Predicting the College Football Playoffs: Reflections on Week 2

Who dropped back in the playoff discussion, and who stepped into their places?

John Bullock (5) celebrates a stop on 4th and 1. / Amarillo Mullen

Nebraska did much to improve its position in the pecking order for teams looking to make the playoffs, but the Big Ten as a whole did not do a lot to help its members have additional leverage for future at-large bids. Let’s look at the positives first….

Nebraska dominates Colorado in prime time and is now ranked in both polls.

While the hard-to-please Nebraska fans likely feel that the 2nd half of Saturday night’s game left a lot to be desired, it likely played out almost as well as possible as far as garnering positive media attention. Because Nebraska so dominated Colorado in the first half, most viewers who aren’t supporters of either team turned channels to watch other more competitive games. Without any special highlights of Colorado to showcase, the media narrative afterward was almost unanimous in describing the Nebraska victory as “dominating” or similar. Colorado is not a bad team. If Colorado can win its next two games against Colorado State and Baylor, they would need to win 3 of their final 8 to be bowl eligible. Colorado’s pass rush will look better against median Big 12 offenses, and they can make some adjustments to their short-passing game to compensate for their lack of a rushing attack, so it will take excellent defenses to shut them down. No, their D-line will not match up well against the O-lines of Utah, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, and possibly UCF, but they should hold their own against Texas Tech, Cincinnati, and possibly Kansas. If they can get to 6 wins, regardless of how, it will make Nebraska’s victory over them look more impressive. It’s asking a lot of Nebraska fans to root for Colorado, but you can at least take solace in whatever future victories they have by knowing that they’re making Nebraska look better.

As for Nebraska being ranked now, yes, it matters. Keep winning, and we’ll keep climbing. It’s tricky making a splash this week against Northern Iowa, an FCS team, so it would be ideal for the Huskers to get up early with a few halftime highlights, which will be what most people will see and remember. The folks on the committee that will make the decisions about who they invite cannot possibly watch every team and every game, so the AP and the coaches’ polls are cheat sheets for where they should focus their attention. It will always be in Nebraska’s best interest to 1) be ranked, and 2) be playing ranked teams. Speaking of which, here is the next bright spot….

Future Nebraska B1G opponents are knocking on the door of being ranked.

Illinois did all of the mid-tier B1G teams a huge favor by knocking off Kansas on Saturday. Kansas is one of 6 to 10 Big 12 teams who have a plausible chance at winning their conference, so their having a loss to a mid-tier B1G team helps the Big Ten look better with every Kansas success that follows. Illinois is now sitting just outside of the top 25 rankings in both polls, so a convincing win this week over Central Michigan would likely mean that they will be ranked in at least one poll when they visit Lincoln for a primetime Friday night game on September 20th, which will be televised on Fox.

Rutgers pummeled Akron to become 2-0, and they are now also in position to be ranked by the time that they come to Nebraska on October 5th. To do that would require them 1) traveling to and beating Virginia Tech on September 21, and 2) beating Washington at home on September 27. Rutgers has a good defense and a punishing style of football that should help them to match up fairly well in both games, but they don’t have the depth to absorb many more injuries. Virginia Tech lost to Vanderbilt to start the season, and Washington is in the beginning of a massive restructuring after losing its coaching staff and a majority of the key players that took them to the championship game last year, so it’s not as implausible as it might seem.

Indiana is still undefeated and scoring points by the bushel. When Curt Cignetti was hired away from James Madison last winter, he brought nine of his players with him. Last year’s Dukes went 11-2 and played in a bowl game (Armed Forces Bowl), losing only that bowl game to Air Force (31-21) and an overtime contest to Appalachian State (26-23), who won their bowl game. I am explaining all of this just to make the case that James Madison was not only better than Indiana a year ago, they likely would have finished somewhere near the lower middle of the Big Ten conference. Cignetti is a winner, he brought players to upgrade the Hoosiers, and the impending opponents for Indiana are not exactly daunting: @UCLA, NC-Charlotte, Maryland, and @Northwestern before hosting Nebraska on October 19th. If Indiana can win at UCLA this week, they could plausibly be undefeated and ranked when the Huskers come to town.

Ohio State is the only Big Ten team that has looked dominant thus far. They will obviously be ranked when the Huskers come to town on October 26th, but the question is, how high? Texas jumped past them to be ranked #2 after the Longhorns’ impressive win over Michigan on Saturday, but they will play Oklahoma in the Red River Shootout the week before they host #1 Georgia on October 19. Georgia will also travel to #4 Alabama and play Auburn prior to the Texas game. After playing Georgia, Alabama will host Tennessee on October 19th. Tennessee travels to Oklahoma before that game. Put it all together, and it’s likely that whichever SEC team wins out in the games above will be ranked #1 for the week of the Nebraska @ Ohio State game, but Ohio State will likely be ranked no lower than #2 if they remain unbeaten until then, which would mean beating Oregon in Eugene on October 12.

USC continues to impress, pitching a shutout at home against Utah State. They are now ranked #11 in the AP poll, and they’ll continue to climb if they continue to win. They’re off this week before a pivotal stretch where they play @Michigan, Wisconsin, @Minnesota, Penn State, and @Maryland in consecutive weeks. Since Nebraska only plays Wisconsin out of that list of teams, it would help Nebraska’s conference standings for USC to win all of those games.

Notre Dame’s shocking loss to Northern Illinois potentially opens up one more at-large bid.

Because Notre Dame has yet to play Purdue and USC, their fall in the rankings does take away potential for the those teams (and the B1G as a whole) to gain from potentially beating them later. Notre Dame has already placed itself behind the 8-ball for making the playoffs by losing to the Huskies. If Notre Dame were to win all of its remaining games, they would likely be back in to the middle of the playoff invitations, but even one more loss will likely be enough to eliminate them from consideration. If they are out, it would be an additional spot for an at-large bid, which could potentially be Nebraska or another B1G team.

Now let’s look at the negatives for Nebraska from last week….

Texas’ beatdown of Michigan makes the SEC look unstoppable, and it calls into question the rest of the Big Ten.

As defending national champion and 3x Big Ten champion, Michigan’s current team probably has been overrated after losing Harbaugh and other key coaches and a bus-full of key players to the NFL. Still, getting manhandled at home by Texas is an image that’s probably more enduring than the way Texas beat Alabama handily at home last year. Anything good that Michigan does in-conference from this point forward will serve to make Texas (and the SEC) look better while likely only hurting the Big Ten in comparison.

The Big Ten lost some close cross-conference games.

Iowa lost to Iowa State due to a last-second field goal, and on Friday night Northwestern lost to Duke in double-overtime. Neither game was a monumental hit to the prestige of the conference, but each is another data point that helped another conference’s reputation at the expense of the Big Ten’s.

The Big Ten struggled in games that shouldn’t have been close.

Penn State was trailing Bowling Green at halftime at home. There’s no positive way to spin that as far as media attention. Oregon had to kick a last-second field goal to beat Boise State at home. Wisconsin was not exactly a juggernaut in its 27-13 win over South Dakota, an FCS team. As a result, both Penn State and Oregon tumbled in the polls, and Wisconsin failed to move closer to being in the polls. Even worse news for Wisconsin and the Big Ten is that they are hosting Alabama for Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff this week. Alabama is currently more than a 2-touchdown favorite. It’s an opportunity for a monumental win for Wisconsin and the Big Ten,… but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The Big 12 kept hope alive for a potential 2nd team to make the playoffs with an at-large bid.

#13 Oklahoma State and #14 Kansas State narrowly averted upsets at the hands of Arkansas and Tulane, respectively. Combined with #21 Iowa State’s win over Iowa, three of the best teams in the conference avoided what would likely have been playoff-nullifying losses. About the only way that the Big 12 will get 2 teams into the playoffs is to have an undefeated, highly ranked team narrowly lose in the conference championship game: the winner would receive an auto-bid and a first-round bye, and the formerly undefeated team that lost would have the best possible shot at getting an at-large bid. #12 Utah and #20 Arizona are also ranked and undefeated. FWIW, Arizona State, BYU, UCF, and TCU are also still undefeated, though not yet ranked.

The SEC looks like a lock to get 4 teams into the playoffs, possibly more.

In addition to Texas’ big win over Michigan, Tennessee dismantled North Carolina State (51-10) in the other cross-conference matchup of ranked opponents. The result? For the first time ever, six of the top seven teams in the AP poll are from the same conference: #1 Georgia, #2 Texas, #4 Alabama, #5 Ole Miss, #6 Missouri, and #7 Tennessee. Add in #15 Oklahoma and #16 LSU, and it’s quite likely that SEC teams will spend the remainder of the season trading places with one another as each week they take turns winning and losing games with one another. Worse for the Big Ten as a whole is that #3 Ohio State—the sole non-SEC team in the top 7—soon plays the two next highest ranked B1G teams, #8 Penn State and #9 Oregon. That means that if Ohio State were to go undefeated, it would most likely provide cushion at the top to solidify all of the SEC teams with 1 loss or less against potentially dropping lower than Big Ten contenders. Because Missouri and Ole Miss don’t have schedules as difficult as the rest, there will likely be 5 SEC teams still ranked in the top 10 well into November, and probably 2 to 3 more in the top 20. Because almost all losses will be close and will most likely come at the hands of other highly-ranked SEC teams, the top ten rankings will look a lot like a shell game where the SEC teams just continually get moved around on the board, but none of them ever leaving it or falling too far behind.

As a general rule for all non-SEC fans, besides losing to teams from other conferences, the best way to alleviate the SEC stronghold on the top of the rankings is to have as many upsets as possible from other SEC teams that are NOT highly ranked. Auburn, Arkansas, Kentucky, Texas A&M, and Mississippi State are all unranked with a loss, so any wins by any of them over the highly ranked SEC teams would go a long way towards pulling pieces out of the logjam.

With the new 12-team playoff system in place, more teams will have more chances to make the playoffs, and their opportunities will last much longer into the season. This series of articles is intended to continue all season with three subjects per week: reflections on the past week; games to anticipate for the coming week; and an overview of how the whole system is coming together and evolving with projections for who will make the playoffs, bubble teams, power rankings, etc. All will be written from the perspective of a Nebraska fan who wants a summary of who to root for and why, what needs to happen for Nebraska to make the playoffs, and an occasional look at the politics and economics that are likely going on behind the scenes as it is a political process that will choose which teams make it.

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