied. Movelor, our college football model’s rating system, has indicated at times that they are the best team in the country. It currently has them only a tenth of a point behind Ohio State for that title. ESPN’s SP+, which achieves slightly better accuracy with an immensely different approach (Movelor looks at the whole, SP+ looks at the parts), has the Nittany Lions ranked 8th. Questions mostly revolve around this offense—whether sophomore quarterback Drew Allar is the real deal, whether he has enough around him for that to matter. The consensus is that the defense is great, and that Manny Diaz has it firing on all cylinders, with the unit yet to allow a single opponent to score three times. The offense is the big unknown.
We talk a lot about teams who have “a loss to give,” and Penn State fits that bill. They don’t necessarily need to beat Ohio State to win the Big Ten. They don’t need to beat Ohio State to make the playoff. But it’s going to be harder if they lose, and not just because their margin for error will be gone. It’ll also be harder because it will probably mean they aren’t as good as Movelor projects, that they’re somewhere closer to SP+’s evaluation. In a practical sense, Penn State is trying to win what’s probably the tougher leg of their two-game Big Ten East challenge (they host Michigan, so Michigan would have to be six points better than the Buckeyes for those games to be the same in difficulty). In the bigger picture, they’re trying to claim their place in the national championship circle, and beating a team as talented and proven as Ohio State—one they’ve struggled to beat in this era—would get them very close.
As for Ohio State? This is the one they have to have. With help (from Penn State), Ohio State can win the Big Ten without beating Michigan. If Ohio State loses this, though, the round robin goes off script. If Ohio State loses, Ohio State needs to win on the road. If Ohio State loses, Penn State has a good chance to get to 12–0. If Ohio State loses in a certain way, frustrations with Ryan Day begin to rage in Columbus, and with the thinness of Ryan Day’s skin on full display this season, we can bet on hearing about all frustrations from both sides. Ohio State playing Michigan on Thanksgiving weekend is an inconvenient thing. Even if they do beat the Wolverines, they still have to spend the next month hearing about how they can’t, and how they haven’t, and how they’ve been physically bullied by their rivals the last two seasons. If Ohio State loses to Penn State, it’s going to be a long wait for any hope of redemption, and a lot of pressure is going to lie upon the shoulders of 18 to 23-year-olds to keep things from falling apart.
What this is, then—this, college football’s sixth bona fide Big Game of the season—is a classic case of upside and downside. Penn State has the upside. Ohio State has the downside. It’s a noon kickoff in Columbus. You would think Ohio State, of all programs, would know how to prepare to kick off at noon.
The Good Ones
It’s a solid slate.
Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Tennessee @ Alabama (CBS)
A year ago in Knoxville, Tennessee took down Alabama and then its own goalposts in a moment which released decades of pent-up Volunteer frustration. Now, both teams have something to prove.
Tennessee’s no-show in Gainesville is either puzzling or it’s not. Either Tennessee is a fine-not-great team, or Tennessee put together one of the biggest duds of the year. With Georgia inconsistent (I believe that’s the word now, since they turned the page on “underwhelming” when they whooped Kentucky), there’s a path for Tennessee to win the SEC East, and since that path includes beating Alabama and Alabama is the best in the West, that means there’s a path for Tennessee to win the SEC. We’re halfway through October, and nobody is talking about Tennessee, and they might be right. They also might be about to make up for lost time.
With Alabama, the post-Texas road has not been a fun one. The Tide are plagued by disappointing victories, poor play on the offensive line, and limitations at quarterback. The defense is fierce, and the offense has its big plays, but Alabama is not the intimidating program we’re so used to them being. The mystique is gone, and it’s possible that’s a disadvantage even beyond the disadvantage of not being all that great.
Alabama is still in a position where it can sneak through, get a little better, sneak through again, get a little more better, and continue the process all the way to the national championship. Even at their current level of play, a national championship is possible if Ohio State plays Michigan the way Ohio State’s been playing Michigan and Michigan plays Alabama the way Michigan’s been playing playoff competition. In that universe, Alabama needs exactly one surprising win, and with Brock Bowers injured, it might not even need that. Alabama is not in a bad place.
But Alabama is also not in a good place, and even beating Tennessee—a mildly realistic playoff contender themselves—would likely provide only relief at this point, not excitement.
Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: Duke @ Florida State (ABC)
Henry Belin IV threw for multiple touchdowns last week and averaged 8.9 yards per attempt for Duke in his first start during Riley Leonard’s ankle-sprain absence. Those are great numbers. The bad ones? There were only twelve attempts, and Belin only completed the pass on four of them.
We are no longer under illusions that Florida State is a great football team. Perhaps they will return us to that perspective, but for the moment, they seem ACC Great™, a close cousin to ACC Good™, which is when a team is ranked and has a good record but would be turned into meatloaf were they to play a real top-five opponent. ACC Great™ is the classic 13–0 team that’s an underdog in a playoff semifinal. That’s where Florida State appears to be headed.
What Florida State does have going for it is that it’s rather balanced. Little about this team is spectacular, but little is vulnerable. If Leonard doesn’t play, and if Belin isn’t capable of shock and awe, Florida State should capitalize enough on his mistakes or limitations to outweigh whatever it is Duke’s defense does to FSU’s offensive effort. This seems, in fact, to be the expectation. Florida State is a 14.5-point favorite, projected to win comfortably. But for as low as Duke’s ceiling may appear, perhaps the Blue Devils are as good as their record indicates, good enough to be one stop on fourth and long away from this being an undefeated, top-ten clash.
If Duke pulls off the upset, dominoes start falling fast. The ACC will suddenly face another collective uphill playoff climb, the kind of thing that did a whole lot to doom the Pac-12. Florida State will be on its heels with a trip to Gainesville and the ACC Championship still to come. Duke itself will enter the playoff mix with some vigor. UNC is a main ACC character, and UNC will remain such as long as they’re undefeated, a trend that will likely extend all the way to Veterans Day. But UNC, like Duke, is ACC Good™. We want to know for sure whether Florida State is ACC Great™.
Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT: Utah @ USC (FOX)
Does USC still have a playoff chance? Ehh. Technically. Does USC have a chance tomorrow night to avenge two brutal losses from last year, the second a deflating and embarrassing finale to Caleb Williams’s Heisman campaign? Yes. USC has that chance.
To sing our weekly refrain, Cam Rising probably won’t play tomorrow, but there’s a chance. Even if he does, Utah’s offense is not going to win the team this game. That is the job of Utah’s defense. Utah’s offense’s job is to take what USC gives them and not give USC anything back. On the balance, that might turn into quite a lot for the visitors, but the bigger job for Utah is going to be to turn Caleb Williams’s one week in Hell into two weeks in Hell, building on what Notre Dame accomplished and bullying what folks are starting to theorize could be a pretty bad offensive line.
USC is a fairly big favorite here. Seven points or so. I’m skeptical of that, as has been implied, but they do still have the reigning Heisman winner and all sorts of talent around him, along with a head coach with plenty of experience bouncing back from crushing defeats. (Anyone remember the name Kyle Kempt?) USC is not a great team, though, and this is in some ways an exercise in how not-great they are. As for Utah: Do *they* still have a playoff chance?
Ehh.
Technically.
Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Minnesota @ Iowa (NBC)
Everyone thinks Iowa is bad at football because Iowa’s offense is only capable of scoring touchdowns in one way, and that way is breaking off a single big run one time per game.
Thankfully for Iowa, Minnesota probably isn’t quality competition?
Truth be told, Iowa is not a bad football team. They are a bad offensive football team—perplexingly, atrociously, unsettlingly bad—but they are so phenomenal at the art of playing defense that it more than makes up for the offensive impotence. Movelor would have Iowa favored over USC right now, even in Los Angeles. Movelor is roughly a point per game less accurate than the Las Vegas spread.
What we want to know here is, primarily, whether or not Iowa wins. It doesn’t matter how they do it as long as they win, and that’s the theme for them from here on out. They have the simplest postseason situation of them all: Win every game, ugly though it may be, and they will make the College Football Playoff. Do anything else, and they’ll end up somewhere between the Orange Bowl and the Pinstripe Bowl. The question which informs this, though, is more how bad Minnesota is than how good Iowa is. Since that Thursday night comeback over Nebraska in Week 1, the Gophers are 0–3 against Power Five competition, a performance lowlighted by the overtime loss at Northwestern.
Penn State made Iowa look bad. Can Minnesota make Iowa look good?
Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT: Mississippi @ Auburn (ESPN)
Quietly holding onto a one-loss record in the SEC West, Mississippi has already gotten through their meetings with LSU and Alabama, beating the former after losing to the latter. Their schedule is not easy from here—they’re visited by Texas A&M, they have to go play Georgia—but this is one of their three hardest tests remaining, and with the SEC hierarchy unusually fragile, that’s enough to keep an eye on this team. Auburn, meanwhile, doesn’t face another ranked opponent after this week until the Iron Bowl. If they make a run, it won’t be towards anything of national import—they’re 0–3 in the SEC—but they’re poised for the kind of late-season success that generates offseason optimism. Win tomorrow, win some more, and the Tigers will be a popular sleeper in Hugh Freeze’s second year.
Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: Air Force @ Navy (CBS)
We’re prone to paying more attention to special college football games than their postseason impact warrants. We’re the sort who want Harvard vs. Yale to decide the Ivy League title. This is not one of those instances. Air Force is 6–0, is set to be favored in all remaining games, and is currently the Group of Five’s likeliest New Year’s Six bowl representative. They also just lost their quarterback, Zac Larrier, “for a while.”
Air Force doesn’t pass the ball much, but that doesn’t make the quarterback unimportant. This is not the Iowa offense, where much of the quarterback’s purpose is to hand off (something which made those overreactions to the impact of Cade McNamara’s injury overreactions). There is a lot happening every play in the Air Force backfield, and the quarterback is in the midst of it all. Losing Larrier may work out fine—there’s a tendency in college football for backups to not be much worse than starters—but it inserts a big unknown right before a 10:00 AM Mountain Time start against one of the opponents who takes the Falcons more seriously as a rival than anybody else. This is more than tradition and pageantry. This is a major hurdle in Air Force’s race to be the best mid-major in the country.
The Important Ones
Dormant volcanoes:
- Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: Michigan @ Michigan State (NBC)
- Saturday, 12:00 PM EDT: UCF @ Oklahoma (ABC)
- Saturday, 10:30 PM EDT: Arizona State @ Washington (FS1)
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Washington State @ Oregon (ABC)
- Saturday, 4:00 PM EDT: Texas @ Houston (FOX)
- Saturday, 6:30 PM EDT: Virginia @ North Carolina (CW)
- Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: Army @ LSU (SECN)
We should talk about Michigan potentially getting caught again flouting the rules. What’s going on there? My impression is that they’ve been accused of sending staff to opposing teams’ games to scout, which is against the rules. Specifically, they’re being accused of using the in-person scouting to identify opponents’ offensive hand signals. It is generally a big advantage to know which play your opponents are going to run.
You could make a case that in-person scouting should be allowed. I would guess that, if this scandal continues to escalate, plenty of Michigan people will make that case, just as they passed off recruiting during a dead period as an infraction only about a cheeseburger. Again, though, Jim Harbaugh’s program is accused of having broken a rule, and in sports, the rules are the rules. It’s kind of like a blindside block. Whether you like the rule or not, it’s the rule, and if Michigan is guilty, they’ve already accepted whatever consequences await. That’s the risk inherent to breaking a rule.
That piece of this is cut and dried. What’s not cut and dried is what’s going on at Michigan. Is this a program pushing the envelope especially far? Is this a program prone to getting caught? Is Jim Harbaugh calling all these shots? Does Jim Harbaugh have trouble controlling his underlings? What exactly did Matt Weiss do? Michigan has been outperforming its talent in recent years. When Clemson used to outperform its talent, its players were faster and stronger than their recruiting rankings indicated and then suddenly, in moderate proportion, tested positive for the same PED. Are the edges Michigan is finding of the illegal variety?
The nice thing about a sign-stealing scandal at this point in the year with this Michigan team is that it probably doesn’t affect much of consequence within this season. Michigan hasn’t played anybody all that respectable yet, and their future opponents of quality are all far enough off that those opponents will have plenty of time to adjust their signals. It’s a wrinkle, and it’s late notice for Michigan State, but it sounds like suspicions already had coaches preparing for this issue, and for as nice as it would be for Michigan State’s players and students to win this game, there are no championships at stake tomorrow for the Spartans.
In the others, hangovers are the question. Oklahoma and Texas had a week off. Will they come out focused or rusty? Washington and Oregon just played their Super Bowl. Will they come out invigorated or suffer a letdown? North Carolina is finally looking good and being called a good team. How lightly will they take Virginia? LSU appears to have righted the ship. It’s done that before, though, and Army is notoriously unusual, a pebble in the blender. All these teams—Michigan, Oklahoma, Washington, Oregon, Texas, UNC, LSU—have at least somewhat realistic playoff hopes (and some have especially strong likelihoods). Movelor says there’s about a 4-in-9 chance one of the seven goes down.
The Interesting Ones
Moving down the line.
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Oklahoma State @ West Virginia (ESPN)
- Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT: TCU @ Kansas State (ESPN2)
The weekend’s Big 12 slate is highlighted by a rematch of last year’s conference championship. Or is it? Kansas State is very much alive in this season’s Big 12 race, but TCU already has two conference losses and still has to play both Texas and Oklahoma. Meanwhile, Oklahoma State’s victory over Kansas State may have been more than just Friday night magic in Stillwater—the Pokes won again last week over Kansas and are, along with West Virginia, among the league’s five one-loss teams trying to keep within a step of the Sooners. With Texas on neither Oklahoma State nor West Virginia’s schedule, the path to participation in a messy tiebreaker is there for the winner to pursue.
- Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT: Clemson @ Miami–FL (ACCN)
Is Miami any good? They’re 0–2 in ACC play after a 4–0 start which included a thumping of Texas A&M. Now, they get a Clemson team licking some wounds of its own but coming off a convincing win over Syracuse, an unconvincing win over Wake Forest, and a week off, a three-Saturday stretch which constitutes the Tigers’ best of the year. Miami’s ACC title hopes are laughable. Clemson’s are thin. Still, it’s hard to look away. How good Miami is matters to college football as a whole. The same is true of Clemson. As the ACC pecking order shuffles in earnest here in the post-Lawrence era, there are power structure implications at play.
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: North Texas @ Tulane (ESPN2)
The Group of Five’s informal national championship—the one rarely called as much but functionally a title race decided by the CFP committee and rewarded with a New Year’s Six berth—has three main participants. One, Air Force, was covered above. Another, Fresno State, is off this week. The third is Tulane, and they are a three-score favorite over this North Texas team. UNT has gotten better since the year began, but Tulane is playing a style points game, trying to establish themselves as the better team than their Mountain West competition without the benefit of playing the other teams in the race.
- Saturday, 4:00 PM EDT: Toledo @ Miami–OH (ESPNU)
That’s right. Both Miamis play big ones this week. The RedHawks are involved in the MAC’s game of the year, to date.
The MACs three best teams are, in some order, Toledo, Miami, and Ohio. Toledo leads the West Division. Miami leads the East. Ohio is in the West with Miami, but they were upset last week in DeKalb. Miami still has to go play Ohio on the road (the Bobcats and Rockets don’t meet this regular season), so there’s a solid chance the East will be decided head to head, but whether tomorrow’s game comes to impact the MAC championship directly or not, it’s an exciting measurement between two teams at the top of a league, and at the very least, the winner will enjoy that much more breathing room heading into next weekend.
- Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT: Wisconsin @ Illinois (FS1)
Wisconsin’s still a team to watch, the Big Ten West’s likeliest foil should Iowa go down. They’d need more help—or they’d need to upset Ohio State—and it’s possible the division could devolve into a state where four-way ties are on the table. But with betting markets so low on the Hawkeyes and a lot of football left to play, it’s worth continuing to pay attention to the Badgers, at least through the end of the month.
- Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT: Georgia State @ Louisiana (ESPNU)
- Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT: Appalachian State @ Old Dominion (NFLN)
In the Sun Belt, someone will represent the East Division in the conference championship with James Madison either ineligible or not invited by the league (given some college basketball conferences let postseason-ineligible teams play in their conference tournaments, I’m not sure whether the Sun Belt Championship piece of JMU’s postseason absence is coming solely from the NCAA). All of Georgia State, Appalachian State, Old Dominion, and Georgia Southern are possibilities, with Louisiana competing for the West title. Of the four, Movelor gives Georgia State the edge, but only at a 31% probability. They’ve got the toughest matchup this week.
The FCS
Three top-ten teams (Movelor’s top ten, I often don’t check the polls) play good conference competition this weekend in the championship subdivision:
- Saturday, 3:00 PM EDT: South Dakota State @ Southern Illinois (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 10:30 PM EDT: Montana State @ Sacramento State (ESPN2)
- Saturday, 2:30 PM EDT: Furman @ Western Carolina (ESPN+)
The highlight here is Montana State’s trip to Sacramento. The Bobcats, national semifinalists three of the last four years, appear to be the FCS’s second-best team, their only loss so far coming on the road at South Dakota State via two-minute drill. The way the FCS often works is that we throw new potential challengers at teams we think could be among the best, and we see how they measure up. With the good Southeastern teams anxious to join the FBS (smartly, it turns out, with the price of admission rising), and with the good Northeastern teams fading as cultural support in the region does the same, power is consolidated in the Big Sky and the MVFC right now. Seventy percent of Movelor’s FCS top 20 plays in those two leagues. Most of the FCS championship is decided in the regular season melee within and between those two leagues.
So, we’re throwing Sacramento State at Montana State this time. The Hornets have one loss—to Idaho in the Kibbie Dome—and they’ve scuffled a little their last two games, narrowly escaping Northern Arizona and sleepwalking past Northern Colorado. But, this is college football, and teams rally, and a home game on a big stage against a program with a target on its back is as good a scene as anyone could hope for in Andy Thompson’s first year as head coach. Movelor has the line favoring Montana State by around ten points.
In the Midwest, something similar is happening with South Dakota State and SIU. Like Sacramento State, Southern Illinois has seen itself ranked higher at points this year, commanding a lot of attention before getting stomped by Youngstown State two Saturdays back. Even playing at home, even ranked 14th by the system, Movelor has them a 17-point underdog here. But, this is college football, and the Salukis are not a bad team. This is a comparable matchup in respective team quality to if Air Force played Vanderbilt.
Not all the good Southeastern programs have jumped to the FBS, and we’re getting a good test tomorrow of what should be one of the best two teams in that direction. Furman, ranked 9th by Movelor, is 5–1 on the year with their only loss coming to South Carolina. Their toughest competition to date, however—beyond the Gamecocks—has been a 27th-ranked Samford team. Western Carolina is 18th in our rankings, has beaten Chattanooga (another SoCon contender), and has also downed Samford, leaving them alone with the Paladins as the undefeateds in the league. Both are likely to make the playoffs, but winning the conference will likely be enough to get whoever does it a first-round bye, which is a big deal given the danger of unseeded, geographically decided first-round matchups. This might be the SoCon Championship. WCU hosts.
Other FCS games of note:
- Saturday, 2:00 PM EDT: Illinois State @ Youngstown State (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 5:00 PM EDT: North Dakota @ Northern Iowa (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 7:00 PM EDT: Weber State @ Eastern Washington (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT: Incarnate Word @ McNeese (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 8:00 PM EDT: Austin Peay @ Southern Utah (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 1:00 PM EDT: Lafayette @ Holy Cross (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 1:00 PM EDT: Harvard @ Princeton (ESPN+)
- Saturday, 1:00 PM EDT: St. Francis (PA) @ Duquesne (NECFR)
Both Youngstown State and Northern Iowa are .500 overall despite sitting comfortably in the Movelor top 20 (Youngstown State is 10th). Theirs aren’t quite playoff elimination games, but they’re close, and Illinois State has some résumé-building to do while North Dakota is looking to look the part of a top-five team after establishing themselves last weekend with the beatdown of NDSU.
Weber State and Eastern Washington are playing to preserve fading playoff hopes, with Weber State among the biggest disappointments of the year and Eastern Washington starting to struggle last week after performing well against a brutal September schedule.
Incarnate Word and Austin Peay each have games they’d hope would be routine, each looking to cement themselves as deserving a lot of home games in November and December. Peay has looked excellent since losing to SIU and Tennessee to open the year. UIW is doing the Sacramento State thing, continuing to succeed after the architect of their program moved to an FBS school down the road.
Holy Cross has an interesting one, playing a 5–1 Lafayette team who hasn’t played much competition in their wins but is steadily climbing, and could be the Crusaders’ primary Patriot League competition when all is said and done. Harvard looks to keep rolling as they face Princeton, entering at 5–0 and eyeing an eventual top-ten ranking. Duquesne hosts Saint Francis for what might be the NEC championship.
