Good, old-fashioned chaos.
It’s easy to say now that Tennessee deserved our skepticism, and we won’t go that far. They did hold off Alabama, albeit at home, and they stomped LSU in Baton Rouge, and it was proven that they weren’t on Georgia’s level but now it’s also been shown that they’re almost certainly no Ohio State or Michigan. Movelor, in our model’s latest update, has the Volunteers as the sixth-best team in the country, back behind Alabama and newly behind Penn State. SP+ and FPI disagree with Movelor on the Penn State piece, but it’s largely irrelevant. The point is: Tennessee was not a playoff-caliber team, and now we know, and now the committee knows as well. Barring a wild turn of events these next twelve days, Tennessee—like Alabama—will not be selected for the College Football Playoff. We’re down, if you draw the line for consideration at 1-in-100 likely, to eight teams playing for four spots.
I don’t know that we have much to say about Tennessee’s game itself, except that the Hendon Hooker injury is very sad—Dennis Dixon-esque—and that hey, Spencer Rattler isn’t so bad. South Carolina dominated time of possession, passed for first downs at will (11.9 yards per attempt), and successfully scored a touchdown on each of its first five drives. It was a thrashing, and that it came from the team who just a week ago lost by thirty to Florida and just three weeks ago lost by double digits to Mizzou is an indication that yes, college football still has the capacity to surprise us, even as power has consolidated in recent years in the hands of Ohio State, Clemson, and three programs in the SEC. It wasn’t shocking that South Carolina won. It was shocking that they blew Tennessee out of the water.
The game flipped the script on the Saturday, which had previously been quite bad for the Big Ten’s contending pair. Michigan nearly went down at home to deservedly unranked Illinois. Ohio State needed to stop Maryland on the Terrapins’ final possession. Each of these teams is now close to locked into the playoff—our model puts the Buckeyes at 99.3% and the Wolverines at 90.7%. Without Tennessee’s loss, that situation would be loudly dicier.
For Ohio State, it’s hard to see a single scenario that does not end up in a playoff appearance. By APD (Adjusted Point Differential, our model’s measurement of how convincingly teams win), the Bucks have been the most impressive team in the country. They’ve struggled in big games, but they’ve always won them in the end. Barring total annihilation by Michigan in Columbus next weekend, the Buckeyes are in unless the committee gets very cute and very dismissive of the things that have mattered to their predecessors.
Michigan’s in a slightly tougher boat. They still have just the one surely compelling victory: Their win over Penn State is the fifth-most impressive in the country in our model’s margin-and-location-aware eyes, but their next-best one, the win over Iowa, comes in at 34th. They didn’t schedule a single respectable nonconference foe, giving the committee an out in the public’s eyes similar to when a prior committee kept the Big 12 out because the Big 12 wouldn’t name a champion. There’s cause for belief that these committees like to point to specific things within the control of their candidates, and that they want to incentivize aggressive nonconference scheduling. An institutionalist approach, if you will.
Still, Michigan’s résumé is pretty strong, in reality. They did bully Iowa, who’s fairly likely to finish the season ranked. The Illinois debacle was only their second one-score victory of the campaign. Their APD is well below those of Ohio State and Georgia, and it even trails Alabama’s, but it still dwarfs those of TCU, USC, Clemson, Oregon, and LSU. Most crucially, if they do lose to Ohio State, it’ll be on the road against one of the two best teams in the country. There’s a recency piece to this, but I don’t think any committee is dumb enough to zoom out, look at Clemson’s loss at Notre Dame and a hypothetical Michigan loss at Ohio State, and call them close enough for a conference title bonus to make the difference.
To Clemson’s credit, they’re pulling it together. Or, they’re playing against the ACC. Notre Dame’s thorough dominance of ACC competition says more than it’s being allowed to say, especially because it confirms what numbers tell us: This league is bad, bad, bad. Clemson isn’t a terrible team. They had a terrible game in South Bend, but they’re in the top ten of all three of Movelor, SP+, and FPI. The problem is that their loss was so emphatic, and their wins leave tons to be desired. Clemson’s second-best win, to go back to Michigan’s win over Iowa? It’s worse than the Michigan/Iowa victory. It’s the overtime escape from Wake Forest, who might climb back into the committee’s top 25 this week but is unanimously in the mid-to-high 30’s in actual quality, according to the three rating systems we reference. Clemson’s résumé is weak in the context of most potential 12-1 Power Five champs, and blowing out 5-6 Miami doesn’t do much to change that.
It doesn’t help the Tigers that UNC laid down in front of a rickety shopping cart and made it look like a steamroller, blowing a 17-0 lead at home against Georgia Tech while now-former Heisman candidate Drake Maye completed just sixteen of his thirty passes and failed to find the endzone. It wasn’t a beatdown, but it was a terrible loss, erasing UNC’s own fringy playoff shot and taking another opportunity to impress away from Dabo Swinney’s guys. UNC will still assumedly be ranked tomorrow night, but the likelihood of them losing to NC State is now higher, and there’s no longer any chance of the ACC Championship featuring two playoff hopefuls, which hurts Clemson and helps Michigan et al.
USC doesn’t have the same issues Clemson has with résumé. Their wins are unimpressive so far—UCLA’s had a nice season, but they also just lost to Arizona before Saturday’s tight one in L.A.—but they get two shots at good teams these next two weeks, playing Notre Dame on Saturday and then most likely Oregon in the Pac-12 Championship. Their loss is completely understandable, coming by one point on the road against a Utah team that is, on paper, second-best in the league behind the Ducks (and maybe still the best—their loss on Saturday night was only by a field goal, which is exactly the margin expected from two equal teams playing at one’s home field).
The problem for the Trojans—and they have opportunity to rectify this, which is why their playoff probability in scenarios in which they do win out remains well north of fifty percent—is that even their wins against bad teams haven’t been all that impressive. They’re behind eleven teams in APD, a list that includes Texas, Florida State, and Kansas State. And given that APD has some predictivity within it, this is the real issue for Lincoln Riley: It’s unlikely that the Trojans beat Oregon, and it’s close to unlikely that they get past Notre Dame. USC controls its fate more than anyone outside the current top four, but its road is tough and it’s not exactly out there using all-wheel drive.
That said, we’ve told a similar tale about TCU for more than a month now, at one point mostly refusing to acknowledge their playoff chance because it was so likely that they’d lose. With Iowa State continuing to disintegrate, though, they’re now one take-care-of-business victory and a minor upset of Kansas State away from being clearly in the field. Even if they lose to Kansas State, they may still have a chance, either through losses by USC and Clemson or a come-to-Jesus moment in which the committee refuses to let an ACC team in the field for the same reasons they didn’t let UCF in back in 2017. TCU shouldn’t lose, if they want to get in this thing, but losing wouldn’t totally eliminate them. And to go back to Clemson for a moment—that South Carolina game this weekend suddenly looks a whole lot tougher than it did 48 hours ago.
TCU’s win over Baylor was emblematic of their whole year. They struggled. They were sloppy. They were often outplayed by possibly a better football team, but one that’s failed the consistency test and so is thoroughly not in our conversation. They were aggressively themselves on the final two plays, sacrificing the comfort of time on the field goal attempt for an extra few yards of proximity to the goalposts, and for reasons forever unknowable (with no counterfactual available), it worked. TCU is not one of the four best teams in the country. But they keep doing everything they’re asked to do, and they keep winning the decisive moments, and that’s an effective alternative to being great, if you can pull it off.
The final two characters left on our radar—Oregon and LSU, each of whom has a chance to be a two-loss Power Five champion, something that’s never earned a playoff berth before but could this year—impressed, LSU through whooping UAB and Oregon through a defensive showcase in which they picked off Cameron Rising three times and held their Pac-12 counterpower to fewer than five yards per play, both by air and by land. The Ducks should be watching tomorrow’s rankings more closely than anyone, looking to see how close they currently stand to Clemson, with more left to gain than the Tigers but that one additional loss. The (LSU) Tigers are in a great spot, given the hole they dug for themselves. Their head-to-head vanquisher just lost, the other team which beat them keeps winning (Florida State should crack the top fifteen tomorrow), and Texas A&M still looks pretty bad, meaning their SEC Championship game against Georgia really might be an opportunity to play their way into the field. To a greater degree than USC, the probability of LSU winning out is low, but they’re closer to controlling their fate than even Clemson, most likely. What’s more, about a third of our data points on Georgia suggest the Dawgs are vulnerable, as they looked like they had an albatross around their neck for most of that game in Lexington.
Tennessee and Alabama do remain the teams in waiting, characters who might get a call in a world where TCU ends 11-2, Clemson loses to South Carolina, USC wins the Pac-12 at 11-2, and Georgia smokes LSU. In that scenario, Tennessee currently looks like a better candidate than Alabama, but the Volunteers are now without their star quarterback, and while they hold the head-to-head advantage, their second loss is massively worse than that of the Tide (and it came with that star quarterback still healthy). So, that’s another thing to watch with tomorrow’s rankings, but we’ll try to say more on that tomorrow. For now, it’s an eight-team race with two alternates for now and maybe just the one after tomorrow. UNC was eliminated. Utah was eliminated. Tennessee opened a door wide open that we didn’t think was there. In opening that door, the Vols reminded us of college football’s proud tradition of not following the script, one that’s slipped in the last few years. We’ve got ourselves a playoff race. There might be a lot more twists and turns on the speedway.
