WATCH GRID: If the season ends right now, here's your Playoff
Welcome to something like Week 2 of something like the college football season.
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I’ve done this “haw haw haw, if the regular season ended after roughly one weekend, here’s what the four-team Playoff field would look like” gimmick for several years now at various websites.
It’s a dumb joke, but it always gave me something to do while waiting through enough weekends for Bowl Projections to become a useful public service.
Well, now that we’re in college football’s most tenuous season since the 1870s, there might be some actual value to this gimmick.
5. Marshall
There’s no shame in being the top bubble team. These days, it’s good be a bubble team.
The Thundering Herd earned this spot by averaging a 59-0 margin of victory all season long, one of the greatest average margins in college football history. However, they have no FBS wins, and the Playoff committee pretends FCS teams barely exist.
4. South Alabama
The committee values road wins. Only a few teams have any, and USA’s 32-21 victory at favored Southern Miss, a 2019 bowl team, was more impressive than SMU’s 31-24 triumph at underdog Texas State, never a bowl team.
Also, Southern Miss parted ways with its head coach after facing South Alabama. If football performance was the primary factor in this transaction, then the committee must note USA’s influence on the job market.
3. Army
42-0, the only shutout against any FBS opponent all year, albeit against a Middle Tennessee that was projected to be a sub-100 team. Army’s flexbone-option offense also does not lead the country in rushing yardage (North Texas, 360 against Houston Baptist), another severe demerit.
2. BYU
A 55-3 win at Navy has caught the committee’s eye, though a 2020 asterisk applies: due to coronavirus concerns, Navy hadn’t practiced blocking or tackling. The result is the result, and BYU must make the Playoff, but this is a Body Clocks result to some degree.
And at #1 …
1. UAB
Holding off the Central Arkansas Bears might have been aided somewhat by UCA having to beat Austin Peay on the road just five days prior. But the fact remains: UAB is the only team in the country to have beaten a team that has also beaten somebody else. UAB’s RPI is embarrassing everyone else’s.
Look at the Playoff field we have given you:
Birmingham, Alabama vs. Mobile, Alabama in the Sugar Bowl.
A battle of the top independents in the Rose Bowl.
The winners meeting in Miami for the natty.
This is not bad, yes? And/or we could cancel everything but bowl season.
As for Week 2, pleased to be bringing back the Watch Grid for like the fifth or 10th or whatever year in a row, this time at Moon Crew.
Of course, the following depends on whether you are watching college football this season or not.
After a decent Thursday night battle between Playoff #1 UAB and potential spoiler Miami, here’s the Saturday situation (AP rankings included):
I’ve tried to spotlight games that appear likely to be somewhat competitive. Coastal Carolina at Kansas has the tightest Vegas spread, and I’m sure many of us will insist on staying up for that, but I refuse to be held liable.
The only real EVENT on the calendar appears to be the first conference game in Notre Dame history.
Notre Dame’s strength of schedule has almost always been Actually Fine, their 2020 schedule probably got easier once they hopped aboard the ACC for the year, and so many things about Notre Dame deserve more mockery than conference independence ever did. So I hope Notre Dame wins the ACC, then flees back into independence like:
Now that football season is here, but also just as in-limbo as everything else, wanna note something a few people expressed over the last couple weekends: SinfulSeven.com, an ebook football-adjacent enough to feel like a thing to do during a football-adjacent football season!
