A common complaint regarding national college football coverage is that it focuses too heavily on the SEC. This is a silly complaint. You can’t tell the NFL’s story over the last 25 years without talking about Tom Brady. You can’t tell college football’s without talking about the SEC.
The default, approaching tonight’s game, is to talk about Washington and Michigan, and this is fair and just. We will be talking mostly about Washington and Michigan in the rest of this post. But to properly appreciate what Washington and—to a greater degree—Michigan have done to get here, we need to talk about what happened this season in the SEC.
My best explanation of what it’s taken to win a national championship in college football during the last 15 years—the era in which recruiting coverage has been the most detailed and made our understanding the most accurate—is the following:
- You must amass a lot of talent. Speed. Size. Strength. Ability to play quarterback from one and preferably two players. It has been rare in recent college football history to see a national champion who is not among the three or four biggest and fastest teams in the country. Speed, size, and strength are the raw materials from which national champions are usually built.
- You must harness those raw materials and shape them into a great football team. It’s not enough to have big, strong, fast players and a quarterback with the right raw tools. You must get those players to play to their potential. LSU’s talent has routinely been near the top of college football, but LSU has oscillated between greatness and mediocrity as coaches and their performance have come and gone. You need the raw material, but the builder needs to know what he’s doing.
- You must—and this has been increasingly true in recent years, paradoxically true after playoff expansion—consistently win. Some years, you cannot lose. Every year except for one (a long time ago now), you cannot lose more than once. It is not enough to be a great football team. You must be that great football team every single week.
The issues for the SEC powers this year:
- Georgia did not accomplish number 3. Georgia had issues early in the year with this—bigger issues, at better times—but it really bit them in the SEC Championship. They didn’t play their best game when they had to. They didn’t show up perfectly for the biggest game of the season. There were other challenges—it’s hard to stay great when you’ve sent 25 players to the NFL Draft over the last two offseasons—but the core of Georgia’s absence tonight is that Georgia did not achieve the consistency this season required.
- Alabama did not accomplish number 2. Alabama’s offensive line never synced up. There were other issues—consistency was a problem, and Jalen Milroe was not always as effective a quarterback as national champions often need—but the core of Alabama’s absence tonight is that Nick Saban’s program had an unusually hard time turning its great athletes into a great team.
- If we include Texas in this mix, SEC team that they’re about to be, all three issues reared their head in the end, each to a minor degree. Texas only graded out 6th on the 247Sports Talent Composite. Texas is only ranked 8th right now by Movelor. Steve Sarkisian made some fourth quarter gaffes in each of Texas’s two losses this year. The Talent Composite and Movelor each have their shortcomings, and Sark’s decisions weren’t egregious, but the Longhorn downfall came from a combination of all three problems. Texas was good. Texas wasn’t great.
What’s interesting—what’s game-changing about this college football season—is that neither Michigan nor Washington completed step number 1. Neither Michigan nor Washington is all that talented when it comes to the raw materials. Going back to original recruiting grades—highly predictive as you click back through the years—Michigan comes in 14th in that Talent Composite and Washington sits at 26th. Michigan and Washington took the 14th-best and 26th-best 18-year-olds in the country and turned them into the national champion and the national runner up.
There are theories for what happened here, and one circles back to age.
Michael Penix Jr., Washington’s ace of a quarterback, is very old. Michael Penix Jr. is a year and a half older than C.J. Stroud, the likely NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year. Michael Penix Jr. graduated high school the same year as Trevor Lawrence, who won a national championship five years ago. Washington got here in large part because Michael Penix Jr. threw the football equivalent of no-hitters against Oregon twice and against Texas in the Sugar Bowl. It didn’t hurt that this is the man’s sixth year in college and fifth season with five or more starts. Without the Covid eligibility phenomenon, Michael Penix Jr. would be too old to play college football this year. This was a big asset for Washington.
Michigan’s offensive line, the unit most responsible for the Wolverines overcoming their Ohio State-sized Sisyphean hill and then the unit most responsible for wearing down Alabama, is also very old. Every starter on the line enrolled in college before the 2019 season except for Zak Zinter, whose injury somehow made the line older than it was before he went down. I’m not sure which of the linemen redshirted and which are using that Covid eligibility, but regardless, these are primarily fifth-year starters. They are grown men with an extra year of conditioning under their belts.
Age is not, though, the end of the story. Plenty of teams play fifth-year offensive linemen. Kalen DeBoer could likely have recruited another good quarterback, even if Penix has been special under his tutelage.
That “tutelage” word is important here, and it gets at what’s really gone on: Michigan has ridden a wave of talent that is cresting this year. Washington played a game that usually works better in the NFL and developed an excellent player at the most impactful position on the field. Each has made the most out of the raw material they have, and specifically in the arena of player development. They haven’t completely closed the talent gap. Michigan’s players were still not as fast as Alabama’s, and Washington’s are not as fast or strong as Texas’s or Georgia’s. But through a combination of riding their veterans and playing the player development game really well, Michigan and Washington seem to have made their players good enough that good coaching and consistency have carried the day.
There are two more recent programs we should talk about here. One is Clemson, circa 2018. The other is TCU, circa January 9th, 2023.
Clemson did not recruit as well, back in the day, as Alabama did, but in that 2018 season’s national title game, there was no denying who was the biggest, strongest, fastest team on the field. Two weeks earlier, somewhere around a fifth of players tested on the Clemson roster tested positive for a performance-enhancing substance. We’ve mentioned this a lot on this site, but as with the SEC vis-à-vis tonight’s title game, it bears mentioning. We don’t know whether Clemson was cheating intentionally or at a wide scale, but we do know that Clemson had a highly effective strength program leading up to the 2018 season, and that they then had a small wave of positive PED tests, and that they have since receded in how efficiently they convert their recruiting numbers into wins. It really all might be a coincidence. But it bears mentioning. I personally think Michigan is just undervalued by the Talent Composite and is riding a sensational offensive line capable of competing with a slightly down version of Alabama. But they did get busted for some level of cheating, and perhaps it helped them in some ways along the climb.
TCU made the national championship last year in a position much like that of Washington: They weren’t as good on paper as the other team and they weren’t as talented. They drew the right opponent in the semifinal and capitalized on that opponent’s mistakes. They absolutely earned the right to be there, but they also got a little lucky, and that showed as they failed to make a bowl game this year. If Washington beats Michigan tonight, all the credit in the world to Washington. But until then, we’re more interested in how Michigan got so good than we are in how Washington got so good. Because: For as impressive as Washington’s last two games have been, the teams they beat—Oregon and Texas—just aren’t quite as good, on average, from everything we know, as Michigan’s best conquered foes—Alabama and Ohio State.
We have our suspicions at this site that Michigan is going to run the ball all over Washington, treating the Huskies like Penn State with a worse defense and a reasonably competitive offense. We thought Alabama got too cute with its play-calling in the Rose Bowl and could have beaten Alabama in regulation had they not overestimated the Tide front seven. The most enduring truth of the last 15 years of college football has been that while the SEC’s strength varies, its best teams are usually the nation’s best, and that Alabama knows how to show up at the season’s end. We are more impressed by Michigan beating Alabama in January than we are by Texas beating Alabama in September, and we are therefore more impressed by Michigan beating Alabama in January than we are by Washington beating Texas in January. But we didn’t think Washington had a good chance against Texas, and we didn’t think Michigan would beat Ohio State any of the last three years. Sports surprise, and rules of greatness change. We think Michigan is a traditionally great college football team who got there in unique fashion. It’s possible Washington, though, is great themselves, a sport-altering unicorn. It’s also possible Washington isn’t as good as Michigan and that Washington will still win. The third rule says you have to show up at the right times.
