As the college football season winds down, there is really only one thing that we know for sure. No matter how all the various conference races turn out, and no matter what the playoff committee’s final decisions are regarding participants and seeding, not everyone is going to be happy.
Another slew of chaotic results over the weekend produced the usual plethora of snap judgments and quick takes. Once again, our aim here is to attempt to provide some big-picture perspective.
Here are the top five overreactions to a wild Week 13.
On the one hand, we have a lot more teams involved in meaningful games this late in the campaign. The counterargument is maybe that isn’t such a good thing, as this is shaping up to be a year that would have had a fairly clear-cut foursome under the old format. Is more actually better when there might not be 12 teams truly worthy of a shot at a national championship?
It depends upon one’s definition of worthy. We probably won’t be able to give a definitive answer to that until we see how those first-round and quarterfinal games unfold. We do know that a couple of blockbuster showdowns from the past weekend that could have been staged in a playoff setting turned out to be colossal disappointments. But having said that, we’ll try to deal with the worthiness question for the remainder of this piece.
UP AND DOWN: Winners and losers from Week 13 in college football
TIEBREAKERS: Where Power Four conference races stand after Week 13
Overall, it was probably a net loss of a team from the at-large pool for the league with Alabama and Ole Miss excusing themselves from the discussion. Texas A&M’s status didn’t actually change, as the Aggies almost certainly needed to go the automatic route to a berth, and that path is still available despite the loss at Auburn.
The beneficiary looks like Tennessee, back among of the queue among the league’s at-large hopefuls. The Volunteers were, counterintuitively, both helped and hurt by Alabama’s loss, now unable to reach the SEC title game under any tiebreaker scenario but seemingly well positioned to sit out that week and prepare for a round-of-12 contest. All that goes out the window, of course, should they lose to in-state rival Vanderbilt. As we’ve seen, conference optimization is off the table once competitors take the field.
So the question becomes, will the SEC’s net loss of an at-large team really benefit the ACC, as this week’s polls would suggest? The answer to that is a definite maybe, as the league’s trio of candidates still have work to do. SMU will be favored in its home finale against bowl-eligible California, and Miami will likewise be expected to handle its visit to Syracuse. Neither outcome is guaranteed, however, and should either come up short they’d find themselves in the crowded mix with other power conference runners-up.
Then there’s Clemson, whose Palmetto showdown with South Carolina won’t affect its ACC standing unless a loss by Hurricanes puts the Tigers in the championship game. But a win would provide a final statement to be an at-large possibility. Suffice it to say there will be a lot of interested parties watching those contests next week.
The state of Indiana is on the cusp of producing a pair of 11-1 finishers, both of which can only be in the at-large pool. In this corner, we have Notre Dame, with some nice wins including one at Texas A&M but one really bad loss at home against a mid-tier MAC team. And in this corner, we have Indiana, which can at least claim a couple of wins now against bowl teams but didn’t threaten Ohio State after intermission.
It isn’t out of the question that those two could find themselves pitted against each other in the round of 12 if things fall a certain way. Far be it from us here at Overreaction HQ to ask the committee to manipulate their data to make this happen. But we’d all watch, wouldn’t we?
The Big 12 is officially in what can best be described as an absolute mess. Though the league is unquestionably deeper than the top conferences of the so-called Group of Five, its eventual champion might nevertheless find itself lumped in with the winners of the American Athletic and Mountain West for that all-important bye into the quarterfinal round. There are way too many permutations to get into here, but there will be a lot of discussion of where all the candidates from those conferences land in the next couple sets of preliminary playoff rankings. Then again, perhaps expecting any kind of consistency from the committee is the biggest overreaction of them all.
