2021 College Football Discussion and Pick'em Thread

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My first reaction to this story was skepticism, but that changed when neither Texas nor Oklahoma denied anything. At this point it's very clear that the rest of the Big 12 sees this as a real threat. At this point, until there's information to the contrary, one has to assume that the plan is for this to happen.

Everyone seems to be assuming that if this goes through that the Big 12 will fall apart, but I'm not sure about that, just because the remaining eight schools don't have an obvious landing spot. Scouring some Texas Tech boards today, people there seemed convinced that (as GeorgeiaModerate suggests) they'd be included in an imminent Pac-16 expansion. It's possible that the conference does that just to be doing something since everyone else is (it wouldn't be the first time), but otherwise the proposed schools add absolutely nothing. The Pac-12 does not need to add schools, and it is unclear to me how it would benefit from adding a group of second- and third-tier schools in distant and lightly populated areas with no real history of football success and no serious revenue.

A&M would obviously be unhappy about this, but A&M has no moral grounds to make an argument and it can't stop this from happening. Oklahoma State's opposition might be more salient, but I doubt that Oklahoma State has the clout in the state legislature to stop Oklahoma from doing what it wants, particularly since T. Boone Pickens is dead and can no longer use his billions.

It is darkly amusing that Texas and Oklahoma are citing the Big 12's instability as their reason for leaving, given that that perceived instability has been caused exclusively by Texas and Oklahoma constantly talking about leaving. I think the most meaningful way to look at this is as a victory for ESPN, which is taking over the SEC contract from CBS, over Fox, which holds the rights to the Big 12. This will make college football worse, as have all the rounds of realignment and all the changes to the postseason in my lifetime, but everyone involved has concluded that what's good for ESPN is good for the country.

I would prefer the Big 12 just go away rather than backfill, but are any of them likely to get interest from a remaining P5 conference other than maybe Kansas/Big 10 and maaaaaaybe West Virginia/ACC?

And how can Oklahoma leave Oklahoma State behind? I've always heard state politics won't allow it. Maybe Missouri goes to the B1G with Kansas and Oklahoma State takes the spot into the SEC? I think Mizzou's faculty would like that, but I think the fans have moved on from the Big 10 fantasies.

Missouri is a basket case as an academic institution; the Big Ten absolutely does not want that, even though Missouri desperately wants to be a Big Ten institution.

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Missouri is a basket case as an academic institution; the Big Ten absolutely does not want that, even though Missouri desperately wants to be a Big Ten institution.

It's a horrifically-mismanaged institution, but it still meets the bare minimum qualifications for Big Ten membership for now, which is what keeps their faculty's hopes up. Big risks for the Big Ten that are not mitigated by a large media market or brand name football program, though.

But when thinking about a companion to add alongside Kansas, which is an obvious target, Mizzou has to be in the conversation unless the Big Ten can pull off a coup and steal Georgia Tech, Notre Dame, or maybe Boston College. Any other suitable institution is either off-limits (Pitt, Iowa State) or fantasy (Duke/UNC, Texas/Oklahoma).

I didn't contest this when replying to Harry, but Kansas is far from an obvious target to me. KU does not have the academic and institutional issues of MU (although that is liable to change whenever the radical wing of the Kansas Republican Party takes power again), but aside from that it has all the same issues.

From the standpoint of media market size, which of course was the driving factor in the last round of realignment, all Kansas has to offer is Kansas City and Wichita, neither of which are anything to write home about. Unfortunately, that's the best asset that Kansas has. I've seen it suggested (and it makes sense) that media markets are less important now than they were in the 2010s as a result of the widespread shift from cable to streaming. That will be an issue for Kansas, since the Jayhawks certainly won't draw streaming eyeballs. It bears remembering that Kansas has been for a full decade literally the worst major-conference football program in the country; when considering the ratio of financial investment to on-field success, it might be the worst football program anywhere. People were bemused by the Big Ten adding Rutgers, but there's no really comparison between the state of Rutgers football at the time of its invitation to the Big Ten and the state of Kansas football now.

Kansas does have a very famous and successful basketball program, but there has never been any indication at any stage of conference reorganization that basketball matters at all to major football conferences. If it did, the last decade would have gone very differently for Connecticut.

Of course, this is all premised on the Big Ten deciding to expand at the same time as the SEC. It's true that the Big Ten expanded to fourteen when the SEC did, but both of the schools the Big Ten added had something obvious going for them in terms of market size, which was clearly the most important thing at the time. There's no particular reason that the Big Ten has to follow the SEC now, and the quality of the available options provides a strong reason not to do that.

Something I've seen repeatedly since this report first broke (particularly from people not associated with the Pac-12 or Big Ten) is that the inherent P5-ness of the rump Big 12 schools will lead to most of them being picked up by existing major conferences. Left unexamined is why exactly the Pac-12 or Big Ten would need to add more teams to get to sixteen right this instant or why they would dip into the dregs of the Big 12 to do so.

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The Maryland board I pay money for is earnestly discussing the feasibility of getting Toronto into the Big Ten.

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I-L-L!

I-N-I!!!!!

Went down to the game with the family yesterday! Was able to stay in the shade to stay as cool as possible. Felt fantastic to be among the first to welcome back college football as we love it, and finally SHUTTING UP the HATERS who all pegged Illinois as a 3-9 bottom feeder felt AMAZING. Illinois should hopefully be a much more competent program now having a proven, competent college football coach.

The track record for coaches who did well at one job and then flamed out at their next job is not good for their next job after that. Bert is yesterday's man; I expect very little from him, and last weekend didn't do anything to change my thinking.

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Looks like Oklahoma will hold on.  Meanwhile, UConn football continues to circle the drain, losing to Holy Cross 38-28.

UConn has assembled a remarkably soft schedule, with games against three of the absolute worst teams in FBS (Vandy, Middle Tennessee, UMass), two FCS opponents (Holy Cross and Yale), and a handful of teams in the bottom half of FBS (Fresno, Purdue, Army, Wyoming). I'm not sure what Houston will be this season, but it's very possible they only play two teams above .500. Going winless against that slate would be a remarkable feat.

They also play Clemson.

At this point, as far as I can tell, the sole purpose of Connecticut football is to take buy games to pay off the debt the program has incurred. I don't know why any high school kid with a CAA scholarship offer would go to Connecticut.

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I was not impressed by Penn State. There was a huge athletic mismatch all day between Penn State's receivers and Wisconsin's secondary, but they didn't take advantage of that much at all. I don't know if that was because James Franklin is a lousy coach or because Sean Clifford can't make the throws, but I think it's some of both. I don't think they'll stand a chance against Ohio State. Honestly, that game made me feel good about Maryland's chances to beat Penn State again, even though the only reason Maryland is beating West Virginia now is that West Virginia absolutely does not want to win.

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North Carolina is obviously much better than Vanderbilt, but you can make a case for anyone else in the SEC beating them. The lower half teams in the SEC tend to recruit as well as UNC or better, and put a similar number of players in the NFL draft. And I didn't say UNC would be last in the SEC, just 11th or worse if they were the SEC's 15th team.

I'm going to go ahead and say that Carolina is better than Mississippi State. This is just really bleak.

I wonder where Louisiana Tech would finish in the SEC.

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PS: I've never heard "Carolina" refer to UNC before. I hear the team often referring to South Carolina in a college football context. I wonder if that's an SEC peculiarity.

I find this (almost literally) incredible! I do remember that I realized I had spent a lot of time in the South when I found myself using "USC" to refer to South Carolina.

LSU getting run out of the Rose Bowl — this is getting out of hand. Coach O might get fired this season.

One wonders if this is why Texas A&M gave Jimbo Fisher that monster extension; he had definitely been making eyes at Louisiana State back when he was at Florida State.

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PS: I've never heard "Carolina" refer to UNC before. I hear the team often referring to South Carolina in a college football context. I wonder if that's an SEC peculiarity.

I find this (almost literally) incredible! I do remember that I realized I had spent a lot of time in the South when I found myself using "USC" to refer to South Carolina.

That's really interesting. You live/lived in Georgia, right? Did you discuss football a lot with Georgia fans, especially in, say, 2019, when a 4-8 "Carolina" team came into Athens and beat them?

Or I wonder if "Carolina" is just an SEC West thing?

I mean, I've heard South Carolina referred to as Carolina, but I've heard North Carolina referred to as Carolina a lot more often. "Carolina" is like "USC" where South Carolina disputes the term with a different school, but the overwhelming majority of people unconnected to the University of South Carolina will associate the term with the other school when they hear that term with no context.

When South Carolina played at Georgia in 2019, I didn't see the game because I was at a corn maze in Dawsonville. When I emerged at its conclusion, I saw a kid who looked to be about four years old in a South Carolina jersey running around and pointing at all of the many, many people wearing Bulldogs clothing. That was how I found out that South Carolina had beaten Georgia. It's a pleasant memory.

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Realistic names here, besides Cristobal, are James Franklin, if they can pry him away from Penn State, and Luke Fickell. USC's new AD is the ex-AD at Cincinnati and hired Fickell, so the relationship is there already.

I don't think it'll be a matter of having to pry away Franklin; there's probably a reason his name has been associated with the USC job for half a decade, and my guess is that it's because his agent has been letting people know that he's interested. If USC is willing to fork over the cash I think they'll have him, but that'd be an uninspiring choice.

Now that Lynn Swann and Pat Haden are out of the athletic director's office, I think the chance that the next head coach comes from the Trojan family are lower than ever. Historically, USC has tended to make offbeat hiring decisions for head football coach. I think an interesting name might be Kalen DeBoer at Fresno State. He hasn't been coaching at this level for very long, and a lot is riding on the idea that the Oregon game a week and a half ago was real, but he would fit with some of the unexpected choices USC has made in the past and the logic of hiring a local guy would be obvious. Obviously Fickell is a real possibility based on his existing connections, particularly since it doesn't seem like Ohio State is opening up any time soon.

A fun name to think about is P. J. Fleck. He's recruited very well everywhere he's gone, and with Southern California's resources he could repeat his strategy at Western Michigan of winning by having more talent than everyone else. He doesn't have any ties to the West Coast, but I think there's less reason to think that he's regionally limited than there would be for someone like Fickell, and I have to believe he'd be interested in the Trojans. For USC, it seems to me that one of the biggest issues with the Helton era has been fan apathy, and Fleck has a big enough personality to get fans interested again and to draw attention to the program even in a crowded market.

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I'm at the Rose Bowl watching UCLA get dismantled by Fresno State. It's an exciting place to be!

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I'm admittedly biased, but it would be hard to convince me right now that Georgia isn't the best team in the country.

The same Georgia team that beat a mediocre Clemson team by all of seven points?

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I'm admittedly biased, but it would be hard to convince me right now that Georgia isn't the best team in the country.

The same Georgia team that beat a mediocre Clemson team by all of seven points?

In a game that really wasn't as close as the score might suggest?  A game that was a season opener on the road in one of the most hostile stadiums in the country?  And the team that today beat the #8 team 37-0?  Yes, that team.

I was unaware that the Carolina Panthers' home stadium in Charlotte is one of the most hostile stadiums in the country.

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Anyway, Arkansas is a nice story and all, but there's a reason that they were projected to finish second to last in the SEC West. Until I have reason to think otherwise, I'm going to say that the best team in the country is Alabama.

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It's time for Joe Brady to come home.

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Graham Harrell is conceptually interesting: he runs an offense that's been proven to work at Washington State and he's the guy I thought they would try to get when Leach left. The USC job being open might complicate things, but I'm not sure how serious a contender he is. Alex Grinch was at Wazzu recently, but he might be too big for that job now (although Rolovich's salary would double Grinch's current salary). My guess is that Dickert will be given a real opportunity to win the job, but given that the Cougars have ripped off three straight wins against teams that should be better than them, there's a good chance that regression means that it ends up looking like the team collapsed on his watch.

The news not discussed here is that the American Conference appears to have screwed itself even more than we already thought it to be while putting C-USA in a marginally better position with some addition by subtraction.

It's bizarre to see them chasing major markets as if it's 2011. Picking up these urban commuter schools instead of teams with actual fans is what made Conference USA the bottom-tier conference to begin with, and now the AAC thinks that those same schools are its ticket to...well, nobody knows.

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Graham Harrell is conceptually interesting: he runs an offense that's been proven to work at Washington State and he's the guy I thought they would try to get when Leach left. The USC job being open might complicate things, but I'm not sure how serious a contender he is. Alex Grinch was at Wazzu recently, but he might be too big for that job now (although Rolovich's salary would double Grinch's current salary). My guess is that Dickert will be given a real opportunity to win the job, but given that the Cougars have ripped off three straight wins against teams that should be better than them, there's a good chance that regression means that it ends up looking like the team collapsed on his watch.

No way Harrell is a serious candidate for USC. If there’s one thing you can count on it is that an AD will try to avoid the mistake of their predecessor. Clay Helton was an unknown; a coordinator who did well enough as interim to get the big job. With Helton failing USC will go out of their way to avoid hiring another in-program coordinator to avoid looking like they’re doing the same thing. I expect them to try for some big popular name. 

Sure, I remember when USC didn't promote its interim head coach who everyone loved and everyone thought this was a mistake and so then the next time they promoted the interim head coach whom nobody cared about. That's why this time the interim head coach is some guy who can't possibly be an option for the permanent job. Given that Harrell is not the interim and can't be promoted on that basis, I don't think that that rules out his getting a serious look for the permanent job on the basis of his work as offensive coordinator. It wouldn't necessarily be the same situation as with Orgeron or Helton.

Anyway, I am less than convinced that USC will try to go for a big name. Everyone speaking with confidence about how Urban Meyer will show up at a USC press conference any day now knows nothing about the university's administration. There's no chance they're going after a low-character guy like that given the issues the university has faced in recent years. More generally, USC has pretty much always gone for weird head coaching hires rather than just taking a big name.

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Yes.

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The first three names on that list are actually reasonable! I imagine SMU will not want to lose its coach to TCU, which means that Dykes will presumably get paid, especially if Dave Aranda goes to LSU and the Baylor job comes open at the same time as Texas Christian and Texas Tech.

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Man this sucks

Maybe your conference should stop blocking the 12-team playoff for no reason other than spite.

You could have a Pac-12 team playing for the title every year rather than 25% of the years.

Why would that be a good thing? Expanded playoffs suck, they'd be awful for everyone, four teams is already far too many.

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Man this sucks

Maybe your conference should stop blocking the 12-team playoff for no reason other than spite.

You could have a Pac-12 team playing for the title every year rather than 25% of the years.

Why would that be a good thing? Expanded playoffs suck, they'd be awful for everyone, four teams is already far too many.

I disagree completely. The bowls are just big time grifts for "executives" to make 6- and 7-figure salaries and bleed the universities (that is, the taxpayers if the university is public) out of their money. And the players often don't care (nowadays they're open about it and "opt out"), so a lot of the games aren't any good.

It won't happen because the corrupt bowl $ystem is entrenched, but the FBS would be much better off adding a 13th regular season game for all and having a ~16-team playoff as the only postseason, with the profits going to the schools and all players.

An argument based around money is more interesting than an argument about the urgent necessity to find the best team through a tournament, which is nice. The problem here is that an argument against bilking taxpayers, when taken to its logical conclusion, inevitably arrives at the idea that schools should be taken out of sports entirely. Some people feel this way and only watch pro football, but obviously I like college football a lot. The reason I care about college football more than pro football isn't because I think the quality of play is higher (although it certainly can be visually interesting in a way that pro football isn't); it's because I'm emotionally attached to its culture, which involves a lot of features that wouldn't exist if it were drawn up from scratch by Homo economicus. I'm unconvinced by an argument to rationality.

Beyond that, as I said, the games we've seen just haven't been good (year after year we get blowout semifinals, because there aren't four teams that deserve to be national champions) and adding more teams would certainly not help. I don't want a system where the only thing that matters is who gets hot for a few weeks; let basketball be basketball. Even a decade ago, the forthcoming SEC championship game would be a big deal, but now anything other than a convincing defeat for Alabama would mean that both teams get in, so people won't care in nearly the same way. Last year's ACC championship game was meaningless. I don't understand the impulse you see constantly in college football media today to make the actual results of games irrelevant.

No other division of college football, nor any state in high school, nor the NFL would ever abandon their current playoff system to go to a bowl or BCS or even a 4-team CFP/NY6 system,  because it's just a bad idea that is only in place because it developed organically over the decades.

I played high school football in California. We didn't and still don't have a playoff system to determine a state championship; instead, each sectional champion at each level plays an equivalent team from the other half of the state. It's not as universal as you allege, and there are reasons to prefer something else.

Why would that be a good thing? Expanded playoffs suck, they'd be awful for everyone, four teams is already far too many.

You are not just a clown, you are the whole circus.

Hey asshole, have you ever considered chilling out? It'd be one thing if politics were involved, but I don't appreciate being insulted because you don't agree with my opinions about sports. I don't understand why you want to be such a relentlessly unpleasant presence on every sports-related thread on this forum, but it'd help if you stopped doing that.

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Not Florida, I don't think, but you'll still see him often. There is another job opening in the state very soon a little more in line with his deal

I've never gotten the sense that the Miami administration was devoted enough to football to pay Lane Kiffin money. Of course its hard to tell since its a private university and we don't know what Diaz's contract says, but we'll see.

That's been the hit on them for a while, but they just fired their AD and the admin publicly committed this week to pumping an extra $20-30 mil into the football program. Doubt it's enough to pull away Cristobal — even with the extra money, Oregon's still a better job — but Kiffin definitely wants out of Oxford, and it's not a bad landing spot.

Cristobal's an alum who's spent most of his life in Florida, so there's an obvious reason for him to go to Miami even if Oregon is a better job. The Kiffin rumors sound like a great way for Jimmy Sexton to get his client a raise from Misssissippi. The boosters in Oxford have more money than sense and I don't think they'd like to see their coach get poached.

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That was a really fun game to be at! Ultimately Bryan Harsin just wanted to lose more than Alabama did. Gus would have won that one.

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That was a really fun game to be at! Ultimately Bryan Harsin just wanted to lose more than Alabama did. Gus would have won that one.

I felt like Auburn should have gone for two and the win in the first OT.  When you're the less talented team on your backup QB, it's better to put it all on one play than extend it.

Yeah, everyone knew it except him, apparently. Auburn could have won by scoring once from the three; even after they survived the next overtime, they needed not only to score from the three but also to stop Alabama from doing the same. They weren't able to do it, of course. Playing to extend the game might work if you're at Boise State playing UNLV, but it doesn't work against Alabama. Auburn has been Alabama time and time again by making the most of low-probability events, but he systematically excluded any possibility of that happening this time.

The fourth quarter and overtime makes the total yardage numbers and particularly Bryce Young's numbers look a lot better than they were, but there's a reason Alabama had three points 59 minutes into the game. Auburn's players showed up. It's too bad the coaches didn't.

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Riley not wanting to play Bama and Georgia every year looks smart right now.

I think this has a lot less to do with that (for one thing, SEC teams hardly play each other every year) and a lot more to do with Southern Cal doubling his salary.