College Football Morning: Alabama Isn't Done Yet (Week 5 Recap)

Kalen DeBoer might be a worthy heir to the Nick Saban throne.

When Nick Saban retired, I assumed Alabama would recede from the top of the sport. I thought Saban’s greatest gift was his ability to navigate a potent but chaotic booster ecosystem, like how it took the Hoover Dam to tame the Colorado River. Irrationally high expectations? A lot of egos who’d bitten their tongues for long enough? That seemed like a bad recipe. This is why we thought coaches like Dan Lanning were wise for not taking the job, and why we feared for Kalen DeBoer, someone in between a Midwesterner and a Westerner but definitely not an SEC man.

We’re four games in. Kalen DeBoer might be an SEC man.

Those long-term concerns still stand. Kirby Smart has struggled with discipline in Athens. Nate Oats has struggled with it in Tuscaloosa. Jimbo Fisher struggled with a different kind of discipline in College Station, giving his supporters the recruiting class they wanted instead of the football team they needed. We still don’t know how DeBoer will perform as a statesman and what that will mean for Alabama over the next five, ten, and twenty years. (It takes a long time to climb back up.)

Right now, though?

It seems that I, for one, didn’t appreciate how well Kalen DeBoer can coach.

Credit to Jalen Milroe, who punched Georgia in the mouth. Credit to Kane Wommack, who had the defense ready to play and turned large portions of last night into Carson Beck’s personal nightmare. Credit to Ryan Williams, the 17-year-old who juggled and spun and dashed his way into SEC lore in the fourth game of his college career. All of that, though—from hiring Wommack to re-recruiting Williams to unlocking Milroe when others were ready to give him the Jackson Arnold (or Jalen Hurts) treatment—comes back to DeBoer. A lot of that is coaching football. But a lot of it too is getting players to believe and keeping players bought in, two things DeBoer excelled at in Seattle.

Maybe we underestimated Alabama.

Maybe I underestimated Kalen DeBoer.

The game itself took a winding route to a finish well within the bounds of normal expectations. Alabama is likely the best team in the country right now—they lead an average of ESPN’s SP+, FPI, and our own Movelor system—and they’re certainly the most accomplished, given what we now know about Michigan. But Georgia’s rally showed us plenty, and what it showed wasn’t meaningless. This is still Georgia, even if what being Georgia means fluctuates from week to week. A lot’s been made of the difficulty of the Bulldogs’ schedule, but their road trip to Mississippi looks a lot friendlier than it did two days ago, and they do at least get Tennessee at home. The game against Texas might be their only one as an underdog, and they catch the Longhorns at a good time, having just played Mississippi State while their hosts will be coming off the Red River Shootout. Is Carson Beck a Heisman contender? Not anymore, most likely. But UGA remains a national championship threat. They’re the fourth-likeliest to win it all in our model’s simulations, and their average final CFP ranking remains higher than that of the Vols.

Georgia has work to do, and we don’t know if they’ll do it. Alabama has work to do, and we have reason to think they’ll do that work. It’s not that Kalen DeBoer’s a better coach than Kirby Smart. Smart is vastly more proven. It’s that this Alabama team, this year’s Alabama team, has made more of itself so far than this Georgia team has. That’s a good sign for the Tide.

One last question, before we move on to the other games. I mean this seriously:

When DeBoer said “Roll Tide” after the game, did anybody else hear a little bit of drawl?

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About Mississippi

Many still believe Mississippi to be a very good team. SP+ has them fourth in the country right now, better than both Tennessee and Georgia, and SP+ tends to swing more dramatically than Movelor does. Maybe that’s correct. Maybe Mississippi is really good and Lane Kiffin’s team will rally to contend for an SEC Championship. The upside of losing to Kentucky rather than another school is that the head-to-head tiebreaker with UK probably won’t matter (whereas Georgia might wish it had the head-to-head over Alabama depending what scenario arises at the end of the year).

Our model is bearish, though, and so am I. We talked last week about the depth questions facing USC and Tennessee, two teams with great frontline talent but shakier athletes beneath the surface. Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, and a dozen other schools have big, strong, fast young men on their first string. What separates perennial title threats from the rest is what happens when someone goes down. There are four schools who have that kind of athleticism on the second string. USC, Tennessee, and Mississippi are not among those four.

Right now, our model projects Mississippi to win 9.5 regular season games. It projects Georgia to win 9.6. They’re expected to achieve similar results from here on out. But because Mississippi lost to a team expected to lose five games, Mississippi’s average final CFP ranking is 16th, trailing the likes of Kansas State. Add onto that the risk that Mississippi will get worse while their competition gets better (because of wear and tear setting in), and yesterday’s loss was a handicap this team probably can’t afford.

Mississippi has a decent playoff chance. But it’s not 50/50.

Texas raised some eyebrows this week, only leading by one possession until the final play of the third quarter. I’m not worried about Texas. Mississippi State milked the clock like it was the last cow in Wisconsin, the ball got slippery for Jaydon Blue, and Texas still never faced any serious risk of losing this game. Better yet, this was probably Arch Manning’s best game yet under center. A lot of people called his second-quarter touchdown pass to DeAndre Moore a lucky throw, but I didn’t see it that way. Maybe he was throwing it up for grabs, but it’s equally if not more possible that he knew Moore was in single coverage and would likely beat his man, then tried to throw it past the receiver so that the only downside would become an incompletion. I’m not sure that’s exactly what happened, but again: Equally if not more possible.

In short: Texas is still very much a title contender. They very much could be the best team in the country right now, and also when it’s all said and done.

In the other two SEC games, Auburn made Oklahoma the latest beneficiary of its ability to spontaneously combust while Texas A&M survived Arkansas at Jerry World. I wouldn’t say things are going great for any of those four, but for what it’s worth, our model has Oklahoma winning seven games and A&M winning eight. (It does not currently have Arkansas or Auburn making a bowl.)

Not Yet, Louisville

Louisville had their chances against Notre Dame. They outgained the Irish and took the ball away just as often as their hosts. They didn’t miss any kicks, and they had the ball on Notre Dame’s side of the 50 as the clock ticked down towards the two-minute warning. In a sense, Louisville should be pretty fired up. They just played one of the ten best teams in the country (yes, Notre Dame is that good) to a near-draw. But man, Louisville did not play like a winning football team, especially in the closing minutes.

Between the time Louisville snapped the ball coming out of that two-minute warning and the time Louisville snapped the ball on the fourth-down incompletion which sealed their fate, they managed to allow one minute and seven seconds to come off the game clock. They also managed to lose four yards. It was a catastrophe, an embarrassing display of late-game mismanagement.

The nice thing for Jeff Brohm’s team is that their ACC title chances went up a little bit with the performance. Coupled with Miami’s near-loss to Virginia Tech, the showing was enough to boost the Cards past the Canes in Movelor by fractions of a point on a neutral field. This was bad for their playoff chances—they do have an at-large shot, but it would’ve been a rather big at-large shot and it’s now very small—but they’re absolutely an ACC factor.

Meanwhile, Notre Dame survived September. It’s not the 4–1 they would have wanted, if forced to go 3–1, but it’s not a bad 4–1. The CFP committee doesn’t rank teams this early in the year for a reason. Our model can, though, and our model—which has a solid track record of predicting committee behavior—believes that by the committee’s historically implied rubric, Notre Dame would be ranked 13th in the country right now, only one spot behind Georgia. Their win at Texas A&M is the ninth-best win in the nation this year, considering margin, opponent, and location. Their win over Louisville is the tenth-best. Now, they get a week off to lick their many wounds before enjoying what should be a softer October and November ahead of the USC game. With Army and Navy still unbeaten, there’s still a playoff path for the Irish even if they do ultimately lose to USC. This is no guarantee—they’re not absolutely in at 10–2 or anything of that sort—but there’s absolutely a chance Notre Dame loses another game and still makes the College Football Playoff.

We talked more about Miami yesterday, but to bring them back into this for a second:

The ACC’s big question is who’s the best between Clemson, Louisville, and Miami. Reasonable minds and well-built systems disagree about SMU, Pitt, and others (maybe we shouldn’t write Virginia Tech off as a program just yet), but those are the big three, and each of them is unbeaten so far in conference play.

Clemson did its job against Stanford. It took a while to break through, but they kept hitting Stanford hard enough after the game was out of reach to give Cade Klubnik a nice stat line. This was probably smart. Decisive victories matter to the committee. They make résumés look better. They marginally help in ratings systems. They create higher-profile individual players, which raises team-wide reputations. None of us actually watches every second of every game played by playoff-contending teams. Margin matters beyond where it has meaning.

We expected Florida State to give SMU a tough game, and that is not what happened, the Seminole slide continuing while SMU rallied to a 1-in-9 playoff probability. That BYU loss is looking better by the week for the Mustangs, and we suddenly have a very interesting game in Louisville next weekend.

Who Runs the Big 12?

I’m seeing Iowa State listed as the Big 12 favorite in a lot of places, and as someone who loves Iowa State dearly, I’m flattered by the notion. But I’m skeptical that the Cyclones are really close enough to Kansas State in quality for the one fewer realized conference loss to matter, even with Farmageddon in Ames this year.

The thing about Kansas State—and they showed this again yesterday—is that on average, they are a good team, but the majority of the time, they are a very good team. Occasionally, they will be quite bad (that’s what they did last week), but they’re usually either firing on all cylinders or firing on none at all. They’re limited by their physical ceiling, like most of the Big 12, but this is a good football team who can, on a good day, kick anyone in the Big 12’s ass besides maybe a fuller-strength Utah. Kansas State is good. They might not be good often enough to actually pull this off, but I have more confidence in the Wildcats than I do in anyone else.

What makes this conversation relevant is that Utah lost to Arizona last night amidst the post-Alabama/Georgia haze. They lost at home. They lost by two scores. Utah didn’t find the endzone until the fourth quarter, and Arizona—who’s looked lost in each of their other three games this year—is suddenly 1–0 lifetime in the Big 12 Conference.

Cam Rising didn’t play, and everyone is well aware of that. But I wonder how many points Cam Rising can really be worth. We have no way to know, because we’ve seen so little of him the last year and a half, but I wonder if Utah’s offense would have nights like last night even if Rising was fully healthy and playing the game.

Regardless, we’ll keep dancing the Utah dance. They should be the best team in the conference. But I’m not sure they are when Rising’s healthy, and they certainly aren’t right now.

With Iowa State handling business in Houston and BYU holding off a lively Baylor comeback attempt, we mostly have a five-way race for the Big 12: K-State probably leads it. Utah isn’t out of the mix. BYU has earned its presence. Iowa State is a possibility. Arizona is in it. There are other undefeated teams in league play—Colorado put together its best game of the Deion Sanders era in Orlando, while Texas Tech won a thriller over Cincy—but this is a five-way competition until further notice.

Michigan Still Has Problems

I was open to the possibility that Michigan could smashmouth its way to at least a playoff return, and I remain suspicious that they’ll pull it off. But after three quarters of shutting Minnesota down, Michigan ended up letting the Gophers pull within a field goal yesterday. The Wolverines held on only after a suspect offsides call on an onside kick.

We knew preseason that Movelor would probably be too high on the Wolverines. We thought after last week that Movelor had probably found its level with these guys. I’m not sure it did, though. Michigan’s defense is good, but it isn’t lights out. Michigan’s offense isn’t dancing on land mines anymore, but it’s not exceptionally effective.

This brings us to USC. I know the transitive property can lead to some weird places. You could use it right now to say UConn is better than Notre Dame, given the Huskies beat Buffalo who beat NIU. But in a lot of ways, all we’re ever doing in college football prognosticating is using the transitive property. We’re observing teams compete against different teams and inferring hypothetical results based on what we see. UConn isn’t better than Notre Dame, but Purdue might be worse than NIU. We don’t think this because of a direct transitive win/loss chain. We think this because Notre Dame was able to bully Purdue’s front seven and offensive line, and they couldn’t do the same against Northern Illinois.

I say all that to say:

USC should probably be worried.

We were high on them last week, and in the long term I do still feel optimistic. But the fact yet another mediocre team played Michigan close does not bode well for Southern Cal, who failed to beat the Wolverines. USC catches some good breaks with the schedule—they get Penn State at home, and they don’t play Ohio State—but the Trojans are a team who needs to be better. They roared past Wisconsin in yesterday’s second half, but that wasn’t a great showing from Wisconsin, whom Movelor currently has the 14th-best team in the Big Ten.

Jeremiah Smith had an even better night than Ryan Williams, so while Ohio State’s yet to get tested, keep an eye on the freshman receiver. We’re two weeks away from Bucks vs. Ducks.

Oregon didn’t have any trouble with UCLA, not allowing a single offensive touchdown and nearly leading by five possessions at halftime.

Penn State had kicking problems, and Illinois had things looking bad late in the first half, but the Illini couldn’t capitalize inside the Penn State five-yard line, the Illini ultimately settled for a 45-yard field goal, the Illini missed that field goal, and Penn State came out and took the lead right away after halftime. That cool postgame win probability Bill Connelly calculates says that the raw stats here implied a 23.5-point Nittany Lions victory. In other words, Penn State is fine.

We still have USC and Michigan in the playoff race, checking in around 1-in-6 and 1-in-4 respectively. Rutgers is sneaking into the periphery, currently 4–0 and ranked 31st by Movelor after holding off Washington. Our model is still really not sold on Indiana, who got to 5–0 by pulling past Maryland in a game they could have won by more. But the Hoosiers keep overperforming expectations, and Curt Cignetti can coach.

Overall, there’s a very clear pecking order in this league. It goes Ohio State, then Oregon, then Penn State, then Michigan, then USC, then the rest, with differences between the rest dictated mostly by who’s played whom when. There is plenty of season left for that to change, but that’s the current outlook.

Ashton Jeanty’s the Real Thing

We’ve held off a long time on anointing Boise State a playoff contender. Until last night, they hadn’t done anything to deserve that status. They played Oregon close, but Oregon was coming off an awful season debut.

We aren’t holding off anymore.

Boise State pounded a respectable Washington State team into the fabled blue turf, Jeanty making Cougars defenders look like they were made out of pool noodles. It’s not unrealistic to see him as a Heisman contender, especially with the MWC race so much higher-profile than normal. And speaking of that higher profile…

UNLV absolutely looked better without Matthew Sluka. We don’t know if this is because Hajj-Malik Williams is better, or whether some teammates might like him more, or whether UNLV just happened to play a better game with Williams under center, but UNLV played better yesterday than UNLV has played so far this year. And UNLV’s played a lot of good football games. The Rebels dominated Fresno State, capitalizing on every early mistake and punishing their former fellow conference contender, largely on the ground.

Boise State is the better of these two teams, and San Jose State does still hang around, but UNLV is a worthy adversary of the Broncos. The pair won’t meet until the end of October, but in the meantime, both are receiving AP Poll notoriety and UNLV gets to play both Syracuse (next week) and Oregon State (in three weeks), opportunities to further boost its résumé and prove itself that much more.

And yet...

The Group of Five Probably Runs Through James Madison

It’s important to remember that the AP Poll is not the CFP Top 25. Where a team is “ranked” right now is not a great predictor of where the CFP committee will ultimately place them. So: While Boise State is currently in the top 25 and JMU is not, we don’t know that the committee would have it that way. Precedent says they wouldn’t, but the public will probably be on Boise State’s side under justifiable “don’t punish them for scheduling Oregon” logic.

JMU also has to worry about UNLV, who has not lost already, justifiably or otherwise. In a bizarre, 2020-esque “if the season ended today” situation, UNLV would deserve the Group of Five nod. Thankfully for other reasons, this is not 2020.

James Madison faces a difficult schedule. The Sun Belt doesn’t offer as many layups as the Mountain West. The Mountain West does, though, have tougher top-end teams, and they have that scheduling agreement with Oregon State and Washington State, and UNLV has a third Power Four opponent to deal with. UNLV still has to play Syracuse (H), Oregon State (A), Boise State (H), San Jose State (A), and whomever they hypothetically meet in the hypothetical MWC Championship. Boise State still has to play UNLV (A), San Jose State (A), Oregon State (H), and their own hypothetical MWC Championship opponent. JMU plays no more games which currently appear as difficult as any of those. If JMU takes care of business, they’ll be favored by double digits in each of their remaining games.

The upshot of this? While UNLV and Boise do enjoy those layups, JMU’s projected to finish the regular season 11.3–0.7. UNLV is looking at a 10.1–1.9 average final record. Boise State’s looking at 9.6–2.4. Add in the tougher conference championship game and the likeliest thing is that both these MWC schools finish at least one game behind JMU. If JMU can make it a two-game lead over both and stomp teams like they stomped UNC and Ball State, JMU should take the Group of Five’s minimum one playoff spot.

Liberty’s the other team prominently on the Group of Five radar, and they’re in a weird place. As we wrote on Friday, the hurricane-driven cancelation of their game against App State does greatly increase their chances of finishing the year undefeated, but it also robs them of a chance at their best win. At the moment, Liberty almost definitely needs to finish 12–0 to have any chance, and even then, they’d likely only make the playoff by default, which is how they made the Fiesta Bowl last year.

What About Tulane?

In the AAC, Tulane just crushed USF to get to 3–2 overall. Their losses came to Kansas State and Oklahoma by a combined three possessions. With Memphis having already lost to Navy, Tulane’s the AAC favorite. They don’t have a very good playoff chance—most likely, they’ll lose again, and one of JMU, UNLV, and Boise State will finish with a good enough record that even 11–2 might not be enough for the Wave—but they’re worth tracking. Combined, the Tulane/Memphis/Army/Navy quartet’s got as good a playoff chance as SMU. It’s not impossible that whoever wins the AAC will get in.

Did the Schedule Catch Up to Idaho?

In the FCS world, the headliner is that Idaho went down at UC Davis in its Big Sky season opener. The Vandals are still fine to make the playoffs if they take care of business from here, and it’s possible that the loss was mostly about the grind of one of the toughest opening stretches of schedule in the subdivision. But the likelier interpretation is that Idaho isn’t quite on the level of the FCS’s championship tier. UC Davis is a top-25 team, but Movelor doesn’t have them within two touchdowns of South Dakota State.

In other FCS action, Montana survived a feisty Eastern Washington, Northern Arizona bounced back and beat Sacramento State by a comfortable margin, South Dakota and North Dakota State rolled against SIU and Illinois State (respectively), and McNeese picked up a good win on the road over Weber State. McNeese is now 4–2 and has outperformed Movelor’s expectation in every single game. Our model only has them finishing with seven wins, and the loss to Tarleton shows they probably aren’t a threat to make it to the national semifinals or anything like that, but Incarnate Word might not have the easiest path to a Southland crown.

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If you’re looking for more on the national landscape, our bracketology is a good resource. It’s basically a sneak peek at the end-of-season scoreboard if things continue in the likeliest direction.

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This post was also published at www.thebarkingcrow.com, where you can always find all of Joe Stunardi, Stuart McGrath, and NIT Stu’s work.