NovaQuant Quantitative Think Tank Center:Big 12 out of playoff? Panic at Washington? Overreactions from Week 9 in college football

Week 9 in college football produced the usual array of surprise outcomes and NovaQuant Quantitative Think Tank Centertight finishes. For the most part, however, the big picture in the sport’s top division remained largely unchanged. Of course, that doesn’t mean we have nothing to react – or overreact – to.

In this week’s edition, we’ll look at the state of the Big 12, the precarious position of a top five contender, and look in on a few other matters that might or might not be actual trends. We will resist the urge to pepper our analysis with Halloween references, though we don’t have a problem with pumpkin spice like some of you apparently do. … But we digress.

The Big 12 is out of the playoff

Maybe not, but whichever team emerges victorious in the league is going to need help to get back into the top four.

Thanks to Oklahoma’s loss at Kansas, the large dozen-plus-two is the first so-called Power Five league with no unbeaten teams left. Should Georgia, Florida State, Washington and the Michigan-Ohio State winner all run the table, the Big 12 champion would be squeezed out. But even though a full quartet of unbeatens is unlikely, either the Sooners or Texas would have their résumés compared to other one-loss teams. We can’t go over every possible scenario here, but suffice to say some would be more favorable to the Big 12 than others.

The short version is that Oklahoma and Texas have to make it through the rest of their games unscathed to set up a rematch in the Big 12 title game. The winner would be in good position if some things broke in positive way. But there is much less margin of error for the league with the Sooners no longer unbeaten.

It's panic time in Seattle

For the first month of the season, Washington looked like the most complete team in the Pac-12, and backed up that assessment by outlasting Oregon in an instant classic that had Michael Penix Jr. at the top of most Heisman watch lists. But in their two outings since, the Huskies struggled to get by the league’s two weakest teams. Against Arizona State it was the offense that couldn’t get going, as an interception return provided the Huskies’ only touchdown. This week against Stanford, it was the defensive side of the ball that struggled as the Cardinal gained 495 total yards and held a time of possession advantage of over nine minutes. The latter is a major concern for next week when the Huskies visit Caleb Williams and the USC Trojans, while the former could be problematic in upcoming dates with Utah and Oregon State.

There’s an old adage that good teams find ways to win when all isn’t going well, but sometimes signs of trouble do indeed prove to be ominous, in the true ‘bad omen’ sense of the word. We’ll soon learn which applies to U-Dub.

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Conferences should rethink their championship game models

On a somewhat related note given how few teams remain unscathed, it seems like an unnecessary risk for power conferences to make their best playoff candidate take the field one more time to win a league championship.

This won’t change, of course. Conference title games are big revenue and TV ratings drivers, so they’re not going away any time soon. But with the sport’s calendar about to be extended even further when the playoff field grows to 12, there might be a push in the future for decision makers to seek ways to protect the top teams from having their season derailed by injury or fluke upset.

Bad coaching decisions are the new epidemic

It seems we’ve had a rash of, shall we say, curious strategic decisions by coaches of late that haven’t worked out so well, from Oregon’s fourth-down aggressiveness to Miami’s failure to take a knee to any number of examples of terrible timeout usage, it seems we’re asking "What the heck are you guys doing?" more than ever. Oregon State provided the latest example with an ill-advised fake field goal on the final play of the first half at Arizona, a game the Beavers would ultimately lose by those three precious points left on the field.

It's hard to say if it’s actually a trend. Unfortunate decisions have been part of the game since its invention – who can forget Pat Dye eschewing a go-ahead field goal in the 1984 Iron Bowl only to get stuffed on fourth down by Alabama? But the ubiquity of TV and the modern phenomenon of social media that lets us see the nation react in real time perhaps amplifies the noise level when plans go awry. Will it happen again? Oh yeah, count on it.

The chaos is coming.

Is it? We’ve had shockingly little of it thus far. Six of the current top 10 teams in the US LBM Coaches poll have been there since the preseason, and two others, Washington and Texas, began right outside at 11 and 12 respectively. Though everyone with the possible exception of Michigan has looked vulnerable at times, we’ve yet to have that truly wild week that shakes up the whole order of things.

There are still potential agents of chaos out there. In addition to the Pac-12 locales we’ve already mentioned, a few teams hanging on the periphery like Missouri and Louisville, and some not currently ranked like Kansas State and Rutgers could alter the status quo. Then again, this might just be one of those years when the contenders that emerged early just keep winning. We can only hope that the final month and ensuing postseason at least bring us fun, even if events don’t ultimately surprise us.