Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college football, where we have entered coordinator firing season. First Quarter: Twelve Angry Men. Second Quarter: New Coach Report Card. Third Quarter: September Awards.
Fourth Quarter: October Forecast
In pro golf tournaments, Saturday is moving day—the round in which contenders get in position for the final push on Sunday. In college football, October is moving month. Non-conference play is virtually over, and league races will heat up and narrow down. It’s time to start separating challengers from the field (although the good news is that there will be at least three times as many challengers still in the mix come November in a 12-team playoff season).
Here are five October story lines to monitor:
Do you believe in military miracles (33)?
Army and Navy are both 4–0, which last happened in 1945—a mere two months after World War II ended, when both academies were still flush with enrollees who weren’t going to other colleges. Rare as this is, both teams haven’t just won all their games—they’ve dominated. Army’s average margin of victory is 25.8; Navy’s is 22.5. The Black Knights are sixth nationally in scoring defense and the Midshipmen are ninth in scoring offense.
It’s a remarkable confluence of unexpected success, with Navy coming off four straight losing seasons and Army coming off a pair of .500 seasons. The fact that this joint rise involves two institutions not exactly positioned to thrive in the NIL/transfer portal era makes it all the more intriguing. Perhaps—perhaps!—false alarms have been sounded about those dynamics destroying the sport.
In fact, Army and Navy could destroy order when it comes to the College Football Playoff. It’s a long way off and a lot can happen during moving month and beyond, but what if the American Athletic Conference championship game pits Army against Navy on Dec. 7? And then what if they play again a week later in their regularly scheduled game—after the CFP bids have already gone out? And what if one of them then goes on to play a CFP game the week after the second Army-Navy game?
It’s wild. But it’s not out of the question.
Both teams are 3–0 in the AAC, while no one else is better than 1–0. At present, Army should be favored in all three of its October games: at Tulsa on Saturday, then home against UAB and East Carolina on Oct. 12 and 19. Navy should be favored in its next two: at Air Force on Saturday in a non-conference game, then home against Charlotte.
The Midshipmen’s final October game is against Notre Dame, which is where things really get interesting. Army also plays the Irish, on Nov. 23. They both might lose—but they also will get the chance for a quality win that none of the other Group of 5 playoff contenders are likely to match.
The ultimate scenario would be 11–0 Army vs. 11–0 Navy for the AAC championship, both having beaten Notre Dame. At that point, the proper thing to do would be to cancel that game and defer it to their traditional matchup the next week in Landover, Md., with the winner guaranteed a spot in the playoff. That won’t happen, because the AAC will not give up a prime TV slot Dec. 6 on ABC, plus all the associated ticket revenue.
The second-best scenario (also far more likely) is Army and Navy playing on consecutive Saturdays but not being undefeated. The third-best scenario is one of the two making the AAC title game and winning it.
The Mountain West could end up with a better champion. Maybe the Sun Belt, too. But woe unto a CFP selection committee that turns up its nose at putting an AAC champion service academy in the 12-team field.
Clemson’s comeback (34) has clear sailing to November.
Everyone piled on the Tigers after they were routed by Georgia in the season opener, 34–3. Dabo Swinney included.
“You get beat like this, it’s on the head coach,” Swinney said. “That’s on me. … When you lose like this, [the critics] have got every right to say what they want to say.”
Since then, Clemson has outscored its admittedly fairly modest competition by a combined 165–69. Of those three games, the Tigers led at halftime by a combined 118–27. The splash plays that didn’t exist in Week 1 have proliferated thereafter.
Now Clemson can lick its chops looking at an October lineup of Florida State (1–4), Wake Forest (1–3) and Virginia (a soft 3–1). November gets a little harder, but there is a great chance we see the Tigers back in Charlotte for the ACC title game come December.
The plucky spoiler Nebraska Cornhuskers (35) trying to take down the big, bad Rutgers Scarlet Knights and Indiana Hoosiers.
Actually, the Cornhuskers’ three October opponents are undefeated: Rutgers (Saturday) is 4–0, Indiana (Oct. 19) is 5–0 and Ohio State (Oct. 26) is 4–0. If Nebraska is capable of returning to relevance as a program, it has the opportunity before it.
The Huskers are 3–1 with a solid win over Colorado, a giveaway loss to Illinois and a fairly dreadful win over Purdue. They’ve shown flashes with freshman quarterback Dylan Raiola and the defense has had its disruptive moments (16 sacks). But the kicking game is brutal and overall execution is far from airtight. So, who knows?
If Nebraska can go 3–0 in October, big dreams will be back in Lincoln. If it goes 2–1 and undercuts some great starts elsewhere, that’s a good month. A 1–2 October dampens enthusiasm. An 0–3 October extinguishes it.
Monster weekends (36) in the Big Ten and SEC.
The two leagues with the most playoff contenders (and the most ruthless thirst for power) will do some major jockeying for position in the coming weeks. And each league has one particularly bonkers weekend upcoming.
On Oct. 12, the Big Ten has No. 3 Ohio State at No. 6 Oregon and No. 7 Penn State at No. 11 USC. Not only are those four of the five highest-ranked Big Ten teams at present, both games will pit Old Big Ten vs. New Big Ten on West Coast soil.
Then on Oct. 19, the SEC has its version of a four-team, two-game power struggle: No. 1 Alabama at No. 4 Tennessee, and No. 5 Georgia at No. 2 Texas. If those rankings hold, it will assuredly mark the first time one conference had four of the top five teams in the nation playing each other on the same day.
We will know a lot more about the playoff picture after those two Saturdays.
Cross-country travel watch (37).
The sport’s dubious experiment with coast-to-coast conferences was soft-launched in September. It will pick up significantly now in October. What will the effects be?
Currently, power-conference teams traveling two time zones to play other power-conference teams (Washington State and Oregon State) are 3–7 straight up and 3–7 against the spread. Power-conference teams traveling three time zones to play commensurate competition are 2–5 straight up, 2–5 against the spread.
In October, the Big Ten will play 10 games in which one team travels three time zones to play another and four in which one team travels two time zones. The ACC will play six games in which the visiting team travels three time zones and one in which it travels two time zones. And the Big 12 will have two teams travel three time zones for a league game and five travel two time zones.
We’ll see whether the cumulative effect becomes a factor with West Coast teams that are doing most of the long-distance traveling in the Big Ten and ACC. USC, for example, is in the middle of a three-long-trips-in-five-weeks sojourn: at Michigan on Sept. 19, at Minnesota on Saturday and at Maryland on Oct. 19.
Coach Who Earned His Comp Car This Week
Deion Sanders (38), Colorado. Their 48–21 road demolition of Central Florida was the finest performance yet of the Coach Prime era. A program with glaring weaknesses last season and at times this year on the lines produced a season-high 128 rushing yards on offense and a Sanders era-high five sacks on defense. This is the fastest the Buffs have reached four wins in a season since 2018. After an open date this week, Colorado will play an increasingly big game against Kansas State in Boulder on Oct. 12.
Coach Who Should Take the Bus to Work
Dave Aranda (39), Baylor. It’s getting late early for Aranda, whose Bears are now on an eight-game losing streak against power-conference competition. Baylor followed the heartbreaking loss at Colorado by falling behind BYU, 21–0, in less than 12 minutes Saturday. A second-half rally fell short. Even though the record of the teams that have beaten the Bears this season is 13–2, sooner or later Aranda will have to stack some wins to keep his job. Playing at undefeated Iowa State on Saturday is a tough place to turn it around.
Point After
When thirsty in the college football bedrock town of Birmingham, The Dash recommends a visit to the Black Market Bar (40) for games on TV and good offerings on tap. Try an A-OK IPA from Avondale Brewing Company and thank The Dash later.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Forde-Yard Dash: Undefeated Service Academies and October Story Lines to Watch.