College Football: The Third (Crazy) Month

I've reserved myself to writing about football once a month for a couple reasons.  First, I originally tried writing something weekly a couple of years ago and hated it.  Work is already enough of a grind, and I didn't need what I was doing for "fun" to be the same.  Second, the internet is a big place with a lot of awesome people already sharing unique insights about football, so there isn't a need for me to pipe in about every little thing.  That being said, the last 3 weeks have been so crazy that I needed to cut in line and say a couple of things:

1. OK, this season is awesome after all

Early on in the season, I thought that we had a chance for some 2007-level craziness.  The perceived depth of the two best conferences (Big 12 and SEC) seemed to be setting up a potential for weekly upsets, and 2-loss teams fighting for the national title.  The top 5 teams all had pretty major holes (LSU had a new QB, Bama was replacing a defense, USC had no depth, etc.), so it seemed like we could be in for a bumpy ride.

Then, the first two months happened.  Entering November, we had 5 unbeatens that all looked relatively strong.  There has only been two truly ridiculous upsets (Cal over UCLA and NC State over Florida State), and there hadn't been a truly memorable game (FSU-Clemson came the closest, but the fact that the Noles pulled away in the end ruined that...same goes for ND-Oklahoma).  Even though I had been blessed with the opportunity to watch a lot of football, I had come away not as fulfilled as I could have been (At least the Irish and Huskers were doing well, though).

Since then, we've had four games that will be contenders for my eventual countdown of the best CFB games I've ever seen.*  We've also had a couple of ridiculous upsets, most notably Baylor's romp last night against the Wildcats.  It would seem that the frantic nature of football Saturdays wasn't extinct; instead, it was just hibernating.  This makes me excited for the last two weeks, and also incredibly nervous for ND.

*Those games are Bama-LSU, Bama-A&M, Stanford-Oregon and Utah State-La Tech, although Bama-A&M is probably the only one that would actually make it onto my list.  I will do a post on that at some point.

2. So...Notre Dame, eh?

At the beginning of the season, here is what I said about the Irish:

"The season for ND looks like this: Four games as a mild-to-significant underdog (USC, Oklahoma, and the Michigans), six games as a favorite (Purdue, Navy, Wake, BC, Pitt, and Miami), and the two swing games (BYU and this one). While it would be great to pull off one or more of the upsets, the key to a successful season is going 2-0 in the swing games (and of course, not losing as a favorite). Before we can reliably start winning the big games, we need to make sure we can take care of the "medium" games. If Brian Kelly can lead this team to an 8-4 season, or even a 9-3 one, then I'll pretty much be estatic."
 

I was right about BYU and Stanford, as those games turned out to be two of the closest ones.  To ND's credit, they did take care of those "medium" games as well as all of the others, and now they're one win from playing for all the credit cards.   Of course, my 8-4 expectation was way off base.  The biggest concern for me was the depleted and injured defensive secondary, which has turned out to be the silent weapon of the nation's best scoring defense.  Kelly has continued to juggle quarterbacks when they don't need to be juggled, but it's actually worked pretty well, so I will remain "pretty much estatic."

3. Lay off the SEC a bit

Yes, 5 top ten teams from the SEC played FCS opponents yesterday.  Most places you look on the internet, you'll see people complaining about how this is unfair and such.  Sure, this isn't the best thing for competitive entertainment, and basically punting a game when we have only 12 with which to judge how good teams are is problematic.  That being said, here are some games involving SEC teams from the first two weeks of season:

Week 1:
South Carolina 17, Vanderbilt 13
Texas A&M, La Tech HURRICANE'D
Tennessee 35, NC State 21
Alabama 41, Michigan 14
Clemson 26, Auburn 19

Week 2:
Mississippi State 28, Auburn 10
Florida 20, Texas A&M 17
Georgia 41, Missouri 20
LSU 41, Washington 3

That listing doesn't even include games against good MAC teams (Bowling Green and Kent State), or games against decent Sun Belt teams (UL Monroe...poor Arkansas).  The moral of the story is that the SEC plays roughly the same difficulty of schedule that the other leagues do.  Most other leagues don't play conference games until week 3 or 4, and load up on their FCS teams and such the first few weeks of the season.  Don't get angry at the SEC because they delay their guarantee games until later in the season.  Instead, get angry at the fact that everyone (other than ND, USC, and UCLA) schedules these games.  Hopefully, this will start to go away in 2014 with the whole playoff selection committee thing.  We'll see.

4. How about that WAC?

One of the overriding themes of the year has been how there have been so many close calls where BCS teams have pulled out victories against non-BCS teams.  No conference shows this better than the WAC.  The top three teams (La Tech, Utah State, and San Jose State) have just the following 4 losses as their only non-conference blemishes (all road or neutral sites):

BYU 6, Utah State 3
Texas A&M 59, Louisiana Tech 57
Stanford 20, San Jose State 17
Wisconsin 16, Utah State 14

Now, it wasn't all bad: Lousiana Tech did beat Illinois and Virginia, SJSU knocked off BYU, and the Aggies got a victory in an overtime contest against Utah.  Still, the closeness of those results against 4 good to very good teams show how close the WAC was to having a monumental final season.  Instead, they'll have to settle for a chance at going 3-0 in some obscure bowls, which isn't really that bad of a fate.

Rankings (in which Notre Dame is pretty high):

1. Notre Dame
2. Florida State
3. Alabama
4. Clemson
5. Oregon
6. Texas A&M
7. LSU
8. Ohio State
9. Georgia
10. Florida
11. Kansas State
12. Oklahoma
13. South Carolina
14. Stanford
15. Texas
16. UCLA
17. Oklahoma State
18. Oregon State
19. Utah State
20. Nebraska
21. Northern Illinois
22. Kent State
23. Michigan
24. USC
25. Rutgers

Also Considered: Louisiana Tech, Louisville, Mississippi State, San Jose State, Boise State

Rankings Thoughts:

So, you're probably looking at Clemson at #4 and thinking that that looks pretty high.  I really don't have any problem with that argument, since I think that teams #2-10 are all pretty close.  For that matter, Notre Dame isn't really super far above everybody; they just are lucky enough that Pitt's kicker is only decent.  The epitome of a team that is impossible to rank would have to be Florida.  I've watched good portions of their "wins" over Missouri and Louisiana-Lafayette, and have come away extremely unimpressed.  Still, their trio of wins over LSU, South Carolina, and A&M is as good as any team's top 3 wins, so you can't completely write them off.

As odd as Florida is, Georgia might be even odder.  Georgia has precisely one win against a ranked opponent, and that win was the ugly-fest against Florida a few weeks ago.  Besides that, they have the utter debacle against South Carolina, a 5 point win over terrible Kentucky, and a bunch of underwhelming results against the bad non-conference teams they played.  To be fair, they did steamroll Vanderbilt, which is now an impressive accomplishment, so their resume isn't completely barren.  However, I'm just not sure we have a good idea of just how good this team is.  I'm shocked that someone in the coaches poll actually voted them first.  If they can beat Bama in a couple of weeks, we can talk.  Until then, this team is still a bit of an unknown.

After their losses, Oregon drops just 4 spots, while Kansas State drops 9 spots.  There is a large difference in those drops for a couple of reasons.  One, Oregon still looked pretty good in their loss.  They still gained over 400 yards and only turned the ball over once.  On the other hand Kansas State got plastered in every phase of the game by Baylor.  Two, Stanford is a lot better than Baylor.  Three, I was down on Kansas State at the beginning of the season because I thought they would have a few games like this (A game where nothing went your way, and you aren't able to play through it because you don't have A-level talent).  They got very lucky to win 10 games last season, and nothing fundamentally changed during the offseason (eg. no impact recruiting class).  While one game doesn't make me completely revert to my prior evaluation of the Wildcats, it does cast a lot of doubt on their actual accomplishments.  Luckily, they still have a chance to turn things back around with their game against Texas in two weeks.

Finally, yes, it's fun to rank Kent State above both Michigan and USC.  Therein lies the joy of college football.

Preview of Next Week

There are seven ranked matchups next Saturday (at least according to my rankings), so this should be exciting.  Here are some short previews in chronological order:

Michigan at Ohio State:  Denard Robinson's final game couldn't have a much better set-up.  Michigan has a chance to end Ohio State's magical season (magical, in that it doesn't exist according to the BCS). 

Oregon at Oregon State:  Oregon's loss relegated this game to the PAC-12 network, so you'll just have to imagine this game happening.  Let me know what you come up with for Oregon's uniforms.

Florida at Florida State:  In theory, my prediction should be that Florida State will win by a lot. However, in spite of their offensive hiccups, Florida's defense is still really good.  It wouldn't really be fair to say that Florida State "blew it" if they lose this game, but that's what will happen.  For their sake, I hope they win.

Oklahoma State at Oklahoma:  In theory, the Cowboys could still represent the Big 12 in the BCS, but the odds are that it will come from the trio of Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas State.  In the past, I would have picked Oklahoma by a lot, but since they've already lost twice at home this year, who knows?  The Cowboys are definitely good enough to pull off the upset.

Stanford at UCLA:  Stanford plays UCLA for the right to play UCLA in the PAC 12 title game.  If only both teams were 11-0, then we could have a shot at a triple rematch in the national title game.  Who wouldn't enjoy that?

South Carolina at Clemson:  I've been looking forward to this game for a while, mostly to see how good Clemson really is.  It's too bad they had to schedule it opposite of this game:

Notre Dame at USC: DON'T SCREW THIS UP, GUYS.  I AM SERIOUS.