Week 5 overreactions: Georgia in playoff trouble? Milroe won Heisman?
We can’t help ourselves. We college football watchers, professionals and amateurs alike, always look for grand conclusions to draw from a single week of results. The just-concluded Week 5 slate provided us with plenty to analyze.
We’re back to look at the top five overreactions from the weekend, and it probably won’t come as a shock that three of them stem from one memorable contest. We’ll start with two that are in effect opposite sides of the same coin.
We’ll then take a look at one notable individual performance from that game, then we’ll take a quick snapshot of a couple other conferences whose geography has recently changed.
Georgia’s playoff chances are cooked
It certainly looked that way about a quarter-and-a-half into Saturday night’s contest in Tuscaloosa. As we said going in, a close loss at Alabama isn’t a complete deal breaker.
That said, however, the Bulldogs have an uphill climb as far as winning the SEC championship is concerned. With a ‘1’ already in the loss column, Georgia has road trips to Texas and Mississippi as well as a home date with Tennessee still on the docket. The Bulldogs will probably need to sweep those and avoid a letdown elsewhere to finish in the top two in the final standings.
There’s more than one way to the playoff now, however, in the year of expansion. If the Bulldogs can get through that gauntlet with just one more loss, a 10-2 record with the strength of its schedule – Uga has that win against Clemson in the bank remember – would almost certainly be deemed worthy of an at-large berth. The Bulldogs need to do some things better to make that happen, and having to play an extra round would obviously make the path to the title that much more difficult, but they can’t be counted out just yet.
Jalen Milroe just won the Heisman
Those numbers – 374 yards passing, 117 rushing, four total touchdowns – on that stage with those high stakes are impossible to ignore. If the season were over today, the hardware would almost certainly be his.
Even with over half the season yet to be played, Milroe will be playing from the lead in the race the rest of the way. But every week, there will be a performance worthy of consideration. There were several others this week. Colorado’s Travis Hunter delivered game-changing plays on both sides of the ball, Boise State running back Ashton Jeanty rushed for more than 250 yards for the second time this season and added four touchdowns to his ledger, and Ohio State’s sensational freshman receiver Jeremiah Smith might just be scratching the surface. Admittedly, the performance of the week in the game of the year to date will be hard to overcome, so it’s fair to say Milroe can expect to be making travel plans for New York in December.
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An Alabama-Georgia rematch is inevitable
As fun as that was, a lot has to happen for the Bulldogs and Crimson Tide to meet again, either for the SEC title or in the playoff.
We mapped out Georgia’s tough road to the SEC finale above. Alabama now has a significant leg up to get there but must also visit Tennessee. Texas is not on the Tide’s regular-season slate, but LSU, Oklahoma and Missouri are. All of those teams, and possibly Texas A&M as well, will be trying to crowd their way into a phonebooth with room for only two. (What do you mean “What’s a phonebooth?) Even more variables would have to line up just so in order for there to be a second meeting in the playoff.
Could it happen? Sure. Will it? We’re a long way from being able to say that.
SMU won the realignment lottery
Even the most optimistic SMU fans, including the ones who essentially helped the school buy its way into the ACC, couldn’t have expected such a resounding debut when they saw the schedule. The Mustangs would be hosting preseason No. 10 and defending conference champion Florida State for their first contest in their new league.
The Seminoles’ implosion began way back in Week 0, of course. But even then the Mustangs didn’t look ready for prime time in a power conference as they struggled to get by a Nevada program that had won just two games a year earlier, and a lackluster loss to Brigham Young did little to alter that perception. But a quarterback change revitalized the SMU offense while FSU’s struggles have continued, resulting in Saturday’s resounding 42-16 Mustangs’ victory.
Things figure to get a bit tougher for SMU in its first run through the ACC, starting next week at Louisville, but so far the move for the latest team to elevate to a so-called power conference is a success.
The Big 12 realignment winner will be …
It might still be Utah, especially when and if the Utes can get Cam Rising back healthy. But Arizona’s win in Salt Lake City in the late hours threw the league race wide open.
At the moment, just three teams are off to 2-0 starts in conference play. They are undoubtedly the three everyone expected – BYU, Colorado and Texas Tech. To date, the league’s best result out of conference arguably is Iowa State’s trophy victory against Iowa.
The vacuum created by the departures of Texas and Oklahoma can’t be denied. But fans around the far-flung league would do well to assume the glass-half-full perspective and view the situation as an opportunity to make headway where there are no runaway favorites.