Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college football, where the season’s first “snow” game was actually hail in Wyoming. Second Quarter: Ultimate Carousel Chaos Theory. Third Quarter: Checking in on First-Year Coaches. Fourth Quarter: The Previously Inconceivable Big Ten Showdown.
First Quarter: When Your Top Five Team Turns Into a Dumpster Fire
It’s a nauseating feeling when what is supposed to be The Year for a team dissolves into a disaster almost immediately. After all the months of preparation—from roster building to workouts to implementing offenses and defenses—you find out the plan was flawed. Badly flawed. It took all of six weeks to become a disaster.
Then what?
Quitting is not an option on Oct. 5. Fans and media may give up on a team, but those being paid—the players and coaches—must report for duty and figure out how to fix it. The Dash looks at three crisis situations, and where the teams are headed.
Texas (1)
Preseason AP ranking: No. 1. Current status: 3–2, but 0–2 against power-conference competition—and the Longhorns didn’t lead for a minute in either game. Best win: San José State, presumably.
Fatal flaws: The Longhorns are a bad offensive team, and that’s not just an Arch Manning (2) problem. (Although, to be sure, there is an Arch Manning problem.) In the first halves against Ohio State and Florida, Texas has scored a total of seven points and converted two of 12 third downs. Steve Sarkisian, an accomplished play-scripter and game-caller, cannot get his team started.
Texas’s young offensive line was a hope-and-pray prognosis coming in, and that wishful thinking has evaporated after the Horns ran for 52 yards on 26 attempts in the loss to Florida on Saturday. That included six sacks of Manning for a loss of 37 yards. Coming off an open date, when you’d expect to see a line improve, that was an alarming step back.
Even with an experienced line last year, Texas was spotty in the running game against top-level defenses, rushing for fewer than 60 yards against Ohio State, Arizona State and Georgia (twice).
Next up is the nation’s No. 5 run defense, Oklahoma. The Sooners are also third nationally in sacks.
As for Manning: Maybe he’s one breakthrough game away from being who we all thought he was. (DJ Lagway might have had his breakthrough performance against Texas on Saturday; we’ll see if it continues.) But confidence is a fragile thing, and Manning doesn’t appear to have much of it right now.
Outlook: In terms of trying to backdoor the College Football Playoff, hope remains alive. Only one of Texas’s losses is within the SEC, so there is still a feasible path to the league championship game—especially in a scrambled SEC where it looks like everyone will take a loss. And a 10–2 record would certainly merit at-large playoff consideration. But if the Horns keep playing the way they have been, there’s a better chance they end up 4–4 in the conference than 7–1 and in Atlanta. That would constitute Sark’s first massive step backward at Texas.
Clemson (3)
Preseason AP ranking: No. 4. Current status: 2–3, and the Tigers’ only victory over a power-conference team is in name only—North Carolina has a Sun Belt–level roster and might not win another game this season. Best win: Maybe Troy, actually.
Fatal flaws: Clemson was definitely overrated coming off a 10–4 season that included just one win over a competent opponent (SMU in the ACC championship game, on the final play). But that inflated sense of who the Tigers are didn’t just seem to come from the media or coaches who voted them too high to begin with—it might also have come from within. When Dabo Swinney (4) was talking about being the first program to go 16–0 in a season, it was time to pump the brakes. (He didn’t specifically say Clemson would go 16-0 this year. But he said it in August, and it fed into unrealistic expectations for this team.)
Losing the opener to LSU was not a mortal sin, although it was a warning sign about the offensive struggles to follow. The bigger problem was losing to Georgia Tech, then letting the hangover from that game lead to a ghastly home loss to Syracuse—a game in which Clemson never led.
Outlook: Clemson popped on Saturday against the Tar Heels, looking far more explosive than it had been previously—but, again, North Carolina might be the worst power-conference team in America, so those are empty calories for the time being. With three losses and few chances for quality wins remaining, Clemson is cooked as an at-large playoff contender. The Tigers will need to get into the ACC championship game and win it, just like last year. At 1–2, that’s a heavy lift. A 6–2 league record might not be good enough to get there.
Penn State (5)
Preseason AP ranking: No. 2. Current status: 3–2, winless against power-conference teams, just served up UCLA’s first win of the season. Best win: No such thing, honestly.
Fatal flaws: Failures of coaching and player leadership. If ever a team crumbled after one loss and let it become two losses, that was the Nittany Lions the past two games. Kudos to the Bruins for regrouping after a major staff shakeup and finally unlocking the talent in Nico Iamaleava, but the only explanation for falling behind that team 27–7 at halftime is insufficient mental and physical preparation. (And an overpaid defensive coordinator, after $3 million man Jim Knowles’s unit gave up five straight scoring drives to start the game.)
When that happens, it really does suggest that the James Franklin era (6) has run its very-good, never-elite due course in State College. In a season where everything was put in place to do something special, he’s not Big Game James. He’s not even Medium Game James, after losing to an 0–4 opponent that fired its coach. He’s Little Game James, with fluff wins over Nevada, Florida International and Villanova.
Outlook: Realistically speaking, 9–3 is Penn State’s new ceiling. If the Nittany Lions can somehow beat Ohio State in Columbus for the first time since 2011, while also winning the rest of their games, the playoff is back in play. But a 9–3 mark with a weak non-conference schedule would be a tough sell—and there may well be other losses to come.
At 9–3 or worse, it would be time for Franklin to find an exit strategy. Thanks to a roughly $50 million buyout in a one-sided agreement the school went along with, Penn State cannot afford to fire him. But if the only fun that Franklin is having is on pay day, and he has other good options, he could make this easy on his employer.
Dash College Football Playoff Bracket
If the season ended today—and thankfully it doesn’t—this is how The Dash would select and seed the College Football Playoff bracket. Three teams have separated themselves at the top, with Miami (7) adding a road win over a longtime rival to its body of work. Ohio State (8) and Oregon (9) are close behind.
After them, it gets muddy. There are five SEC teams in the bracket at present, but it’s hard to decide which one is best. For now, give the nod to Oklahoma (10), which is probably going into Red River with its backup quarterback.
Seeding
1. Miami
2. Ohio State
3. Oregon
4. Oklahoma
5. Indiana
6. Texas A&M
7. Mississippi
8. Texas Tech
9. Alabama
10. Georgia
11. Georgia Tech
12. Memphis
First-round games
- No. 12 Memphis at No. 5 Indiana
- No. 11 Georgia Tech at No. 6 Texas A&M
- No. 10 Georgia at No. 7 Ole Miss
- No. 9 Alabama at No. 8 Texas Tech
Quarterfinals
- Sugar Bowl: No. 4 Oklahoma vs. winner of No. 12 Memphis at No. 5 Indiana
- Cotton Bowl: No. 3 Oregon vs. winner of No. 11 Georgia Tech at No. 6 Texas A&M
- Rose Bowl: No. 2 Ohio State vs. winner of No. 10 Georgia at No. 7 Ole Miss
- Orange Bowl: No. 1 Miami vs. winner of No. 9 Alabama at No. 8 Texas Tech
Also considered: BYU, Missouri, Tennessee, LSU, Michigan, Illinois, Arizona State, Virginia, Navy, South Florida.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Forde-Yard Dash: Is There Any Way Back Into the Playoff Picture for Penn State, Texas?.
