Texas vs. Oklahoma: It pains me to say it, but the Charlie Strong era is over. I really like Charlie from his time at Florida. He was a very good coach and a good defensive coordinator. It just hasn’t worked out at Texas. It looked like they might be able to pull off the upset in the first half, but their defense is just not good enough.
Everyone thought Texas was back after the big win against Notre Dame in Week 1, but I was still hesitant to come to that conclusion. Now we know that Notre Dame isn’t very good at 2-4 and might not even make a bowl game.
The question now is does Texas allow Charlie to finish out the season? My guess is one more loss and they probably let him go, but that’s just pure speculation. Texas has to go after Tom Herman hard now, and I think he would undoubtedly take the position.
If, for whatever reason, Herman doesn’t take the Texas position, I think the next best realistic candidates would be Les Miles or Jimbo Fisher. Miles is available and I think he would no doubt take the position. Jimbo may want out of FSU with the personal issues he’s gone through the last year, but I’d be surprised if he left. I’ve seen some people suggest Art Briles and I’d be pretty shocked if Texas went that route with the Baylor mess from last year.
Tennessee at Texas A&M: Have to give credit to Tennessee. Yes, they’ve been lucky and that luck (or pixie dust as Verne put it) ran out yesterday. But they don’t ever quit until the final whistle and that’s an attribute to Butch Jones, who also deserves a lot of credit.
This loss yesterday actually proved to me that Tennessee is a legit top 10 team despite the crazy amount of luck they’ve had this season. I’d still be pretty shocked if they were able to pull off the upset next week against Alabama considering the way Alabama is playing right now.
I think they’ll lose to Alabama next week and run the table pretty easily the rest of the way and finish 10-2. Florida will lose at least one more SEC game and the Vols will play for the SEC championship. I’ll talk about the Florida-LSU mess later.
Houston at Navy: Ugh, I was so looking forward to undefeated Houston and undefeated Louisville playing in November and that unfortunately is not going to happen now. I thought Navy would keep this one close, but no way did I see this happening. And how cool was it see Navy rush the field?
Houston now has almost no shot of making the College Football Playoff. Even if they can run the table and beat Louisville, their schedule is just not strong enough to put them over other potential one-loss teams. We’ll see how it plays out, but right now it doesn’t look good for Houston. This also shows just how difficult it is to go undefeated in college football, even against a mediocre schedule.
Florida State at Miami: This was a bit of a surprise for me. I thought this was an awful matchup on the road for FSU playing a very good QB in Brad Kaaya. And the FSU defense really stepped up.
The Noles started off slow going into the half down 13-3. Then after a quick 3 and out, Miami was driving into FSU territory looking to go up 20-3. And then Kaaya made an awful throw that was intercepted by Tarvarus McFadden in the endzone, which completely turned the game around.
After a couple touchdowns and a field goal, the Noles went up by a touchdown. On one of the drives, Miami’s Jamal Carter was thrown out of the game for targeting, which is the worst rule and is ruining college football. Nobody knows exactly what constitutes a “targeting” call and neither do defenders. But it was funny that it allowed Miami fans to show their asses by throwing trash onto the field.
Miami then drove down for what seemed like the game tying touchdown only to have the PAT blocked by DeMarcus Walker. This was a very impressive win all around by the Noles. The defense was great compared to what they had been and Jimbo called a great game. Deondre Francois is going to be so good and that really sucks as a Florida fan. He was outstanding in the second half going 11/13 for 152 yards and 2 TDs.
This is a down year for FSU and they can still prove they are the best team in the state by beating Florida at the end of the season. Miami still controls their own destiny to the ACC title game, but the game at Virginia Tech in a couple weeks looks a lot more difficult.
LSU at Florida postponement: So this has been the biggest story out of the SEC this weekend, and I want to give my thoughts on this. Early in the week everyone was wondering why they kept pushing the announcement back about the game. They finally made the decision on Thursday afternoon to postpone the game due to uncertainty of conditions and personnel needed for the game, which to me seemed like the right decision at the time.
This sent LSU beat writers and media into a frenzy because Florida refused to play the game in Baton Rouge. And why blame them? They didn’t want to lose the only quality home game on the schedule this year. At the same time, LSU doesn’t want to make up the game by canceling their home game against South Alabama and play three straight SEC road games. It’s because you have a significant disadvantage playing on the road!
And then the conspiracy theory came out that Florida AD Jeremy Foley fooled SEC commissioner Greg Sankey into canceling the game. This is just total absurdity. The only thing Foley said that I wasn’t buying was that it was impossible to make a road trip to LSU with such short notice. I think they didn’t want to move the game, and like I just said, who can blame them? But to suggest he fooled or tricked Sankey is just asinine. Sankey is a grown ass man who understands what he’s dealing with and made the decision.
And then you have guys like Fox Sports’ Clay Travis, who I normally like, calling Florida “scared” and talking about the good weather in Gainesville on Saturday, other games being played in-state, and other games being played in poor conditions like NC State/Notre Dame and UNC/VA Tech. It’s really easy to say that in hindsight. It’s a shame he would come to these conclusions with no evidence whatsoever other than his feelings. He should be smarter than that having graduated with a law degree from Vanderbilt University.
Here’s my final conclusion on what happened. Florida no way wanted to play the game in Baton Rouge, and they were overly cautious in postponing the game indefinitely. Florida wasn’t trying to postpone the game to try to get healthier with Del Rio being injured, and they weren’t trying to gain an advantage in the standings by playing one less game. As Sankey said on the CBS broadcast, the game has to be played. In hindsight, the game probably could have been played on Saturday or Sunday like Georgia and South Carolina are doing as I’m writing this.
There’s really only two scenarios for making up this game. The best one is playing it on December 3rd. If the game has SEC championship implications, then the championship game has to be moved back a week to December 10th. This was done in 2001 for 9/11 when Florida and Tennessee played to decide the SEC East. (That still remains one of the most frustrating Gator games I’ve ever watched). This also allows Florida and LSU to keep their scheduled “cupcake” home games and only forces one game to be moved back a week. If the game doesn’t have SEC championship implications, play it on 12/3 anyways at noon and have an SEC double header with the championship game to follow. Pretty simple.
The other scenario is playing on November 19th. The SEC would have to buyout both cupcake games that the teams have scheduled and make up for lost revenue for LSU. This would mean LSU would have three straight road games, and as Yahoo’s Pat Forde put it “Deal with it.” Sometimes unfortunate circumstances happen. I do think that if this were to happen that LSU’s Thanksgiving game against Texas A&M should be moved back two days later to Saturday. But this scenario is just much more complicated.
Bottom line is this game needs to be played, and I think it ultimately will regardless of impact in the standings.
Rankings: Finally, I’m going to give my rankings, but I’m going to start doing it a little differently this week. One thing I’ve learned while watching sports is there’s a difference between how good a team actually is and how good a team’s “resume” is. So I’m going to give two different rankings. One that is simply based off of a team’s “resume” or results and one based on how good I actually think the teams are. The first one is my resume rankings, which is how I think teams should be ranked because it’s the one where the only thing that matters is wins and losses. However, the top 4 is my current projection of the College Football Playoff. Here it is:
- Alabama (6-0)
- Ohio State (5-0)
- Clemson (6-0)
- Washington (6-0)
- Michigan(6-0)
- Texas A&M (6-0)
- Baylor (5-0)
- Nebraska (5-0)
- West Virginia (4-0)
- Louisville (4-1)
- Tennessee (5-1)
- Virginia Tech (4-1)
- Wisconsin (4-1)
- Utah (5-1)
- Miami and Florida (tie) (4-1)
I have all undefeated Power 5 conference teams ranked above everyone else because they currently have perfect “resumes” since they haven’t lost yet. The rest of the teams are 1 loss Power 5 conference teams ranked by resume. When looking a team’s resume I value “quality” wins over “bad” or “good” losses.
Next is my quality team or projection ranking which ranks how good teams are regardless of wins and losses.
- Alabama: I think this is Nick Saban’s best team he’s ever had. They beat a good Arkansas team on the road by 19 and it wasn’t even that close.
- Ohio State: Struggled a little with Indiana but still no concern. Big test next week at Wisconsin.
- Michigan: Could’ve scored 100 on Rutgers if they wanted.
- Washington: Complete domination of Stanford and scoring 70 at Oregon warrant a top 4 ranking.
- Clemson: Clemsoning is no longer a thing after the beatdown of Boston College.
- Louisville: Bye week and other teams looking really good.
- Texas A&M: They are good, but two overtime wins suggest they might be a little lucky. Bye week and then they go to Bama.
- Tennessee: Yes, they are lucky. But they are really good and have a deep roster.
- Houston: Playoff hopes are done, but still think they are a top 10 team in strength.
- Oklahoma: Lost to two really good teams. I still think this team is legit even with defensive problems.
Tony and Bela 