College Football Morning: West Coast Big Ten Football (Week 7 Preview)
Ducks vs. Bucks, USC vs. Penn State, and the rest of the Week 7 action.
This is not a new matchup, nor are the stakes necessarily all that high. These teams played each other three years ago in Columbus. Oregon beat Ohio State that year, C.J. Stroud throwing for nearly five hundred yards but the Buckeye front seven ominously struggling against an offense which would prove itself far from the Pac-12’s most physical. Ohio State might have missed the playoff that season regardless of that game—the playoff committee tends to exhibit an instinct for self-preservation, and Cincinnati had beaten one-loss Notre Dame in South Bend—but with Ohio State winning ten straight following the loss, Ducks over Bucks loomed large going into the final week of the regular season. We didn’t know on Thanksgiving that the Chekhovian gun C.J. Verdell hung on a Midwestern wall would fire round after round into Ryan Day’s Kerry Coombs experiment, Michigan bullying Ohio State’s D-line in the snow while Coombs’s talented but young secondary shivered and twiddled its thumbs.
Oregon isn’t going to knock Ohio State out of the playoff this year, and if the Ducks miss the field themselves, it won’t be because of a loss to Ohio State. This is a measuring stick, like Alabama vs. Georgia was two weeks ago. Like Alabama vs. Georgia, though, it has the potential to be a heck of a time, and like Ohio State vs. Oregon in 2021, it could tell us a lot about how legitimate Ohio State’s (and Oregon’s) national championship hopes really are.
We do playoff simulations around here, and our model gives us the following for this game: With a win, Ohio State’s 99.7% playoff-likely, independent of the weekend’s other results. With a loss, the number settles at a perfectly respectable 93%. For Oregon, a win yields 93%, while a loss drops the Ducks to 65%. Perhaps more usefully, the national championship probabilities are, for Ohio State, 27% with a win and 19% with a loss. For Oregon, they’re a hopeful 11% in victory and a measly 4% in defeat.
One thing our model captures which every prominent simulator seems to miss is the aspect of college football where every game teaches us something about the teams involved. If Ohio State wins this weekend by more than three points, they are probably better than we currently believe. If Oregon wins, they are probably better, and Ohio State is probably worse. ESPN doesn’t make much public about their models’ inner workings, having only briefly been fans of transparency, back when they were launching the models an evidently layoffs-gutted analytics department now maintains. ESPN doesn’t even always make clear which models are saying what. To my knowledge, though, teams’ power ratings stay static throughout ESPN’s simulations. If a simulation shows Notre Dame losing to Stanford, Notre Dame’s just as good in that simulation the next week. In our model, Notre Dame’s rating drops after an upset loss, just as Ohio State’s drops at least a little bit in simulations where they lose to Oregon on Saturday.
Still…27% vs. 19% isn’t that big a difference. It’s not small (Ohio State would be the clear national title favorite with a win, regardless of what Texas does against Oklahoma), but it’s eight percentage points at a spot on the probability curve where eight percentage points isn’t that many. Why are we saying we might learn a lot, then? Because while the majority of simulations—the simulations which contribute to that gap being as small as it is—include a nailbiting finish, the minority of simulations—the simulations where someone puts a licking on the other team—aren’t so small a minority as to be irrelevant.
In 62% of simulations, this game is a one-score game in either direction. If that happens—if this game comes down to one possession—it won’t teach us as much as the 2021 upset taught. Oregon’s much better than they were three years ago, when they’d go on to receive wedgies and swirlies from Utah in the season’s final weeks. That year, a one-score Oregon upset win meant something big about Ohio State. This year, it would only mean that Oregon’s nearly locked into the Big Ten Championship, that the Ducks’ struggles against Idaho were a fluke or have been resolved, and that Ohio State is not the solitary power in the Big Ten that they currently appear to be. Similarly, a one-score Ohio State win would tell us small things. It would mostly confirm our existing perceptions. A more comfortable victory, in either direction? A one-score game only kept close by odd bounces and correctible mistakes? Those games would tell us more. Those would point towards high national championship hopes for one of these teams.
What we’re watching for, then, is less who wins and loses and more who picks up yards with ease. We want to know whether either team can make the other look inferior, like how Alabama briefly made Georgia look so bad two weeks back. Who wins and loses matters, of course—this is a big, fun game—but it matters mostly for the momentary happiness and sadness of each university and its supporters. This is not Ohio State heading west to put its chips on the table and prove itself the best in the country, as it would have been at any other point in college football’s history. This is Ohio State sizing up Oregon for another meeting or two down the road, and Oregon looking for a little feather in the cap with signing day a couple months away. We will gain a lot in December and January from college football’s changes. We’ve gained a lot already this year, with so many of these at least somewhat novel marquee cross-country matchups. But this game is not what it would have been in any other era. That’s ok! It might still be a riot! But we can call it what it is.
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The Other Big Ones
Penn State at USC
Sticking in the West Coast Big Ten, Penn State’s at USC. We still don’t know if USC is “bad,” per se, but we might be on our way to finding out. The Trojan defense has certainly improved from last year, and the schedule should get easier (but not easy) from here on out. But if you can’t beat Minnesota on the road, are you going to beat Maryland or Washington? I have absolutely no pulse on Lincoln Riley’s job security in Los Angeles. I would think it would be high, especially if Clay Helton got so many years, but I really don’t know how USC’s viewing football at this moment in its history. The bigger risk for Riley is probably a setback so significant that it starts to affect recruiting, tightening the NIL pockets on which the Trojans’ transfer portal efforts rely. Winning would right a rocking ship, and would at least theoretically resurrect some playoff hopes (6% chance with an upset).
For Penn State, this is also about the long term, but more the past than the future. It’s about putting to bed that recent past. It’s about Penn State finally breaking through.
I loathe the AP Poll possibly more than anyone on this earth, but for better or for worse, it’s the poll of record at this point in the season. The last time it ranked Penn State fourth in the country, the Nittany Lions beat Indiana and then lost three straight, one that fabled two-point conversion shootout against Illinois.
The funny thing about Penn State is that all they need to do is maintain their customary level of play from the James Franklin era and it’ll be termed a breakthrough. Make the playoff, and things will feel a lot better, at least for a year or two. With road trips only remaining to Wisconsin, Purdue, and Minnesota after this one, that makes this weekend the fulcrum. Lose, and there’s no margin for error unless they beat Ohio State at the beginning of November. Win, and Penn State just needs to hold serve from here to make the twelve-team field, with a pretty good shot at a home game. 76% playoff probability in victory. 32% in defeat.
What’s going to happen? Paradoxically, Penn State might need to return more to their old bread and butter, smashmouth football. All year, the renaissance for Penn State has been Andy Kotelnicki not only rehabilitating Drew Allar but unleashing him as one of the most productive passers in the country, with the PSU offense gaining more yards per throw than any Power Four team besides Mississippi and Alabama. USC’s defense, however, is about what you’d expect from a Los Angeles-based unit transitioning out of a woeful era: Strong in the secondary, weak up front. Penn State’s defense should be good enough to hold its own against USC’s offense, but rather than make USC respect them over the top, as Penn State will probably need to do against Ohio State, the key on Saturday seems likeliest to be whether Penn State can pick up five yards on the ground on every first down. Penn State needs to ground and pound and resist the temptation to get too cute. Now is not the time to push Allar’s Heisman hopes. Save that for the Buckeyes.
Texas vs. Oklahoma
Moving to the SEC, we get our first Red River Shootout of the new era. We’re curious how long this rivalry will hold the sway it so recently held. It’s no longer a battle for conference supremacy, and with Texas’s most hated rival back in its conference, the likelihood A&M takes over as Texas’s biggest rival is high. If the SEC sticks with its one-rival-per-season setup, maybe UT/OU remains the Longhorn focus. I’m not sure, though, that Oklahoma is going to outrank Texas A&M in terms of whom the SEC wishes to satisfy. The other schools might like Oklahoma more, but the Sooners are stumbling, the Aggies might be surging, and Texas vs. Texas prints currency.
In the grand sense, then, there’s a little more at stake than usual for Oklahoma. They’re playing to get off the mat and into the national picture, yes (14% playoff chance with a win), but they’re also trying to remind their new peers that it wasn’t just Texas whom the SEC added. In the ten-year existence of the College Football Playoff, only three programs have made the field more often than Oklahoma. Nobody in the SEC cares about that—they remember what happened to Oklahoma more than what Oklahoma did to get there—but Oklahoma has some pride to protect, and it goes beyond how they match up with Texas culturally and in DFW recruiting wars.
For Texas, this is about not making it interesting. Quinn Ewers is going to start again, but the program’s been downplaying his health, and the oblique is a muscle which involves itself in a lot of different movements. Texas is trying to get Ewers his reps, get the Longhorn offense its rhythm, notch a fun win, and then zoom the focus in on Georgia. Oklahoma is trying to shake some shit up.
Oklahoma’s offense is bad. Maybe Michael Hawkins has some magic in him, returning to his home turf hoping to legitimize himself in the eyes of his state. This game has often gotten weird in the past, and an unheralded backup quarterback the majority of experts think should be on the bench wouldn’t be the craziest hero the Cotton Bowl’s ever seen. (Maybe Jackson Arnold has issues, but it’s likelier than not that Oklahoma gave him those issues.) More realistically, Oklahoma will need to lean on its defense to spring the upset.
Oklahoma’s defense might be better than Michigan’s, and Michigan’s the only power conference-quality team we’ve seen Texas play so far. Maybe Texas is outsmarting itself, rushing Ewers back because they’re scared of a QB controversy. Maybe Texas, like Alabama and Georgia, has its flaws beneath the surface and we haven’t seen them yet because the Longhorns haven’t been tested. Oklahoma’s a big underdog, and Oklahoma should be a big underdog, because Texas has played better than anyone in the country this season besides arguably Ohio State. But these are the paths Oklahoma fans and Texas haters can hope on.
Mississippi at LSU
Know who’s hanging around the playoff picture?
Good ol’ Brian Kelly.
You can’t get rid of him, you know.
Since escaping South Carolina, LSU’s played fine against UCLA and South Alabama. They haven’t excelled, but they haven’t needed to, and they won those games by a combined seven touchdowns. Their defense still looks weak, like it did against USC, but the offense is probably for real, which raises questions about that USC game but is still a serious factor to consider when viewing the national picture. The Bayou Bengals get both Alabama and Oklahoma at home. They still have to go to Fayetteville, College Station, and Gainesville. But they should be favored in two if not three of those, and while USC’s mediocrity means they can probably only afford one more regular season loss (they’re only 3% playoff-likely if they finish 9–3), a home win here would push them up to the playoff bubble (26% with a win).
Still, the key team to watch in this is Mississippi, who might be really, really good.
It’s weird to say this about Mississippi. Two weeks ago, Kentucky held them to 17 points in Oxford and we said, “Ahh, Mississippi. There you are.” But lost in the South Carolina rollercoaster is the emerging reality that Kentucky might be pretty darn good itself. Movelor, our model’s rating system, has the Cats the 14th-best team in the country. ESPN’s SP+ and FPI both have UK in the top 25. (We respect most ESPN systems. We just don’t know its playoff models work.) And Mississippi, quietly and uncharacteristically, is fierce on the defensive side of the ball. They’ve yet to play a good offense, and maybe they get exposed this week and we regret using the adjective “fierce,” but the degree to which this defense has dominated goes beyond that which can be attributed to inferior competition. LaNorris Sellers and South Carolina scored 33 against LSU, breaking big play after big play. Mississippi held the Gamecocks to a field goal.
It wouldn’t be unprecedented for the best teams in the SEC to each pick up an unexpected loss here and there. This used to be normal in college football, until the dynasties of the last fifteen years made such behavior obsolete. Nobody serious is writing off Alabama because they lost to Vanderbilt. We probably shouldn’t write off Mississippi for losing to a better Kentucky team.
There’s still a lot ahead of Mississippi on the schedule, and so they also don’t have much margin for error. They’re still in this with a second loss—their playoff probability only drops to 32% in defeat—but a win has them checking paths to the SEC Championship (with a 78% playoff likelihood accompanying them). It’s a big one in Baton Rouge.
Iowa State at West Virginia
In the third leg of the primetime trifecta (Ohio State/Oregon’s on NBC, Mississippi/LSU’s on ESPN, Iowa State/West Virginia’s on FOX), the Big 12 at least briefly runs through Morgantown.
Iowa State’s off to arguably its best start ever, 5–0 for the first time since 1980, a season where the early schedule didn’t have as much firepower as that supplied by even Iowa, Houston, and Baylor this year. A lot of people are calling the Cyclones the Big 12 favorites, and while our model disagrees, it does so narrowly, only barely giving Kansas State the edge. Still undefeated, Iowa State has a path to an at-large playoff bid even if they don’t win their conference. This might finally be the encore to Matt Campbell’s Fiesta Bowl run.
West Virginia, though, is not a pushover. Neither team who beat the Mountaineers has a loss this year, and WVU’s coming off an obliteration of Oklahoma State in Stillwater which saw a 31–7 halftime score. Maybe Oklahoma State’s terrible, Iowa State will survive, and we’ll get to Sunday morning without a round of “Can the Big 12 miss the playoff??” scenario-izing. But given Iowa State’s penchant for slow starts, and given what Morgantown can sound like after a day of recreation outside the stadium walls, this is a tough one for ISU. I’m not terribly worried about things like net success rate—which team wins the majority of plays. I’m worried about ill-timed turnovers and too many broken defensive plays. Those are the familiar pitfalls which have met good Cyclone teams during the Matt Campbell era.
Playoff probabilities for ISU: 55% with a win, 16% with a loss.
Playoff probabilities for WVU: 14% with a win, 1% with a loss.
Big one.
Kansas State at Colorado
In the nightcap, the hype is returning to Boulder, and a Kansas State team who soiled the bed the last time they played at altitude will not, to run a phrase further into the ground, find itself in Kansas anymore.
There’s something funny about Chris Klieman’s Kansas State playing Deion Sanders’s Colorado. A team constructed around the biggest-talking skill position units in the country facing one built upon excellent, humble, disciplined offensive line play. Klieman came from North Dakota State, and in a lot of ways, Colorado is facing the same Bison team they played in August, but bigger and stronger and—importantly—faster. If Avery Johnson plays within himself, like Cam Miller did for NDSU and like Avery Johnson didn’t for K-State in Provo, the Wildcats should be just fine, surviving the noise to get back to Manhattan still a Big 12 leader. Lose, and Kansas State probably needs to win out to make the playoff field, and they might need some help even then. Movelor really likes K-State, leading our model to say this team is 11% playoff-likely even if they lose. That’s still only a one-in-nine chance, compared to 52% if they take care of business.
Can Colorado get into the playoff race itself? Kind of. What’s making this a big game is the football presence provided by K-State, the Heisman presence provided by Travis Hunter, and the hype presence provided by the Coach Prime Industrial Complex. With a win, the Buffs are up to a 6% shot, but only 6%. They played very well two weeks ago and they played well for a lot of the Baylor game. Those are the only times you can say that about their performance over the last twelve months. Travis Hunter is great. Shedeur Sanders and his receivers have great moments. Kansas State is a much better football team, provided it can get out of its own way.
The Playoff Impactors
Liberty’s game on Tuesday against FIU fit this category, and the spark notes from that are that Liberty won but looked even more vulnerable doing it, further marginalizing their playoff chance. We’ll know better on Sunday how exactly that result mattered. It depends on some more games in this category and the next. As for the others involving at least one team with at least a 10% playoff shot…
Utah at Arizona State
Arizona at BYU
We could have called Arizona/BYU a Big Game as well, but we’ll ask BYU to continue to prove it. Arizona remains an enigma—while Texas Tech isn’t bad, that loss undid the cautious excitement Arizona’s win over Utah unlocked—but the Cougars are a legitimate Big 12 title threat. They’d be deserving of a top-five ranking if the committee had unveiled its first rankings this week, having dominated Kansas State and beaten SMU in Dallas. But BYU is not one of the country’s five best teams. In fact, none of Movelor, SP+, and FPI have BYU as one of the country’s 25 best teams. The Cougars have earned themselves notoriety, and they could come out of Week 7 as the Big 12 favorite, but they have plenty left to prove when it comes to how good they really are.
As for Utah: I’m not sure Cam Rising’s status matters to the degree it commands narrative attention. Rising’s a very good, very experienced quarterback, and Utah’s offense has major problems without him. Still, it’s hard to believe he’d fix all of them. If Kyle Whittingham’s playing a game intended to make us all say, “Yeah, but that was without Cam Rising,” whenever we look back on Utah losses, congratulations to Kyle Whittingham, because that seems to be what’s happening. At some point, though, Utah needs to stop flip-flopping on medical clearances and go win football games. That has always been a struggle for them under Whittingham, even when the starting QB’s been healthy. Season-to-season, Utah’s consistent. Week-to-week, Utah’s not.
Utah/ASU is a Friday night game. ASU’s been out of the limelight lately, but they’re just as 4–1 as Colorado and probably about as good as the Buffs, whom FPI likes a lot more than Movelor and SP+. (There’s no conspiracy there. It would be so funny if there was, though.)
Playoff probabilities…
BYU: 50% with a win, 14% with a loss.
Utah: 20% with a win, 2% with a loss.
Arizona: 13% with a win, 1% with a loss.
ASU: 1% with a win, 0% with a loss.
ASU might be a lot like Colorado in terms of final quality, but their remaining schedule is tougher and Utah probably isn’t as good as Kansas State.
South Carolina at Alabama
Mississippi State at Georgia
Florida at Tennessee
The remaining three heads of the SEC’s five or six (or seven?)-headed monster are each favored by multiple scores. Of the three, Tennessee’s facing the biggest bogeyman, dealing with Florida, but having seen how badly Alabama’s defense and Georgia’s everything can look at the wrong time, we’re not going to write anything off for a while. By virtue of facing the lowest expectations, Tennessee can make the biggest statement, and there’s a decent chance the Vols will, potentially sending us back to talking a whole lot about Florida this coming week.
Playoff probabilities:
Alabama: 81% with a win, 29% with a loss.
Georgia: 82% with a win, 37% with a loss.
Tennessee: 49% with a win, 7% with a loss.
Florida??: 0%.
I got curious, since that’d be 4–2 for the Gators. Not a single playoff simulation for Florida, even with a win.
Clemson at Wake Forest
Miami is off this weekend, giving a hypothetical ACC football fan an opportunity to watch Clemson a little more closely. (This is unfortunately one of the bigger early-kickoff games nationally. ESPN fumbled its placement of Texas/Oklahoma.) Clemson’s been putting up so many points offensively that we’re now more worried about their defense, at least for the moment. Regardless of all of that, the Tigers should mostly be tuning up against Wake Forest. Famous last words, given what we saw out of Vanderbilt, but Wake’s going to need to pull a lot of tricks out of the bag to earn itself a chance. Clemson’s still the ACC favorite with a win, at 68% playoff-likely, and they could definitely win the ACC with a loss as well, though their playoff probability drops to 21% in such a scenario and we would likely be more than momentarily worried about that D.
Stanford at Notre Dame
*the most nervous laughter anyone has ever nervously laughed*
Having done the easy thing and closed out Louisville, Marcus Freeman now returns from an idle week to try to do the hard thing and take care of a 23-point underdog. Surely, not again, right? Notre Dame is pretty banged up, and Troy Taylor’s in Year Two in Palo Alto. This is not a game where an early deficit should be or will be ignored.
71% playoff probability for the Irish with a win. 6% with a loss.
Boise State at Hawaii
One fun little aspect of Saturday night? You can do an Ashton Jeanty/Travis Hunter split screen if your TV provider allows it. The Broncos are in the Pacific, Jeanty’s looking to put up another productive first half, and Hawaii’s looking to bring back some Colt Brennan/June Jones memories. Hawaii hasn’t beaten Boise since that game, which was also in Honolulu back on Black Friday 2007.
The Group of Five’s messy enough that Boise State isn’t completely out of the playoff chase with a loss (7% probability), but they’d be nearly out of it. Win, and they’re at 42%.
The Interesting Ones
It was hard to draw lines this week. These all impact the playoff too, or rather, they impact how we view the playoff right now. Most likely, they won’t ultimately impact the playoff. These teams are all too unlikely to eventually make it. But if some of them win, their probabilities will inch upwards, and then we’ll start noticing them, at least until they then lose a game that’s just too damaging.
Coastal Carolina at James Madison
UNLV at Utah State
UAB at Army
Toledo at Buffalo
Navy’s idle this weekend and Liberty already played, so Army’s the only undefeated mid-major on the field. The Black Knights are a big favorite over UAB, which means there’s only so much they can gain by winning. 9% playoff probability if they take this one.
There’s a theory around the Sun Belt which says UL Monroe is good, actually, and that the ULM loss won’t be as bad for James Madison as it currently looks. For the time being, the Dukes are trying to get back on the rails tonight and avoid further decimation. 13% playoff probability if they take care of the Chants.
UNLV, like Army, only has so much they can gain here. They’re 8% playoff-likely with a win over Utah State, who is quite bad.
MACtion? Buffalo tries to tear the league down from within once more, adding a rocket booster to its own little boneyard. With a win, Toledo’s 7% playoff-likely. As always, that can go up or down depending on margin and what happens elsewhere.
Cal at Pitt
Louisville at Virginia
Returning to that hypothetical ACC football fan, their Saturday’s actually shaping up pretty nicely. Pitt’s still undefeated if they can keep it, and Cal’s solid, and Louisville’s still probably good enough to make noise here and there, even if they failed their Notre Dame and SMU tests.
Pitt’s an interesting case. They don’t play Miami in the regular season, and they get Clemson at home, so if this team—led by a fairly high-profile former QB recruit in Eli Holstein—can keep rolling a little longer, they could throw a lot of wrenches into the ACC race. They only get to 13% playoff-likely with a win, but they’ve got three power-conference wins already, which would probably make them a well-ranked team if the CFP committee was already releasing rankings.
For Louisville, that Notre Dame game might turn into a free play in the friendly eye of hindsight. The Cards get Miami at home next week, where some (Movelor; maybe FPI) could have them favored. Win this, and they have a 12% playoff chance, which isn’t good but is believable.
Virginia? 5–1 with a win. Cal? 4–2 with a win. Still a long way from talking playoff, but at least possible enough to warrant some hope, and there are plenty of benchmarks below “playoff qualification” which would be meaningful to these programs.
Washington State at Fresno State
We’re unsure what to make of Wazzu, whose only loss so far came on the blue turf down in Boise. They’ve got a possibly tough Fresno State team on the road. Both teams are coming off an idle Saturday and a chance to lick some wounds, with Fresno State’s last game the beatdown at the hands of UNLV.
Washington at Iowa
A little Big Ten depth? This game’s in Iowa City, but it kicks off at 9:00 AM Pacific Time. Big vibes game for both sides. Trying to craft a favorable narrative. Trying to prove that hey, this team isn’t bad or anything. That’s kind of the point of the season for both from this point out. Each is currently projecting to finish 7–5, but that’ll probably jump to 8–4 for at least Iowa should they win.
FCS (Movelor) Top 25 Matchups
#5 Idaho at #4 Montana State
#8 Northern Arizona at #6 Montana
Montana State’s the last undefeated team in the FCS’s two best conferences, but Movelor still has them more than a touchdown worse than both South Dakota State and North Dakota State. Idaho’s at the tail end of a brutal gauntlet to start the year. Get out of these seven games at 5–2 and Idaho, armed with an FBS win over Wyoming, has a believable chance at the Big Sky title and maybe even the 2-seed. Opposite the Vandals, Montana State maintains the inside track to the 1-seed, especially with the Cat-Griz Game in Bozeman this year.
Speaking of the Griz, they draw the Lumberjacks, whom Movelor ranks eighth in the FCS but might not be able to lose another game besides this one if they want to make the playoff field. They lost to Arizona, lost to Idaho, and lost to Incarnate Word, all of which are more than excusable. But they scheduled Lincoln University, a tiny school in Oakland whose football team seems to exist to make the school money playing buy games. (Somewhere between 10% and 50% of Lincoln’s enrollment is on the football team.) From what I can tell, Lincoln is still not a member of the NCAA or the NAIA. They are ungoverned. The result is that NAU’s 3–3 will be viewed by some as 2–3, which makes opportunities like this one huge. NAU needs respect. Montana, meanwhile, is looking to bounce back from last week’s Weber State upset.
#2 North Dakota State at #24 Southern Illinois
SIU’s been a disappointment, making this mostly just another MVFC game for NDSU. But, the MVFC is tough, and this could be tough, and NDSU’s been looking better than last year’s team. Nice chance to prove that ahead of the Dakota Marker Game. On the other sideline, it’s something of a last stand for the Salukis, who are already 2–4. It’s possible to make the FCS Playoffs out of the MVFC at 6–5, but it’s hard, and SIU still has to go to Brookings.
#17 Missouri State at #20 Illinois State
Missouri State’s on its way out of the FCS, but they’re still in the MVFC in a technical sense. Big opportunity for Illinois State, who’s only lost so far to NDSU and Iowa.
#22 Chattanooga at #21 Furman
And finally, two of the SoCon’s theoretical contenders. Chattanooga already lost to Mercer, and the nonconference season went poorly for both these guys, but at least Chattanooga and maybe both of them have reason to hope they’re better than their losing records imply. UTC played multiple FBS schools. Furman’s only bad loss came to Charleston Southern, which is quite the bad loss but is only one game. The SoCon is probably Mercer’s for the taking, but it’s worth putting a pin in this and keeping an eye on whoever wins.
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Some resources for the weekend:
Bark.
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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.
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