College Football Morning: Washington State's Gain, Quinn Ewers's Pain (Week 3 Recap)

Washington State's playoff picture is coming into focus. Texas's just got a lot more blurry.

There are two kinds of movement in college football. There’s the grappling at the top, the temporary résumé edges and outlook shifts between the titans of the sport. Then, there are the more monumental swings. Yesterday mostly involved the former. But we got a little bit of the latter as well.

John Mateer, like many college quarterbacks, hails from the Dallas suburbs. Clean-shaven, with a little bit of dark hair trailing out the back of his helmet, neither his look nor his straightforward recruitment to Pullman indicate the man’s folk hero potential. Gardner Minshew, he is not. But among Washington State fans, Mateer is destined to go down as every bit the icon Minshew was.

Minshew never won an Apple Cup. He only spent one year on the Palouse, and for as magical as that season was, it ended in heartbreak, the visiting Washington Huskies keeping Mike Leach’s penultimate WSU team at arm’s reach in the snow. Minshew, of course, became a Cougar institution anyway, with his mustache and his swagger bringing comfort and confidence to a program rocked by the death of Tyler Hilinski. The Mississippian was, in every way, the perfect quarterback for a Leach-coached team. Beating Washington would have made it mean even more, but Minshew didn’t need to beat Washington to achieve legendary status in his adopted home.

Thankfully, Mateer’s time doesn’t come on the heels of a tragedy as immense as that of 2018. But watching the quarterback scamper and scramble and sling it yesterday, it was hard not to think of that Minshew–Leach season. Once again, Washington State is in the dumps, this time left for dead by the rest of the West Coast’s power conference football apparatus. Once again, the platonic ideal of moxie has arrived in their backfield, and behind his lead, the Cougs have styled themselves giant-killers, the little engine on the Palouse who will not go away. It’s not that Mateer and Minshew are similar football players. It’s not even that Mateer is an excellent quarterback (though he might be one, the jury’s still out). It’s that like Minshew, Mateer brings a dashing identity to the program so recently led by the sport’s greatest pirate. Mateer is the quarterback from the movies. Washington State is the perfect underdog.

With the Apple Cup victory, this WSU season changes. The focus shifts from a Pac-12 in limbo to a Washington State team with a playoff chance. Speculation about whom the conference might add takes a back seat to questions over how this team can avoid a letdown against San Jose State, and whether Mateer forces too many throws when it’s late and he has the lead. Beating Washington ceases to be the goal. A 12–0 season enters the field of possibility.

Whether Washington State has a great playoff shot or a good playoff shot depends on how the committee views them relative to their former peers in the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, and ACC. In our model, we give the Cougs half the CFP rankings deduction Group of Five teams receive, but that’s just our best guess. Their schedule is very much a Mountain West slate. What Washington State has to hope for is a committee who defaults to thinking of them as a power conference team. Even then, 11–1 might not be enough.

Whatever December holds, September has become something special for the Evergreen State’s perennial underdog. With SJSU and Boise State up next, plenty more opportunity lies ahead.

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Moving on to the grappling:

Arch Manning, Quinn Ewers, and Texas

Steve Sarkisian described Quinn Ewers’s injury as an abdominal strain, and he indicated Texas’s medical staff really doesn’t know much else yet. The Heisman favorite last week, Ewers was a key part of Texas’s national championship concept, which was effectively to build an A roster and, with an A+ quarterback and A+ culture, eventually compete against A+ rosters with quarterbacks and cultures ranging from A to C. Texas is good defensively, strong on the offensive line, and elite out wide. But unless Texas is going to be great defensively, the quarterback is the key to Steve Sarkisian’s college football program architecture.

Ewers going down, then, would be an unparalleled disaster in normal college football circumstance. Given the nature of oblique injuries (Ewers was seen pointing to his side), it’s possible he’ll be limited for the rest of the season, with plenty of voices telling him not to risk his NFL Draft status by playing at a level less than 100%. This is not, however, normal college football circumstance. For one thing, there’s a 12-team playoff this year, making individual games less do-or-die. For another, Ewers’s backup is the most touted quarterback recruit in history, a redshirt freshman out of New Orleans from the greatest passing family of all time.

Manning electrified more with his legs than his arm last night, shocking those expecting a Peyton or an Eli when he tore through UTSA’s secondary on the ground. It’s harder to grade his passing—he was throwing to a lot of wide-open receivers—but no one came out of the game doubting the academic sophomore’s potential. Is the hype higher because he’s a Manning? Yes. But the kid is quite the quarterback.

The question is whether Manning can already be the A+ guy whom Texas will eventually need. We’re coming off a week in which every analyst in the country praised Ewers’s polish in the pocket. They praised his poise and comfort doing the little things, most notably moving his feet to create passing lanes. Arch Manning might be able to incinerate UTSA, but can he keep his composure against Oklahoma in the hot, rowdy Cotton Bowl? Can he hold his own against the best athletes in the country when Georgia comes to Austin in October? Can he physically respond through what will be eleven to thirteen games against SEC-caliber competition in the event Texas does go all the way?

In Texas’s ideal world, they won’t have to answer any of these questions, and all they’ll have to worry about is Arch Manning hysteria any time a healthy Quinn Ewers throws an incompletion. But if Ewers faces an extended absence, the national championship hopes of football’s greatest state suddenly rest on the 19-year-old’s shoulders. He’s ready for them. He’s been expecting them. But they’re arriving a little earlier than anticipated.

What to Make of Georgia

Were Georgia playing a more reasonably aggressive coach, they may have lost that game. Were Georgia playing a more reasonably aggressive coach, they may have blown Kentucky out of the water. Mark Stoops made decisions as though he was coaching an NFL-caliber kicker, an NFL-caliber quarterback, an NFL-caliber punter, and a lockdown defense. He isn’t coaching that hypothetical team. He’s coaching Kentucky. Mark Stoops should not have punted the ball back to Georgia when he had a chance to win the game.

Still, the fact it was close at all reflects well on Stoops, and it reflects poorly on Georgia. Was Georgia poorly prepared? Was Georgia distracted by the latest arrest? Is Georgia maybe not the power its talent and previously routine dominance suggest?

We’d do well to remember that we’ve asked these questions before. Three years ago, Stetson Bennett’s offense looked questionable at times before lighting up Alabama in the national title game. Two years ago, Georgia underwhelmed against Kent State, struggled at Mizzou, and got caught in Mark Stoops’s Lexington quicksand only to go on and win the national championship by 58 points. Last year, this team sleepwalked against South Carolina, Auburn, and even Vanderbilt. Only after a scare from Missouri in Athens did the Bulldogs start putting teams away. Of course, that didn’t last. They let Georgia Tech hang around, then famously flopped against Alabama in the SEC Championship, opening the door for a bizarre collection of collateral effects.

That last example is relevant here: Georgia may have gotten away with a lack of consistent excellence in 2021 and 2022, but they didn’t last year. It’s easy to write this off as “Oh, they’ve done this before,” but one of the times they did it before, the habit came back to bite them in the end. I understand that Alabama played a great game in Atlanta last December. Alabama beat Georgia, and Alabama deserves credit for that. But with Carson Beck instead of Bennett, Georgia’s even better-equipped to run the table than they were before. Last year, they didn’t pull it off. Concerns about consistency proved prescient.

Movelor, our model’s rating system, has the Dawgs down to fourth in the country. An overreaction, right? I’m not so sure. If a rating is an indicator of how a team will perform on an average weekend, and if malaise is sometimes part of the Georgia routine, then on average, they’ll play like maybe the fourth-best team in the country. Their ceiling will remain higher than probably anybody’s. But ceilings don’t matter if you don’t reach them when it counts.

Alabama Might Be Ok

After months of hemming and hawing over the Crimson Tide, doubts ignited following a concerning performance last week against USF. How did Kalen DeBoer’s team respond? By blowing Wisconsin’s doors off in front of an amped Camp Randall crowd. A good amount of this can be attributed to Alabama playing most of the game against already-rebuilding Wisconsin’s backup quarterback. But the degree of blowout means something, even if Wisconsin misses a bowl this year, as is expected. Most encouraging was Jalen Milroe throwing a few great balls. We know he has it in him. If he can unlock it consistently, this team’s ceiling rises to heights approaching Texas’s, Georgia’s, and Ohio State’s.

Speaking of those three, Alabama was the team who jumped Georgia in Movelor. An overreaction, right? Honestly, Movelor’s biggest issue is that it occasionally underreacts. FPI and SP+ also have the Tide ahead of the Dawgs. Each has another SEC team (Tennessee and Mississippi, respectively) ahead of Georgia as well. A fourth-place rating is comparatively high on Georgia, relative to other reliable systems.

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Getting into conference-by-conference talk (for the most part):

LSU Survived. What to Make of Mizzou?

Starting in the SEC, LSU and South Carolina played a bizarre football game in which both looked tremendous at times and both looked like the most undisciplined idiots in the world in other moments. A friend pointed out that it would make sense for Brian Kelly to have more trouble corralling his players at LSU than at Notre Dame, with Notre Dame’s smaller student body and South Bend environment providing more natural barriers to keeping players focused. LSU always has the potential to get out of control, and it often does get out of control, and we’ve probably been underrating that as a risk for Kelly over the long run in Baton Rouge.

In the short term, LSU survived, and now they should get a little reprieve before Lane Kiffin brings Mississippi to town in mid-October. Garrett Nussmeier, like everyone in this game, looked great except for when he didn’t.

For South Carolina, it was so close to a breakthrough, but the Gamecocks will have to settle for progress. South Carolina’s talent and athleticism held its own. Those are important building blocks. It’s wild how a team who played so badly against Old Dominion could pull it together as much as Shane Beamer’s team has, but that’s what’s happened. The schedule’s hard enough that missing a bowl game remains a risk, but it’s also very easy to see these guys ruining someone’s season. Mississippi and Mizzou both have to play in Columbia before the year is up.

Speaking of Mizzou…

You know how dogs tilt their heads when they don’t understand what you’re saying? That’s how I feel trying to parse Mizzou’s uncomfortable victory over Boston College.

Mizzou had some atrocious defensive breakdowns. Was that all it was?

Mizzou continues to make few big plays. Is that a terrible trait?

Thomas Castellanos was out there making things happen. Is Boston College good?

Movelor’s meaningfully lower on Mizzou than both SP+ and FPI, yet our model still has the Tigers with a decent (3-in-10) playoff chance. The schedule isn’t all that bad. This team should stick around. But that might also lead to us never really knowing what this Mizzou team is. They play neither Texas nor Georgia this regular season. If Alabama looks more like Week 2’s Alabama than Week 3’s when Tigers meet Tide, we might go into the SEC Championship or the playoff still not knowing Mizzou.

On the other sideline, I have no idea what to make of Boston College either. FPI has Bill O’Brien’s team 23rd in the nation, right on the edge of the ACC picture. Movelor and SP+ have the Eagles around 60th, likelier than not to make a bowl but not really in the playoff sphere. Thanks to the ACC’s eight-game schedule and thin top tier, it’s possible we’ll go the whole season wondering. That’s becoming a little bit of a theme.

Among the remaining SEC main characters, both Mississippi and Tennessee won big, as was expected. We’re still waiting on those two to reach their first tests. Tennessee’s comes next week at Oklahoma. For Lane Kiffin’s team, we’re looking at that South Carolina matchup at the start of October, or maybe LSU the following week.

Further down the list, Billy Napier’s on the hottest of seats in Gainesville, to the degree where we’re googling Billy Napier’s name as we write this just to make sure Florida hasn’t done something drastic. (Kent Fuchs is back but as an interim president. I don’t know how that affects Napier’s job security, but it’s relevant.) It’s possible Texas A&M found something in Marcel Reed, who started ahead of the injured Connor Weigman.

Arkansas’s defense was perplexingly bad against UAB, and Arkansas’s not supposed to have a good defense. Vanderbilt lost at Georgia State in a game I’m guessing was designed to draw the school’s Atlanta alumni out to a night at Turner Field. I hope they all had fun.

Oregon Showed Up, and Davis Warren’s a Problem (in the Bad Way)

Perhaps providing inspiration to Mark Stoops, Butch Jones made no attempt to win yesterday’s game in Ann Arbor, settling for field goals with a kicker who missed them and refusing to use timeouts in the fourth quarter. As with Kentucky and Georgia, an attempt to win might have made the result uglier, but Michigan may have also dodged a bullet.

The nice thing for the Wolverines is that it’s now very clear Davis Warren cannot quarterback this offense effectively. It’s over. Sherrone Moore got it wrong, and now he needs to play somebody else. It’s possible the overall woefulness isn’t Warren’s fault, and that the offense is just broken. The fact, though, is that Michigan stinks with Davis Warren under center. We thought last week had more to do with Texas, but the showing against Arkansas State was comparably messy.

It would be surprising if Alex Orji wasn’t the guy for the Wolverines next week against USC, but even then, Michigan has problems. Orji has a limited skillset, and while USC’s defense is still probably pretty bad, it has upside it used to lack. Also, Arkansas State’s defense should be terrible. I didn’t expect this level of a fall-off from Michigan. They might be out of the playoff race entirely by the end of October.

Oregon, on the other hand, finally got it going, blowing out Oregon State behind a dominant second half. The Beavers were expected to take a step back, and that’s probably a lot of this, but given OSU’s Mountain West-based schedule, this could age very well for Oregon. More than anything, it’s got to be relieving for Ducks fans to finally see the team look like the group we saw so often in 2023. We aren’t going to put Oregon in that top tier with Texas and Ohio State or anything, but they reaffirmed that they belong in the second pack.

Speaking of the second pack: Is Notre Dame still in it? Or is Purdue a terrible, terrible football team? Both things might be true, but when the physical gap appears larger than it did between Notre Dame and a MAC team, there is a problem. Movelor has Notre Dame as the seventh-best team in the country. FPI has the Irish in the same place. SP+ has them tenth. Hope is back in South Bend, just in time for another MAC team to come to town.

Credit to Indiana for what they did to UCLA. UCLA might be bad, but it’s still hard to do that. Curt Cignetti made some bold claims when he arrived in Bloomington. He’s got a chance to back them all up.

K-State and K-State Alone? Or K-State Amidst a Pack?

We talked a little about this yesterday, but Kansas State crushed Arizona on Friday night. Crushed them. Arizona’s got a first-year head coach, and the McMillan/Fifita combo might be a V8 engine in a car without any wheels. Still, K-State played a great football game, and we’ve begun our annual tradition of wondering if this is the year Chris Klieman ascends to the levels he attained at North Dakota State.

It's possible Kansas State’s at that level and that the Big 12 is simply keeping up. Utah’s a hard team to gauge without Cam Rising, but Isaac Wilson played just fine in the win in Logan. Oklahoma State looked impressive again, not messing around against Tulsa. UCF’s comeback against TCU is going to cause a lot of defensive coordinators anxiety as they approach matchups with Gus Malzahn. TCU’s still competitive, BYU’s sneakily playing well, Arizona State’s got a great thing going, and all of Houston, Cincinnati, Colorado, Baylor, and Texas Tech eased some doubts this week. (Houston did that last week, too.) The Big 12 has enjoyed a pretty good September so far. On average, its teams are up nearly a point in Movelor since the start of the year.

SP+ still has Utah a little better than K-State, and neither SP+ nor FPI has the Wildcats as high as we have them. But there’s a consensus that Kansas State is either at the top of this conference or right there next to a co-favorite. With conference play beginning with a bang (they’ve got BYU on the road, then Oklahoma State at home), we’ll know soon enough whether they can keep it up.

Pitt!

Two weeks in a row now, Pitt has pulled off a big comeback against a bad Big 12 defense. The Panthers probably aren’t good, but Eli Holstein gives them a quarterback they can get behind, and we’re reaching the point in the year where even mediocre teams can earn cultural credit for avoiding losses.

Speaking of undefeated mediocrity, Cal got to 3–0 with a strong showing against San Diego State in Berkeley. Fans seem rather bought in, too, which is encouraging for the long term prospects of one of the least sports-inclined schools in the power leagues. It’s not fair to call Cal mediocre the way we can say that about Pitt. They’re better than mediocre. Or at least, we think that. We’ll know a little more next week, when they go to Florida State. More on Florida State in a moment.

Miami won again, beating up Ball State. Cam Ward put up big numbers again, throwing for five touchdowns and 346 yards on only 28 attempts. Miami looks good and legitimate, and they might not even need to be either of those things, with a path existing towards a schedule with zero ranked opponents before the College Football Playoff quarterfinals. It’s unlikely to happen, but Miami’s got an easy road. The ACC can do that for some teams.

Did Memphis Win the Mike Norvell Trade??

Oh, Florida State. Yikes.

The Seminoles should still be ok. They should be. If their players remain focused and bought in, FSU should be just fine, with plenty of winnable games ahead on the schedule and chances to play spoiler to some bigtime rivals. Their players should remain focused and bought in, so this should be how it plays out. Florida State should take care of business against Cal, continue to stabilize at SMU, and then maybe cause some mayhem in their matchups with Clemson, Miami, and Notre Dame.

What will Florida State do? I’m not sure. The last time we saw Florida State face adversity, they decided to go to court rather than attempt to prove themselves on the football field.

Mike Norvell did a great job at Memphis, and even with this season’s disaster, he’s done a good job so far at FSU. He has (growing) issues, but he’s still 23–7 since the start of 2022, a pretty good mark by recent FSU standards. One of the best things he did up there in Tennessee? Bringing Ryan Silverfield onto his staff.

After three years stuck in neutral, the Tigers got to ten victories last season. Now, they’re aimed at ten or eleven wins in the regular season alone, and they’re the likeliest playoff team among the Group of Five. Memphis is in this thing.

The most encouraging indicator for this program was how much it looked like they belonged on the same field as FSU’s athletes yesterday. Yes, there’s probably some quitting going on in Tallahassee. Yes, DJ Uiagalelei’s shortcomings allow teams to key in on the run. But Memphis held its own in the trenches against a program who should own them. That’s not nothing.

Tulane took another tough loss, this time to Oklahoma, putting the Green Wave further behind the eight ball nationally even if their conference record remains a perfect 0–0.

Bracket Talk

A break, for a second, to drop in our model’s latest bracketology. The highlights are that Memphis and Notre Dame moved in, Memphis onto the 12-seed line and Notre Dame onto the 10-seed line. We go deeper in that linked post, but Michigan, Missouri, Miami, and Washington State are the first four teams out.

One thing we didn’t discuss in the post? We currently have seven teams from the South and southeast and five from the rest of the country in the projected field. The way seedings currently project, all five of those non-southern schools are on the same side of the bracket, lumped together with 6-seed Georgia. We’re curious whether the committee will wiggle teams around at all for unofficial geographic balance, but we’re more curious about how they’ll do that if they decide to try. Would they try to create more interconference matchups in the early rounds? Or would they aim for an interregional championship? If they’re going to do it, I’d personally more enjoy the latter, but I suppose there’s a reason I didn’t mind the BCS format all that much.

The Mountain West Is Not a One-Bronco Race

UNLV might have gotten a little lucky in Kansas City on Friday night, but on a Boise State-less weekend, the opportunity for oxygen in the MWC allowed for the Rebels to flash their promise. More quietly, Fresno State had a dominant night.

We talk often about how even against some of the worst teams in the country, domination means something. That’s what happened in Fresno. Is New Mexico State particularly competitive? Probably not. But Fresno State dominated them, allowing fewer than 2.4 yards per offensive play while taking the ball away three times. Fresno State’s supposed to be better on offense than it is on defense, too.

Boise State is the Mountain West favorite. But the rest of the league is close enough for teams like UNLV, Fresno State, and maybe even San Jose State to have a shot.

Texas State Will Have to Wait

They were ready for their moment in San Marcos on Thursday, but it wasn’t to be, and despite entering the year looking like a better group of football teams than the AAC, the Sun Belt is struggling overall. Making matters worse? The league’s having trouble producing a nationally relevant top team. You can get away with struggling if your standard-bearer rocks. That’s how the SEC survived the mid-2010’s without anyone noticing it was struggling.

Movelor still says James Madison’s the best team in this conference. JMU was idle this weekend, but last week they only beat Gardner-Webb by a touchdown. SP+ calls Louisiana the Sun Belt favorites, but the Ragin’ Cajuns are coming off a 6–7 year with a losing conference record. FPI points to Marshall, but Marshall’s last game was a lackluster performance in Blacksburg against a bad Virginia Tech. Maybe ULL or JMU turns out great and we forget this whole conversation, but the Sun Belt kind of has the Big 12’s old problem: It’s pretty good, it just lacks firepower.

Appalachian State did get a nice road win this weekend against East Carolina, so that’ll help. But so far, this year’s looking like a step back for the conference. Troy allowing Cade McNamara such an efficient day was a bad look.

Holy Toledo

No, Mississippi State is not one of the SEC’s ten or twelve or fourteen or maybe even fifteen best teams. But Toledo spanked them, and Toledo did it in Starkville, and in doing that, Toledo sent a message to NIU and other aspiring MAC champions that they’re going to need to play good football to win this league. Don’t sleep on playoff Toledo, either. The average of Movelor, SP+, and FPI has the Rockets only about a touchdown worse than Memphis. That’s close enough to get the nod if the gap in records is large enough. Liberty just made the Fiesta Bowl nine months ago.

(Liberty won again and was a little underwhelming again. The leading candidate to do what Liberty did last year is Liberty.)

An FCS Shakeup?

North Dakota State pulled it out in Johnson City, but it was a dogfight with East Tennessee State, who moved the ball very well on the ground against the NDSU defense. South Dakota State won against Division II Augustana, but it was far from a flawless performance. Meanwhile, out west, Idaho smoked a respectable Albany team and Montana held Morehead State to two points.

What Movelor makes of all of this is that the FCS top five is consolidating, that Idaho and the Montanas are moving up while the Dakota States move down. It’s hard to know for sure that that’s the case. There’s so much season to go, and South Dakota State definitely knew it was playing a D2 school yesterday. Still, it’s setting up for a fun playoff season. There is so much snow in the FCS Playoffs now that the western half of the country has pulled ahead of the eastern half.

In other noteworthy FCS action, Villanova edged a valiant Towson, Southern Illinois held off a late Incarnate Word rally, Duquesne upset Youngstown State on the road, and Northern Arizona’s up into Movelor’s FCS Top Ten, which presently looks like this:

1. South Dakota State (+19.0)
2. North Dakota (+16.3)
3. Montana (+12.4)
4. Idaho (+10.9)
5. Montana State (+10.0)
6. Villanova (+6.1)
7. Southern Illinois (+6.1)
8. South Dakota (+4.3)
9. North Dakota (+3.5)
10. Northern Arizona (+3.2)

That’s five MVFC schools, four from the Big Sky, and Villanova. A big trend in college football is southern and eastern FCS programs trying to move up into the Group of Five while the north-central and northwestern parts of the country hold steady. We’ll see if that holds up as the Mountain West most likely comes calling in a few months’ time, but I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense for those top five programs to make the leap at this moment. I’d bet on Incarnate Word going FBS before I’d take Montana, Montana State, or Idaho.

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We’ll have Movelor’s Week 4 picks up later today or tomorrow. If you’re looking for some lighter college football fare, Stu’s weekly College Football Vibe Check continues our celebration of John Mateer while attempting to further the conspiracy theory that the Manning family took out Quinn Ewers. It’s a normal day at The Barking Crow.

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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.