Notre Dame and USC, but this time, via a proxy war.
Week Zero is always hit or miss, an awkwardly large spotlight on what’s effectively an open mic night. The last two years, it’s been Nebraska commanding our focus, mostly for worse. In 2019, it was Florida and Miami. In 2018, some of the better action came from the FCS. It’s a strange way to start a season, a sort of soft launch before the main event. But, it gives us an opportunity to look at teams we otherwise might not notice, and this year, there are some marginal playoff implications. Since there are only ten games, we’ll talk through all ten. We’ve got the time. As always, we’ll be getting a lot of help from Movelor, our college football rating system.
Fringe Playoff Candidates
- Notre Dame vs. Navy (2:30 PM EDT, NBC)
- San Jose State @ USC (8:00 PM EDT, Pac-12 Networks)
We are low on USC, both objectively (through Movelor) and subjectively (through our own judgment). We don’t think they’re bad. I would say they’re absolutely a Pac-12 contender. But expectations were so high for them last year, and they didn’t fully live up to those, and now expectations are even higher this year. I don’t know if the original Trojans liked chariots, but the cart is ahead of the horse with these guys. They’ve got a lot to prove.
Proving that starts tonight, in a later game, with reigning Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams facing a team that’s expected to finish right around the middle of the second or third-best Group of Five league. It’s a dud of a matchup, but it can tell us things.
We’ll say this a few dozen more times before the season’s out, but in college football, margin matters. Not only is winning big important for perception, but it’s just the thing good teams do. Movelor has USC favored by 24.5. Betting markets have the number at 31. We know USC can score. We always know Lincoln Riley’s teams can score. What we want to know is whether the defense can do its part to match those Vegas expectations, or whether the offense can do so much that it doesn’t matter if the defense does anything at all.
Earlier in the day, over in Ireland, Notre Dame and Navy continue one of the sport’s many historic rivalries. Our Notre Dame guy wrote about it earlier in the week, right here.
Notre Dame is, again, a fascinating character in the broader playoff conversation. There are generally eight lanes in the CFP race—two each for the SEC and Big Ten; one apiece for the Big 12, Pac-12, and ACC; and one for the rest of the country—and Notre Dame dabbles in five of them this year, with USC, Clemson, and Ohio State all on the schedule and all favored by many to win their respective leagues. What the Irish show today is meaningful not just for them, but for how the margins of error change for more serious playoff contenders. To mix the lane example with a Mario metaphor: While Marcus Freeman’s team runs its own race, they’re also lobbing blue shells out into the ether.
Notre Dame has a lot of good pieces and a lot of question marks. It’s like USC this way, but without the rising piece of the narrative (also, the good pieces are more uniformly spread with Notre Dame, whereas USC has some imbalance that makes it tantalizingly fun). The things to watch for the Irish are more specific than just “defense.” When Notre Dame has the ball, can they spread it around on Navy and show some aerial superiority? When it’s the Mids on offense, how much can Notre Dame’s physical superiority assert itself? On both sides of the ball, how significantly the Irish dominate the trenches is a big question mark. Navy is always unique, but this year, they’re more of an unknown than usual, with former defensive coordinator Brian Newberry in his first year as the program’s head coach. This could be meaningless, or it could pull some of the floor out from under the Mids as they transition, or it could result in a slightly more conventional version of the Navy we’re used to seeing. Two of those three explanations point towards situations where Notre Dame should win big. There isn’t a ton of upside today for the guys from South Bend.
Overall, there’s only something like a 1-in-8 chance either of these teams makes the playoff, per our model. But markets disagree, especially with USC, and 1-in-8 isn’t nothing. We’ll learn things today.
More Mountain West, Ohio, and Vanderbilt
- Ohio @ San Diego State (7:00 PM EDT, FS1)
- Hawaii @ Vanderbilt (7:30 PM EDT, SEC Network)
There are things here.
Ohio is the Movelor favorite to win the MAC, having lost to Toledo in the championship last year. The offense is expected to be a lot of fun again (Kurtis Rourke is returning from a torn ACL and is—yes, this is so funny—evidently the top prospect for next year’s Canadian Football League draft), while the defense is very much what you would expect from the fifth or sixth-most prominent football program in a state whose talent base is starting to dry up. San Diego State is still Brady Hoke’s team, if you ever wonder what that guy’s up to. Their defense is still good, but it’s not spectacular like it was a few years ago. Their offense is still lacking.
Ohio and San Diego State is one of two games this week without a clear favorite. Both Movelor and the markets have the Aztecs winning, but Movelor has that only 50.5% likely and the markets have the spread at 2.5.
Over in Tennessee, we get our first SEC game of the year, as Vanderbilt seeks its first winning season since 2013, James Franklin’s final year in Nashville. Over Clark Lea’s second campaign, the Commodores took a step forward, upsetting Kentucky and Florida on consecutive Saturdays in November to finish 5–7. Their other nonconference games this year come against Alabama A&M, UNLV, and a Sam Hartman-less Wake Forest, and those all happen over the next three weeks. The Dores then play Missouri at the end of September, with Kentucky thrown in the middle. This is one of those teams with one of those schedules where if they’re going to make a bowl game, they might need to start 6–0. They’ll begin the quest hosting a pretty bad Hawaii team. Movelor has the Rainbow Warriors second to last in the Mountain West (and it is not high on the Mountain West these days).
Rich Rodriguez Returns to Conference USA
- UTEP @ Jacksonville State (5:30 PM EDT, CBSSN)
- UMass @ New Mexico State (7:00 PM EDT, ESPN)
- FIU @ Louisiana Tech (9:00 PM EDT, CBSSN)
Oddly enough, Rich Rodriguez was never a head coach in Conference USA. He was, though, the Tulane offensive coordinator late in the 90s, when Tulane was in Conference USA and Tommy Bowden was the head coach. Yes, Tulane fans, I know about 1998. Yes, that was special. I don’t know what else you want me to say.
Conference USA is doing a thing this year where it puts conference games on Week Zero, and it feels like cheating but the Big Ten did the exact same thing the last two years so it probably only feels that way because it’s Conference USA. The tattered remnants of the league which once housed Memphis, Louisville, Tulane, Houston, Cincinnati, and Southern Miss are now led by Western Kentucky, Liberty, and—to hear Movelor tell it—Jacksonville State.
Jacksonville State had a lot of success at the FCS level last decade after moving up from Division II in the 90s, making the national championship in 2015 and winning the Ohio Valley Conference five straight times. They took a step back in 2021, but last year they went 9–2 as they prepared for the FBS transition, and they went 9–1 against FCS foes.
The Gamecocks played Week Zero last year as well, and they were underestimated in that game (or their opponent was overestimated) just as Movelor views them as being underestimated today. This is a traditionally strong FCS program with a decently big-name coach running its operation in the heart of SEC country there in northeast Alabama. There’s a lot working in its favor, and while it can’t play in a bowl this year (or the Conference USA championship, I would assume), it should be just as much a factor as UTEP in this bad league.
FIU is noteworthy because Movelor has it as the worst FBS team right now, bad enough that it would be ranked 78th in the FCS, which would be in the FCS’s bottom half. Movelor has Louisiana Tech as the second-worst Conference USA team and still a comfortable two-score favorite. But! These teams tied for ninth (and last) in C-USA last year at 2–6. Nothing comes easy in Ruston. Even for the home team.
Finally, New Mexico State is favored over independent UMass, having managed a 7–6 record last year in Jerry Kill’s first season in Las Cruces. It was just the team’s second winning season in the last twenty years, and given Kill’s history at Southern Illinois, Northern Illinois, and Minnesota, it’s fair and fun to have some belief in these guys. UMass, meanwhile, still doesn’t have much going for it. Bill Connelly’s SP+, which is one of our favorite college football models, has these guys, not FIU, as the worst FBS team. I’m unsure where he would have them ranked in the FCS.
The FCS
- Mercer vs. North Alabama (3:30 PM EDT, ESPN)
- Fordham @ Albany (7:00 PM EDT, Flo Football)
- South Carolina State vs. Jackson State (7:30 PM EDT, ABC)
You could do worse than these three games.
Mercer enters the year 16th in the FCS in Movelor, better than more than half of Conference USA and coming off a heartbreaking end to last season, when they lost in double overtime at Samford in a game I’d guess would have put them in the playoff field if it ended differently. They meet North Alabama this afternoon on a neutral field in Montgomery. UNA had a lot of Division II success over the years but has yet to find its footing at the Division I level after beginning its transition in 2018.
Fordham and Albany should be competitive with one another, each in the upper half of the FCS and Fordham enjoying a particularly good playoff shot, with about a 30% chance of winning a bottom-heavy Patriot League.
The HBCU kickoff, though, is where the FCS action is at. Jackson State is one of the most interesting college football teams this year at any level, because Deion Sanders—its former head coach—is one of the most interesting coaches.
Jackson State enjoyed a talent boom under Sanders like nothing an HBCU had ever seen in the recruiting-rankings era, but it lost a lot of that talent—including Travis Hunter and Shedeur Sanders—to Colorado when Deion left. Now, there’s the question of what exactly is left behind for the two-time SWAC champions and two-time Celebration Bowl runners up. Across the field? Longtime South Carolina State coach Buddy Pough announced his upcoming retirement on Thursday. The 2021 MEAC and Celebration Bowl champions had a rough season last year, but the narrative is well-crafted for them to send Pough out in style.
