A lot happened over the last five days of college football, from USF trouncing Boise State to TCU trouncing UNC to the continued sacking of the Tuscaloosa Empire. There’s a lot to say. We’ve culled our list to 35 thoughts and theories, which—in the spirit of college football’s ardent dedication to academics—we’ll call thesis statements.
Before those…
If you missed it yesterday, we updated our CFP Bracketology, Movelor’s Top 25, and some other readouts from our model. The only addenda there are that TCU is now in Movelor’s Top 25, ranked 20th, and that they’re presumably a Big 12 contender but presumably not the Big 12 favorite. More updates on that later this week.
Now.
Thesis statements. (Apologies to any English teachers in the room. Some of these are chaotic. I was an English major, but I wasn’t always a good one.)
The moment the rest of the country should have gotten scared of Ohio State came on Texas’s fourth play, when the Buckeyes made it impossible for Arch Manning to sneak forward even a couple feet. The biggest question about this team was the heart of its defensive line.
The preseason AP Poll is useful, but voters disrespected Ohio State. That’s why it sounded so weird when Gus Johnson said the Buckeyes were leading “the number one team in the nation” after they went up 7–0. They won the national championship and there was no good reason to believe anyone else got better than they did.
If Ohio State hadn’t dropped all those passes early, Julian Sayin would be getting a lot of attention right now.
Clock-milking is an important piece of college football and a useful referendum on the strength of an offensive line. Put a pin in Ohio State’s struggles to put the Longhorns away at the end.
Texas is fine. It doesn’t feel true, but if Colin Simmons kept his hands to himself on that Buckeye touchdown drive, Texas might have won that game.
Texas has issues. The second-biggest was its offensive line. That’s a position group which can improve through more experience playing together.
Texas has issues. The biggest was Arch Manning. He was the reason for the hype. From a lot of media the backlash is hypocritical, but he’s the key to this team reaching national championship quality.
We were right that Steve Sarkisian doesn’t trust Manning, but we didn’t understand why. We thought it would be about decision-making and reads. It looks like it’s an accuracy problem. That’s harder to fix, which means Texas might need to work around it. Go watch some Riley Leonard tape, Sark.
For a lot of teams, Week 1 wasn’t about making the playoff. It was about not missing it. The media and the CFP committee have created too much incentive to not get blown out, even in games where there’s really no downside (shoutout to Curt Cignetti, the pioneer who recognized this and turtled in a playoff game). The result is Sark playing to not get crushed in Columbus and Marcus Freeman playing to not get crushed in Miami.
LSU is not the second-best team in the country, but second-most accomplished is fair for now. By the rites and rituals which govern college football rankings, sure. Call them number two.
LSU isn’t talented enough. They’re not on the same plane of talent as Georgia, Ohio State, and Texas. They can turn out better than those teams (they’re better than Alabama, the last team on that plane), but they have a lower ceiling.
Brian Kelly understandably takes a lot of heat, but he had a great gameplan and despite his own red face, his team kept its cool and executed. I think it was Cortez Hankton whom the broadcast showed calmly steering his receivers through a Kelly tirade early in the night. That’s huge, and it circles back to crediting Kelly for hiring assistants who can handle him and empowering them to do that.
Clemson should have had a big continuity advantage, so the fact their engine stalled is either a booming endorsement of Blake Baker or a sign that their ceiling is just too low. However!
Cade Klubnik can be better than that, and at times he will be. The question is whether he’s limited or inconsistent. Either is bad, but limited is worse for Clemson’s hopes of a seriously good season.
Mario Cristobal might be the best offseason coach in the country. Miami brought in a lot of new guys and showed up ready to kick ass in every phase of the game.
Mario Cristobal has his work cut out for him in keeping that team focused. They should have won by more. It looked like they thought it was over. It took three quarters for Miami to start resting on its laurels. Cristobal needs to navigate at least three months.
Mario Cristobal needs help with game management. His kicker is not good enough to justify that kind of use.
Notre Dame looked like it regressed to its talent level, which like LSU’s is good but not good enough to match the highest ceilings in the sport.
Notre Dame’s offensive line struggles were perplexing, but they probably stemmed from conditioning. That’s a wild mistake to make and it could hint towards a lack of focus, but that unit should be fine the longer the season goes on.
Notre Dame misses the center of its defensive line. It’s a rebuilding year in South Bend.
Florida State played its heart out on Saturday, and it’s refreshing to see hustle, Gus Malzahn, and Tommy Castellanos be enough to massacre a talented but poorly-coached defense.
Florida State’s (obviously) a lot better, but they’re going to need some underachievement from Clemson and Miami if they’re going to win the ACC.
If you put Ty Simpson in Columbus, nobody would be seriously doubting his capabilities. Development’s always underrated as a factor in what quarterbacks become.
Inconsistency is a sign of poor focus, and Alabama is the most inconsistent good team in the country. It also has every ingredient imaginable for distraction: Tons of agents in the mix and a set of boosters who 1) understandably think they’re the reason Alabama was great the last 20 years, given they spent so much money building those rosters and 2) don’t have a lot of natural trust for the western Midwesterner who took over from Nick Saban. Speaking of those…
We’ve said it before, but the thing that made Nick Saban the greatest of his generation was his skill at managing a program. He maximized booster contribution, kept his players focused, and kept the whole Alabama ecosystem pulling in the same direction. At his best, even Kirby Smart has only done two of those three things at once. Saban always did all three.
Alabama has the talent for now, but there’s no reason it should stay more talented than Florida, Texas A&M, and even schools like Oklahoma and Tennessee over the next few years. Alabama’s done an efficient job of mining its resources—we can infer that recruiting gets a higher percentage of booster money there than it does in Gainesville—but that’s left it with only downside in the talent game.
Oregon and Iowa State shouldn’t be too comfortable even after playing nearly-perfect games against some of the best of the FCS. Montana State and South Dakota are better than most of the country, but the only FCS team who would beat average power conference teams this year is probably North Dakota State.
North Dakota probably made a leap, but Kansas State’s defense sucked on Saturday, and they’re lucky to have survived the post-Dublin game. Hosting Army followed by a short week road game could be enough to send the Wildcats spiraling. It’s white-knuckle time until they reach their 15-day break in mid-September.
Boise State regressed to its talent level, and as we said last year, it wasn’t as good last year as some of those teams in the Chris Petersen era.
Half-seriously, I think Shedeur Sanders was a good game manager and Deion Sanders is not. Deion Sanders needs to grow in that area if Colorado’s going to avoid losing a ton of close games. You can’t be a guy who leaves two timeouts on the table if you’re going to win in the Big 12. Too many one-possession games for that.
I don’t know if South Carolina is flawed or if Shane Beamer is simply a Beamer. They might just thrive in the muck.
Bill Belichick walked into a terrible situation in Chapel Hill, but he and his team (I’m actually thinking of Mike Lombardi here more than Jordon Hudson) haven’t done themselves any favors through their arrogant messaging. The NFL’s 33rd team got its ass kicked.
We said it above, but TCU might be a Big 12 contender (as might BYU, Utah, Kansas, Texas Tech, Kansas State, and Colorado, in addition to known contenders ISU and ASU). So that’s a positive for UNC. The NFL’s 33rd team got its ass kicked by one of the nine teams who might win the Big 12.
I don’t know what to say about Tennessee but I want to mention them because they were impressive. Not perfect, but Tennessee doesn’t need to be perfect.
I also don’t know what to say about Lee Corso besides that I also love him, as it seems we all do. Sometimes the groupthink is correct.
I’m not sure what we’ll have for you tomorrow, but later this week we’ll of course have a Week 2 preview, plus our model’s full outputs and hopefully some FCS bracketology. We’re working on that program right now.
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