Notre Dame led Arkansas 42-13 on the opening possession of the second half when it faced a fourth-and-10 and did something nobody saw coming. Arkansas certainly didn’t. The Irish ran a fake punt to pick up 40 yards.
Those watching at home or in the stadium (actually, there was nobody left in the stadium at that point) were no less caught off guard, and probably asked themselves what Arkansas or Sam Pittman had ever done to Marcus Freeman to cause him to run a fake punt while up 29 points in the fourth quarter.
The answer? Nothing. Marcus Freeman knew the score of the game at the time, but he also knew The Score for Notre Dame, and did what he will have to continue doing for the rest of the season.
Prepare yourselves for it, because it could become the most annoying conversation you hear for the next few months as we wind the season down. Can a 10-2 Notre Dame with no impressive resume wins earn an at-large College Football Playoff berth? Should it? The answer to the first question is pretty easy. Of course it can, it’s Notre Dame. As for whether or not a hypothetical 10-2 Irish team with losses to Miami and Texas A&M but no overly impressive wins would deserve a spot, I have no idea. There are too many other variables we don’t know.
Marcus Freeman and the Irish don’t know them, either. All they can control is what they can control, and what they can control right now is that if they have the chance to pile on against an opponent, they need to do so.
Style points matter, and there’s few things more stylish than putting up 50 burgers on everybody in your path, like the Irish have done to Purdue and Arkansas the last two weeks.
It’s not a position this program is unfamiliar with. Last year, the Irish lost to Northern Illinois in a shocking upset, and followed it up by putting up 66 against Purdue. Then they beat Miami OH comfortably and had a narrow victory against Louisville that felt like a decent resume win, because the Cardinals were ranked at the time.
Nobody else on the schedule was expected to be (though both Navy and Army would be when they played), so the Irish stuck their foot on the gas pedal and averaged 45.1 points per game over their final seven wins. It was more than enough to make people overlook the loss and put the Irish in the field, given what happened elsewhere throughout the country.
It was excellent foresight by Freeman to run it up as much as seemed decent against Arkansas, because the rest of the day was not kind at all to the Irish schedule. NC State lost at home to a Virginia Tech team that fired its coach two weeks ago. USC went on the road and did the thing it always does when it leaves the state of California: it lost. this time to an Illinois team that lost by 53 the week before. Boston College lost at home to Cal. The same Syracuse that beat Clemson followed it up with a 38-3 home loss to Duke.
Odds are extremely high that none of the teams remaining on Notre Dame’s schedule will be ranked when they play. The only impression Notre Dame can make for the rest of the season is on the scoreboard.
So if you are playing the Irish this year, and you’re down 30 or more, don’t think that means they won’t run a fake punt or go for it on fourth down. They will. They have to.
Oregon may have punched its ticket
College football is a crazy sport where just about anything is possible. That said, it kind of feels like Oregon clinched a playoff spot Saturday night, right? The Ducks didn’t have the most difficult schedule of your national title contenders coming into the season, and Saturday night’s game at Penn State in white out conditions was the toughest test this team was expected to face.
They passed — if only by the skin of their beak.
When Oregon went up 17-3 early in the fourth quarter, I thought the game was a wrap because the Penn State offense hadn’t done a damn thing all night. But credit to the Nittany Lions, they got their act together and stormed back into the game, forcing overtime with a touchdown in the final minute. But they fell short of winning when Dillon Thieneman picked off a Drew Allar pass in the second overtime to seal the win.
Now take a look at the rest of Oregon’s schedule. The Ducks will take next week off before returning home to face Indiana. If the Ducks pick up a win there, I can’t imagine a scenario in which they lose two of their final six games. Even if the Hoosiers pull off the upset — which is not totally outside the realm of possibility — I don’t know that the Ducks will lose two more games before the Big Ten Championship. If they get to Indianapolis at 11-1 and lose to Ohio State, there’s no way an 11-2 Oregon team with a win over Penn State but losses to Ohio State and Indiana gets left out.
Barring a disaster, it feels like Oregon fans can start saving up money for a playoff trip this December.
As for the team that lost
That felt like a true gut punch for Penn State. I honestly wonder if the comeback made things worse. At least if the offense never does anything and you lose by two scores, you can try to brush it off with a “what else is new?” Coming back, giving fans that sense of “oh my god, we’re finally going to do this,” only to pull the rug out from beneath them again…man.
If there’s any silver lining, it’s that the loss doesn’t eliminate the Lions from Big Ten or playoff consideration. It just makes the path a lot more narrow. Penn State still has to play at Ohio State and at home against Indiana in consecutive games to start November. If Penn State does the thing it always does and loses to Ohio State, that puts a lot of pressure on them to beat Indiana.
And they have to do all of this without slipping up anywhere else.
The self-destructive ACC
The good news for the ACC is its 5-12 record against other Power Four leagues in nonconference play didn’t get any worse this week, but that’s only because it didn’t play any. Because why lose to good teams from other conferences when you can lose to yourself?
Honestly, I don’t know that there’s a question that better reflects the current state of the ACC right now than, “so do you think Virginia can make a playoff run?” I know that sounds incredibly disrespectful to the Hoos, who are coming off an epic home win over Florida State on Friday night, but what’s great for Virginia isn’t necessarily great for the ACC.
Florida State threw away all the goodwill it earned for beating Alabama to open the season. Remember, the Noles are scheduled to host Miami next week. This was going to be a huge moment for the ACC on the national stage: the league’s two Panhandle Powers going at it in a game with conference and playoff implications. While those things might still hang in the balance, losing to Virginia still takes a lot of the steam out of the matchup!
A Miami win might cause everybody to write off Florida State’s credibility as a possible at-large. A Florida State win would cause everybody to wonder if Miami’s a fraud, too. It’s just bad all around!
As for whether or not Virginia can make a playoff run, it can! Not just because its 2-0 in the ACC — or that the Cavaliers are a playoff caliber team — but because of the remaining schedule. Have you seen it? It’s full of ACC teams! Anybody can beat them! In all seriousness, I do feel the need to point out that Virginia has played one road game this year, and it lost to NC State 35-31. It has four more road games remaining on the schedule. I’d wager it loses at least half of them.
That still leaves Georgia Tech, Louisville and Cal as possible Cinderella stories, but you have to squint your eyes really tight to see it.
I’ve no idea what to make of Ole Miss
There are three SEC teams with a record of 5-0, and they are not the usual suspects. It’s Ole Miss, Missouri and Vanderbilt. However, of those three, only one of them is off to a 3-0 start in conference play already, and that’s the Rebels.
They beat LSU 24-19 on Saturday in a game that shouldn’t have been that close. Ole Miss hurt itself with two turnovers and 14 penalties to keep the score tighter than it felt while watching. The problem I have with this team is that I know it’s good, but I’m not convinced it’s great. After all, LSU is its best win, and while the Tigers were ranked No. 4 coming into the week, nobody with any common sense believes they were the fourth-best team in the country. Their resume was propped up by wins over Clemson and Florida, who are a combined 2-6, and the LSU offense has looked horrible even in their wins.
It looked horrible in the loss to Ole Miss, too.
But we’re here to talk about Ole Miss. The team that has won three SEC games against Kentucky, Arkansas and LSU by 18 points combined. They’ll have to play consecutive road games against Georgia and Oklahoma, but we don’t know if Oklahoma will have John Mateer back by the time they play.
After those two, the Rebels finish with South Carolina, The Citadel, Florida and Mississippi State. There’s a scenario where this team finishes the regular season 10-2, and I still have no idea how good it is. Regardless, the playoff feels like a more distinct possibility after the LSU win.
Arizona State won the Big 12 last year, and it might do it again this year. I don’t see that happening, because I don’t know how realistic it is that the Sun Devils can continue winning these close games (they’re 8-3 in one-score games since the start of last season), but I’ve been wrong roughly a billion times before.
But the prevailing feeling I had watching the Sun Devils come back from a 17-0 deficit to beat TCU 27-24 Friday night is that, if dosed with truth serum, Brett Yormark and the Big 12 would tell you they’d have rather TCU won. It would’ve made the path for the league getting two teams into the field clearer. If the conference wants to get two teams into the field, it needs as many undefeated teams as it can get for as long as it can hold onto them. The Sun Devils took a big one off the chessboard Friday. Two of TCU’s wins were against ACC opponents, including an SMU team that made the playoffs last year.
Iowa State, BYU, Houston and Texas Tech remain as the league’s unbeatens. The most impressive nonconference win between them is Iowa State’s win over Iowa. The second-best is BYU’s win over Stanford.
Of those four, Tech’s the one I feel best about, though it was hard not to notice how easily Iowa State took out Arizona Saturday (another fallen unbeaten, though not one I think anybody considered a threat). As for BYU, it survived a close call on the road against Colorado, while Houston needed to come back from a 14-point fourth quarter deficit to keep from being the first team to lose to the now 0-5 Oregon State Beavers.
Week 6 vibe shifters
A look ahead to the five games on next week’s slate most likely to impact the playoff race
- Miami at Florida State
- Vanderbilt at Alabama
- Boise State at Notre Dame
- Iowa State at Cincinnati
- Virginia at Louisville
This week’s CFP Projection
1. Ohio State
2. Miami
3. Alabama
4. Oregon
5. Texas Tech
6. Georgia
7. Oklahoma
8. Penn State
9. Ole Miss
10. Indiana
11. Texas
12. Memphis
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