Bowl Predictions 2014: Projecting Playoff Spots After Week of Upsets
Let’s all just admit this now—we don’t really know anything about college football this season.
After all, if we did, then 11 of the teams that the voters declared as the 25 best in the nation would not have all lost in the same week. That’s right, the Nos. 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19 teams in the AP Poll all lost this past week, many of them in dramatic fashion (Here’s looking at you, Alabama and USC.).
SportsCenter and CNN’s Rachel Nichols put the carnage in visual display:
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Of course, a week like that can turn the playoff picture upside down. With that in mind, let’s take a look at an updated projection for the four College Football Playoff spots.
Playoff Projections
Sugar Bowl: Florida State vs. Oklahoma
Rose Bowl: Michigan State vs. Georgia
Championship Bowl (in Arlington, Texas): TBD (Semifinal winners)
Teams
Florida State
Criticize Florida State all you want for a close victory against Clemson or allowing 41 points to North Carolina State, but if all the upsets on Saturday told us anything, it was that style points are overrated.
All that really matters in college football is winning, and that is all the Seminoles have done the past two seasons.
Alex Scarborough of ESPN suggested the same thing:
If the defending champs win out, they are going to get a playoff spot, whether each game is a one-point victory or a 40-point victory. Florida State is going to win out because it is incredibly talented, has the defending Heisman Trophy winner directing the offense and has nobody remaining on the schedule with the talent on both sides of the ball to compete outside of Notre Dame.
The Seminoles will walk away from that game victorious under the lights in Tallahassee in front of a raucous crowd.
What’s more, Florida State’s nonconference win over Oklahoma State is looking better every week. At the end of the year, the Seminoles’ two victories over the Cowboys and Fighting Irish will represent one of the best nonconference schedules in the country and be more than enough to counteract any real or perceived weaknesses of the ACC.
Oklahoma
It may seem backwards to include Oklahoma in the College Football Playoff in the immediate aftermath of its loss to TCU, but this is all about the SEC and Pac-12 beating themselves up over the rest of the season.
Teams like Oregon, UCLA, Arizona State, Utah, Stanford and Arizona will gradually knock each other out of playoff consideration out west, and the loaded SEC West will do the same. In the meantime, Oklahoma gets possible challengers Kansas State, Baylor and Oklahoma State all at home and will take care of business in Norman.
Quarterback Trevor Knight understood the situation after his team lost to TCU, according to The Associated Press, via ESPN.com: "This isn't the defining moment of our season. There's a lot of football left. Who knows what's down the road. It's early in the season, a one-loss team can still make it."
The Sooners will certainly benefit from what happens in the SEC and Pac-12, but don’t sell their efforts short if they win out. Picking up victories over the Cowboys, undefeated Bears and Wildcats will be much easier said than done, meaning Oklahoma will be a deserving participant at year’s end.
Michigan State
You can basically take everything we just mentioned in the Oklahoma section and apply it to Michigan State’s situation.
The members of the Pac-12 and SEC West will continue to hand each other losses, and the Spartans will gradually sneak up the polls. Come the end of November, that early-season loss to Oregon will seem like a distant memory, and one that nobody should be ashamed of. Michigan State was breaking in a number of new defensive starters against what is typically a dominant Ducks offense.
Michigan State is not going to lose to Purdue, Indiana, Michigan, Maryland, Rutgers or Penn State. The talent gap is simply too large, and the Spartans will be motivated with a potential playoff spot on the line.
The season basically boils down to a prime-time showdown on Nov. 8 against Urban Meyer’s Buckeyes.
Don’t write off Ohio State, either, even though Braxton Miller is out for the year, and it lost early to Virginia Tech. This is a team that has plenty of freshmen and sophomores in critical roles (including J.T. Barrett at quarterback) and has clearly progressed every week. The Buckeyes will be a stiff test for the Spartans and will likely be ranked in the Top 10 by then (assuming no more losses).
The thought here is that Michigan State prevails under the lights at home in a thriller, much like it did in the Big Ten championship game last season.
That will give the Spartans an inside track to a playoff spot.
Georgia
Is Georgia the best team in the SEC?
Absolutely not.
However, sometimes it’s not just about being the best. The SEC West is going to cannibalize itself with Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Texas A&M, Auburn, Alabama and even LSU (although the Tigers appear to be far behind the other top teams in that division) battling with each other every single week.
The Bulldogs, on the other hand, only have to play Auburn from that entire list. What’s more, that game comes at home after Auburn plays a stretch of five consecutive games against LSU, at Mississippi State, against South Carolina, at Ole Miss and against Texas A&M.
If that seems unfair, it kind of is this season. The difference between the SEC West and SEC East is large enough to drive a truck through, and the Bulldogs will catch a worn-down Tigers team at just the right time.
We will also see the same type of situation in the SEC championship game, which just so happens to be in Georgia’s backyard in Atlanta. The Bulldogs will prevail over a physically worn-down SEC West opponent and punch their ticket as a surprise team in the College Football Playoff.
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