It was another fun weekend for Notre Dame to sit back and watch some carnage. Three teams fell from the ranks of the unbeaten re-shaping the 12-team playoff picture as the first rankings from the committee are set to come out this Tuesday evening.
Here’s the latest 18 Stripes Top 20 Poll:
18 Stripes Top 20 Poll
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| RANK | TEAM | RECORD | NEXT |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oregon | 9-0 | vs. Maryland |
| 2 | Miami (+1) | 9-0 | at Georgia Tech |
| 3 | Ohio State (+1) | 7-1 | vs. Purdue |
| 4 | Georgia (+1) | 7-1 | at Ole Miss |
| 5 | Texas (+1) | 7-1 | vs. Florida |
| 6 | Indiana (+1) | 9-0 | vs. Michigan |
| 7 | Tennessee (+1) | 7-1 | vs. Mississippi State |
| 8 | BYU (+1) | 8-0 | at Utah |
| 9 | SMU (+10) | 8-1 | BYE |
| 10 | Notre Dame (+1) | 7-1 | vs. Florida State |
| 11 | Penn State (-9) | 7-1 | vs. Washington |
| 12 | Boise State (+3) | 7-1 | vs. Nevada |
| 13 | Army (+4) | 8-0 | at North Texas |
| 14 | Alabama (+4) | 6-2 | at LSU |
| 15 | Iowa State (-5) | 7-1 | at Kansas |
| 16 | LSU (NR) | 6-2 | vs. Alabama |
| 17 | Washington State (+3) | 7-1 | vs. Utah State |
| 18 | Texas A&M (-6) | 7-2 | BYE |
| 19 | Ole Miss (NR) | 7-2 | vs. Texas |
| 20 | Clemson (-7) | 6-2 | at Virginia Tech |
OUT:
#14 Kansas State
#16 Pittsburgh
Kansas State fall out of our rankings and the Big 12 championship game for now as they drop a pretty bad game at Houston 24-19. After a poor start to the season, Houston is now 3-3 in league play.
Pittsburgh was blown out 48-25 visiting SMU to suffer their first loss of 2024. That drops Pitt out of the ACC title game chase and moves SMU up to a potential matchup with Miami.
First round bye watch (if they win their conferences):
#1 Oregon
#2 Miami
#4 Georgia
#8 BYU
It was a great bye week for BYU who watches Iowa State lose. The Cougars are now the lone remaining team without a loss in the Big XII and would face a potential league championship against…Iowa State at the moment.
National Storylines
Louisiana remains unbeaten in the Sun Belt after a Tuesday night 23-17 win at Texas State.
Liberty is definitely out of the playoff picture now. They lost 31-21 to visiting Jacksonville State.
Western Kentucky is 4-0 in Conference USA following a 31-14 win versus Kennesaw State.
More league unbeatens as Tulane moves to 5-0 in the AAC after smoking Charlotte 34-3.
No problems for Boise State on Friday night following a 56-24 win over San Diego State.
Oregon stays atop the polls running away from Michigan 38-17.
Michigan has lost 3 out of its last 4 games.Â
Tennessee trailed at halftime then came back to beat Kentucky 28-18.
Georgia overcame a bunch of struggles win their rivalry with Florida 34-20 in Jacksonville.
Texas Tech sprung an upset with a 23-22 win over Iowa State.
Penn State didn’t score an offensive touchdown as they lost 20-13 to visiting Ohio State.
The Cinderella run for Indiana continues following a 47-10 destruction of Michigan State.
Lane Kiffin’s offense was cooking as Ole Miss beat Arkansas 63-31.
Thirty-six points in the 2nd half let Miami remain undefeated and beat Duke 53-31.
Nebraska has lost 3 straight games following a 27-20 defeat in Lincoln to UCLA.
Two straight losses for Illinois who falls 25-17 at home to Minnesota.
Clark Lea and Vanderbilt move to 6-3 with a 17-7 win at Auburn.
Arizona State is quietly 6-2 after beating Oklahoma State 42-21.
What’s got into Iowa’s offense? The Hawkeyes beat Wisconsin 42-10.
Opponent Watch
Texas A&M (7-2): Vegas knew A&M was in for a dog fight this weekend and it was even worse than that as the Aggies lose soundly to South Carolina 44-20.
Northern Illinois (4-4): It was a bye week for the Huskies.
Purdue (1-7): After a 26-20 loss to Northwestern the Boilermakers are still winless against FBS opponents in 2024.
Miami [OH] (4-4): Another MAC opponent with a bye week.
Louisville (6-3): After some early struggles, Louisville took control and handed Clemson their first ACC loss by the score of 33-21.
Stanford (2-7): Now six straight losses for Stanford following a 59-28 loss at NC State.
Georgia Tech (5-4): The Yellow Jackets had the week off and host Miami this weekend.
Navy (6-2): Only 260 total yards for Navy as they fall 24-10 at mighty Rice.
Florida State (1-8): Five straight losses for Florida State after a 35-11 defeat to North Carolina.
Virginia (4-4): A bye week for the Cavaliers who face Pittsburgh this weekend.
Army (8-0): Even missing their starting quarterback, Army easily beat Air Force 20-3 to remain unbeaten.
USC (4-5): Here’s to clinching at least 5 losses in a season for the 4th time in the last 6 seasons! The Trojans lost to Washington 26-21 with a bye week now on tap.
Is it really a Cinderella run for Indiana when they’re pounding every team they play into the dirt?
I think so, when you’re one of the least winning power conference teams in history.
Damn, conference realignment never sleeps! (Typo, should say AAC)
That’s funny, I often think “don’t type ACC” for the AAC and it still happens.
For all the hooplah that’s gone into propping up some of these super conferences, it feels like many teams are snaking through on the general mediocrity of their schedules:
Miami’s schedule is middling at best
Indiana has not played anyone
Penn state – they are who we thought they were
Iowa state, fools gold
Clemson – 0-2 in their meaningful games.
I guess I’m living in a glass house throwing stones here: ND isn’t exactly hitting murderers row, and we lost to who lost we lost to. I suppose with conferences bigger than 12 teams, you’re going to have these star aligning scenarios where you get a decent squad plus the schedule shakes out in your favor. It’s just frustrating that justification is given to a teams ranking is: “they’re an 8-0 b10 team or a 7-1 sec team, so theyre ranked high… because its the b10/sec”. It’s a self serving argument; it’d be a bigger travesty if you couldn’t dominate the likes of Mississippi state or northwestern.
Anywho, I think mega conferences are silly, and more teams should be like ND and go full independent; make it like the 80s where Penn state, Miami, ND were playing whoever the hell they wanted.
This seems like a good place to point out that we were originally slated to play Miami this year; their request to move the game is what ultimately led to us adding Army. Imagine Miami coming to South Bend in November in a top 10 matchup.
To your larger point, I think we’re 3-5 years away at most from having a national “super conference” of 64-ish teams. Eight geographical divisions of eight teams, play everyone else in your division once, use the other five games to protect historical rivalries and/or schedule independently from the other seven divisions. In fact I think it would somewhat ironically mirror the good ol’ days – when the SWC, for example, included Texas, Texas A&M, Arkansas, and TCU, and the Big 8 included Oklahoma, Nebraska, Missouri, and Colorado.
The conferences are so big that you can’t play everyone and so some of the top teams don’t have to play each other. All the tiebreaker problems that could come out of it will have to be fixed someway when you have the top 3 or 4 teams tied but haven’t played each other. So much for settling it on the field!
Click “Read More” (below) to get paragraphs & formatting. (More) AP Poll thoughts The AP Poll becomes irrelevant tomorrow, but since I commented on it last week, I thought I’d add some thoughts this week. ND gained 66 points in the poll, (approximately a 1 slot increase on average by each voter) while dropping two spots in the overall (aggragate) rankings. It can seem particularly weird that BYU jumped ND with both being idle, but in fact the nature of an aggragate poll is that it can do weird things, that don’t actually reflect the average voter. Particularly when teams are grouped as closely together as 8-13 were last week. While I haven’t gone through the individual votes to see if it’s the case, it’s actually possible that BYU jumped ND, without a single voter changing the order of those two on their individual ballot. A simple 3 voter example: Last Week imagine 3 voters submitted these ballots: Voter A 8. BYU 9. Clemson 10. ND 11. A&M 12. Iowa St Voter B 8. ND 9. Iowa St. 10. A&M 11. Clemson 12. BYU Voter C 8. BYU 9. ND 10. A&M 11. Iowa St. 12. Clemson The aggragate for last week of the three voters would be: 8. ND 9. BYU 10. A&M 11. Clemson (tie) 11. Iowa St (tie) However, if all three voters this week simply drop out A&M, Clemson, and Iowa St., keeping the same order of BYU and ND as they had in last week’s ballot, BYU still jumps ND in the aggragate because it gained more spots due to the losses (shown below), making it seem like a move without logic, but in fact not necessitating that any AP voter actually did such a thing. Math can be weird. This weeks ballots would be: Voter A 8. BYU 9. ND Voter B 8. ND 9. BYU Voter C 8. BYU 9. ND New Aggragate 8. BYU 9. ND Don’t get me wrong, AP voters do stupid things (like forgetting to put ND on a ballot entirely), but the aggragate poll doesn’t necessarily give a good picture of whether that’s happened in a particular week. That ND was listed at the top of a super tight group last week, meant that 3 of the 6 teams falling out this week would in general not move ND up much (they were already ahead of those teams most commonly), but the teams listed towards the back of the pack would get a lot more movement from the teams dropping out and thus get a greater upward boost. In mathematical terms, ND had low variance and BYU had high variance, the removal of the 3 losers drammatically narrowed BYU’s variance, but not by narriowing it from both sides, but specifically by rasing its floor for voters who had them towards the back of the pack, thus BYU gained a much greater boost to its average ranking than ND did. The good news – again, to the extent that… Read more »
And there are several matchups in the next few weeks that should aid ND, given ND continues to win:
Tenn/UGA
OSU/IU
Texas/A&M (only helpful if A&M wins, obviously)
Stay the course, win the rest of the games and ND’s floor is #8 seed, hosting a game.
Well, maybe the AP isn’t completely irrelevant, given that the CFP poll was almost identical with 1-17.
From what I’ve seen of Oregon, they look to be the best in CFB.
Bur I’m curious how you think they stack up vs the best Chip Kelly teams. I think they might be better, but it could just be relatively: no Saban monster, no peak Dabo or Urban.
Seems like everyone is beatable this year