Evaluating a college football season is a supremely delicate endeavor.
On one hand, the small sample size provided by only 12 games makes it important to withhold overly severe judgments of teams, coaches and players in the first month of a season… the month (September) which has just come to an end as far as game play is concerned.
Yet, on the other hand, when teams lose two games in September — Auburn, cough; Georgia Tech, wheeze; Oregon, hack; Tennessee, sputter — they suffer significant damage and irrevocably alter the complexion of the national championship race. Single losses in September aren’t necessarily death blows — see “Indiana d. Missouri, 2014,” as an example. Yet, instances of teams overcoming bad September defeats — while not rare in the way certain solar or lunar eclipses are — do not exactly outnumber the instances in which bad September defeats lead to unsatisfying seasons.
This business of evaluating a college football season from early September through the middle of December is part art, part science. The main thing to emphasize is how delicate a task it is. There’s a need for the snap judgment on some occasions; the “it could be an aberration or outlier” view on others; and — in a majority of cases — the “wait and see” approach.
Every season demands this balance of viewpoints and mindsets from analysts. The 2015 season has thrown some very specific challenges in the faces of pundits and bloggers.
*
College football seasons are all about what I call “moving parts.” September, October, and November/early December feel like three distinct seasons. The first month is the volatile process of discovering oneself as a team, attended by all the growing pains that process necessarily involves. The second month, October, either invites a team to settle into its best identity or find a way to grow out of a bad one. The third month, November, involves handling pressure and, perhaps, accumulated injuries without bye weeks late in the season. For some teams, this pressure is national championship pressure; for others, conference or division championship pressure; for others, “get to a bowl game pressure.”
Every college football season is a progression of stages, and the neat (but also complicated) aspect of this series of stages is that they often change the trajectories of the teams involved.
With that preamble over, the specific dramas of the 2015 season lie in this fundamental point: Some untraditional teams — meaning teams we’re not accustomed to seeing at the top of the heap — occupy the positions of power and leverage at the moment. Big-name teams inhabit the second, third or fourth tiers.
Utah and Ole Miss are calling the shots. Oregon and Auburn are reeling. TCU and Michigan State, though still unbeaten, have been pounded by injuries and simply aren’t whole. Other relevant examples exist, but those six teams — two of them residing in three different categories or conditions — neatly convey the challenges facing pundits (and the fans who hold pundits to account) in the weeks and months ahead.
You can see where this is going, right?
The reason “moving parts” are so important to digest as an analytical concept in the middle third of each college football season is that the name on the front of the jersey should not make us reflexively lock in our assessments of various teams. This can break in either direction, too — it’s not just negative bias which can flow from this tendency. Positive bias can also be the result of looking at the school instead of the actual scoreboard outcomes each Saturday.
For example: Utah did beat Oregon by 42 in Eugene. Right now, that’s properly viewed as a spectacular result. I don’t do polls or rankings before November; it’s been a longstanding principle of mine, dating back to my time at College Football News. However, if you asked me right now which teams would be in the College Football Playoff, the two non-negotiable, no-doubt selections would be Utah and Ole Miss. Those would be the top two seeds. To this point in the season, no one has done anything more impressive than what the Utes did in Autzen Stadium. Reasonable people should be able to agree on this.
However… this is precisely where an appreciation of moving parts must enable us to remain open-minded in our evaluation of the season and the teams involved.
If Oregon falls to 7-5 and becomes a very ordinary team over the rest of the season, the value of that 62-20 win would have to be downgraded. It wouldn’t be Utah’s fault, but other results in other corners of the country are never the fault of a team in the center of a playoff debate. That doesn’t change the reality (should it unfold…) of the win over Oregon becoming less impressive.
Naturally, if Oregon finishes 10-2, that win will retain its value, but the point being stressed is that we have to be willing, able and prepared to adjust our view of Utah’s resume if the situation demands it.
Next, let’s take Auburn. Ole Miss has to visit the Tigers later in the season. Whether Auburn finishes 7-5 or 9-3 (or perhaps 5-7 — who the heck knows with the Tigers?) will help determine how we should assess Ole Miss in the event that the Rebels and Utah are both 12-1 conference champions. Evaluating the Oregons and Auburns of the world — and how they do (or don’t) improve in the coming months — will have a lot to do with how we compare Utah and Ole Miss, a comparison a lot of people didn’t expect to have to make in the College Football Playoff chase this season.
Finally, consider Michigan State and TCU. These are both teams which, at full strength or with merely “average” injury/suspension luck, would rock and roll. Yet, after just one month in the season, they’ve both been decimated by injuries. Should either team lose now, in a depleted state, but then rebound in November, that should be taken into consideration in early December, provided that each school is in playoff contention. Similarly, teams that beat MSU or TCU right now would obviously deserve credit for such a victory, but if there’s a marked difference between the way the Spartans and Horned Frogs play in the present moment and the way they play (perhaps in a restored state) in the middle of November, that would need to be accounted for when it’s time to decide on college football’s final four.
*
Moving parts — they’re already in motion, but the more central insight to make is that more movements and plot twists await.
Be ready to adjust, and to not pre-judge teams or conferences by last year’s results or longstanding reputations which have attached themselves to programs over five- or 10-year periods of time. Open-mindedness is the central virtue for anyone who wants to accurately assess the twists and turns of a college football season.
