Bold and off the Wall College Football Predictions for the Month of November
Playoff scenarios, bowl eligibility, record books and coaching futures. What do they all have in common?
Each of them are at the mercy of what happens during November, the make-or-break month of the 2014 college football season.
Nine weeks are in the books, but so much can still happen before the season is done. The five weekends in November will have a major impact on how 2014 plays out, from establishing a pecking order for bowl games and the first-ever College Football Playoff, to determining the fate of many coaches and cementing the legacy (both good or bad) of individual players.
No one knows for sure what will happen in November, but we've got some guesses. They may seem wild but none are impossible.
Every SEC Team Will Have at Least Two Losses
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The SEC has firmly established itself as the toughest conference in the country, one so good that it currently occupies 75 percent of the projected semifinals spots in the first College Football Playoff rankings. But that's not likely to remain as such, since the top teams all still have to play at least one of the other contenders in November.
This means that if a team manages to come out of the upcoming gauntlet unscathed, a playoff spot is all but guaranteed. But it also means there's a very real chance that the SEC will cannibalize itself and result in a doomsday scenario for the conference in which everyone finishes the month with at least two losses.
"This is the time of year where the good teams really come up to the top because they've got to be consistently good," Auburn coach Gus Malzahn told ESPN.com's Edward Aschoff. "It's hard to get better this time of year. Most teams can't do it."
Unbeaten Mississippi State has to play at both Alabama and Ole Miss, while one-loss Auburn has the daunting trio of Ole Miss, Georgia and Alabama all on the road. Alabama's next game is at a hot LSU team (which just beat Ole Miss) before it hosts Mississippi State and Auburn.
Ole Miss and Georgia have the "easiest" remaining slates, facing only the top teams at home, but that doesn't guarantee wins.
When all is said and done, the chance of a slew of two-loss SEC teams is very possible.
Another Big-Name Player Will Get Suspended
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The 2014 season has been known as much for the players who have been kept off the field as for what they've done on it, with the high-profile suspensions of Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston and Georgia running back Todd Gurley making for major headlines.
Winston missed the Seminoles' overtime win over Clemson after being suspended for uttering an obscene phrase in public, while Gurley is halfway through a four-game NCAA suspension for accepting money in exchange for autographs.
Neither suspension cost his team a loss, though Georgia still has two games left without Gurley. The next team to have a well-known player get suspended might not be so lucky. With both previous situations involving the player getting turned in by an outside party, there's a great chance someone else is going to rat out a star for breaking a rule or doing something dumb.
A Bowl-Bound Team Will Lose Its Coach Before December
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In October I predicted that at least two coaches would quit, retire or get fired that month. Not long after, Troy's Larry Blakeney announced he'd retire at the end of the season, his 24th, and then on Oct. 13 Buffalo fired Jeff Quinn following a 3-4 start.
Many more coaches will either step down or get pink slips before the 2014 season is through, and at least one of them will become unemployed even though their current team is headed to a bowl game.
Not counting USC, which fired Lane Kiffin after five games last season before rallying to win 10 games, the last school to fire their coach despite being bowl-bound was Purdue in 2012. The Boilermakers let Danny Hope go after going 6-6 in his fourth season, less than a day after beating Indiana for their third straight win to become bowl-eligible, and interim coach Patrick Higgins coached them to a 58-14 loss to Oklahoma State in the Heart of Dallas Bowl.
Official bowl bids won't get settled until early December, after conference title games on Dec. 5-6 and the College Football Playoff selection committee chooses its teams for the six major bowls but look for an ambitious athletic director to pull the trigger later this month in hopes of getting a jump on snagging his coach of the future.
.jpg?w=256 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
Bowl Organizers Will Be Sweating the Final Week of the Month
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The four-team playoff and a few new bowl games have made it so that 76 FBS teams will get to go bowling this season. That's assuming there will be that many teams eligible to play in a bowl game.
Last year there were 82 bowl-eligible teams for 70 spots, but even with the addition of two more schools to the FBS ranks and Penn State's postseason ban lifted by the NCAA, it's going to be touch-and-go heading into the final weeks of the season.
Heading into this weekend, 32 schools have already reached bowl eligibility, with as many as 20 more potentially getting there by late Saturday. There are 22 schools within one win of the required six victories needed (seven if they play 13 games, such as for teams who will compete in conference championship games or who elect to add a home game in exchange for playing at Hawaii) to earn a bowl bid, and another 28 are two wins shy of that benchmark.
Only seven of the 128 FBS schools are mathematically eliminated from bowl contention, and another nine could get knocked out this weekend.
Odds are that enough schools will be eligible to fill all the slots. But organizers of some of the lower-end bowls, particularly those that are in line to get the eighth, ninth or 10th teams from a power conference, will be spending much of November working on contingency plans to find replacement teams.
Connor Halliday Will Set the 13-Game FBS Passing Record in 12 Games
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Washington State quarterback Connor Halliday is no stranger to the record books. In a 60-59 home loss to California on Oct. 4 the senior set the single-game mark for passing yards with 734, and last October Halliday attempted an FBS-record 89 passes in a 62-38 loss at Oregon.
With 3,833 yards through eight games, Halliday is averaging 479.1 yards per game and is on pace to throw for 5,749 yards during the regular season. That would obliterate the 12-game FBS passing record of 5,336 set by Texas Tech's B.J. Symons in 2003, when he also established the 13-game mark of 5,833 after throwing for 497 in the Red Raiders' 38-14 win over Navy in the Houston Bowl.
Since Washington State isn't likely to go bowling—the Cougars are 2-6 and all of their remaining opponents have winning records—Halliday would need to average 500.3 yards per game to best the 13-game mark in 12 games. That's entirely possible, since Halliday has topped 500 three times this season and five times for his career.
"From a statistical standpoint, Halliday's senior season is going better than he ever imagined—he leads the nation in passing by nearly 1,000 yards—but the season itself has been filled with disappointing endings," wrote Jacob Thorpe of the Spokane Spokesman-Review.
It's also worth noting that Halliday's coach, Mike Leach, was Symons' coach at Texas Tech when he established the record. And so far this year Leach hasn't shown much interest in getting Halliday's backup much work, even in blowouts, as freshman Luke Falk has attempted only two passes this season.
Follow Brian J. Pedersen on Twitter at @realBJP.
.jpg?w=480 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
