Alabama head coach Nick Saban isn’t worried about Playoff rankings. He’s only worried about controlling what his team can control!
Nick Saban has built the Alabama football program by focusing on the things that you can control.
At this point in the season, the head coach isn’t worried about where his team stands in the College Football Playoff rankings, and he made that much clear during his weekly “Hey Coach” show on Thursday night.
“I don’t want our players to be talking about or hearing about like what everybody else is talking about — my daughter and everybody else — it’s all I hear about: are we going to get into the Playoff? Why did Georgia get ahead of us? I don’t really care about that, alright. Because the only thing we have to do is focus on what do we have to do to finish the season.”
The Alabama head coach then went on to talk about how special it is that every team since 2010 has suffered one or less losses during the regular season, which is a fantastic point.
Right now, the team needs to be worried about controlling the things that are in its control, one of which is beating Mississippi State in Starkville on Saturday morning.
NFL Freaks of the Week is a weekly poll on the Alabama football twitter account
The āNFL Freaks of the Weekā is a weekly poll on the Alabama football twitter account, that lets fans vote for an NFL offensive and defensive freak of the week from the previous weekās matchups.Ā
Last week, Josh Jacobs and Minkah Fitzpatrick were the Freaks of the week.
Letās see who the fans voted for this week!Ā
Offensively, these were the four candidates twitter got to vote on:
Junior golfers signed their National Letters of Intent earlier this week and there were some clear winners across the country.
The pens have been put to paper and college golf’s Class of 2020 is officially starting to take shape.
Junior golfers around the country were finally able to sign and send their National Letters of Intent to the school of their choice on Wednesday, taking the next step in their careers as student-athletes.
After taking some time to break down and analyze both the menās and womenās signings, there was a clear winner to the day and plenty of other storylines to follow before the players get to campus next fall.
Youāll be hard-pressed to find a better class in 2020 than the group Cardinal coach Conrad Ray recruited to The Farm. Stanford signed three of the top 10 players in theĀ Golfweek/Sagarin rankings for 2020: No. 2 Karl Vilips, No. 6 Jake Beber-Frankel and No. 9 Michael Thorbjornsen.
āDepth is the name of the game,ā Ray said of his team. āThe lineup is wide open with those three guys, I think all three can come in and play right away based off what theyāve done, but you never know until they get on campus.ā
Jake Beber-Frankel shakes hands with a spectator after the second round of the 2019 Boys Junior PGA Championship. (Photo: Hailey Garrett/PGA of America)
Ray called Vilips an “alpha dog” and said Thorbjornsen has “those days where youāre just like āholy mackerel this guyās a freak.ā” Beber-Frankel is “every bit as talented” as the others, but plays with panache and flair that pairs well with his impressive hair.
Ray didnāt want to make comparisons to other 2020 recruiting classes, but he did say 2020 is the best class the Cardinal have had in quite some time.
Florida men get better with youth
Head coach JC Deacon has something special cooking down in Gainesville. While starting an underclassmen-heavy lineup, his young Gators have instantly made an impact as the freshman trio of Ricky Castillo, Quentin Debove and John DuBois currently rank Nos. 2-4 on the team in scoring average.
Deacon tapped into the Florida’s rich junior golf market (and England’s), signing Ryan Hart, Jonah Leach, Tyler Wilkes and Joe Pagdin to further bolster his already-young and impressive squad. Expect the Gators to be national title contenders in the coming years.
The creation of this 2020 recruiting class started almost 5 years ago. To see it come together with these 4 absolute studs is a dream come true. @GatorsGolf is in the most capable hands. Lets get to work boys!! šš https://t.co/wDacOD2QAD
It’s no surprise that the Stanford women also had a strong signing day, inking commitments from two players in Golfweek’s top 10 among the class of 2020: No. 6 Rachel Heck and No. 8 Sadie Englemann.
If only they could play this spring.
Senior Albane Valenzuela, ranked No. 2 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, opted to leave the program last week in order to live out her LPGA and Olympic dreams after earning status for the 2020 season at the recent Q-Series. Valenzuela tied for sixth, while teammate Andrea Lee, No. 3 in the WAGR, also earned status by finishing T-30. Lee has yet to announce her decision.
Ohio State men lock down a local
Thereās something to be said for keeping your best in-state talent in state. A cold climate doesnāt make that an easy sell for Ohio State head coach Jay Moseley, and who could blame a kid for wanting to head south?
But Moseley, in his fourth season leading the Buckeye men, has not only been able to keep Ohioās best talent, but cultivate it. That continues with recent signee Maxwell Moldovan.
When he arrives next year, Moldovan, of Uniontown, Ohio, will help fill a void left by recent graduates ā and Ohio natives ā Will Grimmer, a two-time U.S. Open qualifier, and Daniel Wetterich, runner-up at the Western Amateur and now a Korn Ferry Tour card holder. Grimmer arrived in Columbus the same year as Moseley and Wetterich transferred in from Xavier a year later. (This seasonās roster, by the way, includes freshman Jackson Chandler, who shared the 2018 Ohio State High School title with Moldovan.)
Not since 1993 has Ohio State signed one of those, but itās not the kind of talent you can let slip away.
Alabama gets a double reload
No program experienced a professional exodus quite like Alabama did at the end of last fall. The women lost Kristen Gillman and Lauren Stephenson after the LPGA Q-Series in October and Davis Riley decided to turn professional after Thanksgiving.
Neither Alabama team advanced to the NCAA Championship in May, and the men failed to crack the top 50 in the rankings this fall. An infusion is coming with the class of 2020, though.
If it seems like Canon Claycomb was everywhere on Wednesday, itās probably because he was. Claycomb, who checked in not just at the top of his class but at the top of Golfweekās Junior Rankings, garnered nearly 700 Twitter ālikesā for signing his NLI and later made a cameo on Golf Channel.
Signing day is upon us and Iām so blessed to finally be able to say Iām signed to go to The University of Alabama. Thank you to everyone who has helped me get to this point and thanks to those who have cheered me on. ROLL TIDE. šÆ #270 pic.twitter.com/VWgfw8ty7n
Claycomb, who lives in Orlando, Florida, brings every experience from practicing with PGA Tour players on the Lake Nona range to playing the Junior Ryder Cup to sharing an instructor with Justin Thomas (and sometimes texting JT with questions).
For the women, head coach Mic Potter kept things familiar, securing signatures from four-time Alabama Girlsā Junior winner Michaela Morard as well as Italian Benedetta Moresco, whose older sister Angelica is currently a junior for the Tide.
Both women were chosen to represent their respective sides in the Junior Solheim Cup, and interestingly, walked into the opening ceremonies side-by-side.
Let’s start to look at the resumes of the 15 teams still alive in the Playoff discussion. Who deserves to be ranked higher or lower?
Welcome to the Bubble Watch. If you’ve been reading through my Eliminator articles, you’d know that I still count 15 teams with a shot at reaching the College Football Playoff. (And if you haven’t been reading them, please feel free to go back to them.)
Now that teams have played enough games, we can get a real look at every team’s resume. So, for the 15 teams still alive, I am going to present all of the resumes to you. We’re going to look at every resume so that we can compare what positives and negatives each team has. It’s the easiest and best way to understand what each team is bringing to the table in the College Football Playoff discussion.
How this works
Letās go over what I’m looking at and why.
Quality of wins
For the purposes of determining quality wins, things like Top 10 and Top 25 are arbitrary numbers that do more harm than good. There is no reason the gap between No. 25 and No. 26 is considered significantly larger than the gap between No. 24 and No. 25. Therefore, to counteract this, I am being very lenient as to who is considered Top 10 or Top 25. Any team in the Top 25 of one of the major polls (CFP, AP, or Amway Coaches), or in a significant number of the accepted computer rankings, will be considered in the Top 25 for resume purposes. This leads to the awkwardness of having more than 25 āTop 25ā³ teams, but it presents a more accurate picture of the overall resume. Moreover, it just makes sense. The committee is aware of who is a good team and what counts as a win of decent quality, even if that team didn’t quite make it into the rankings.
I also split up every game each team has played into different groups. The groupings are important. First of all, I focus on Top 10 and Top 25 wins. These are, obviously, the quality wins. Next, I’m looking for teams in the Top 40. These are solid wins and deserve respect. The next group is teams somewhere between 41st and 80th in FBS. These are mediocre teams–they are games that any Playoff contender should win, but could in theory lose on an off day. Everyone outside the Top 80 is a complete cupcake game, and should be valued as a negative. To determine where each team is and who is outside the Top 80, I use a collection of computer rankings that focus on different things (e.g. Sagarin and Anderson) to get broad perspectives on who is a cupcake and who isn’t.
The selection committee has consistently mentioned āwins over teams with winning recordsā as an important metric over the past few years, so Iām going to show that to you. It is a less detailed way to view a win than looking at where each win is ranked, but the committee seems to care about it so we have to. I will not count a win over an FCS team as a +.500 win, regardless of record. Again, even though the metric is a stupid one–there are cupcakes with +.500 records (for example, Buffalo or Western Kentucky)–the committee cares about it, so we have to as well.
Offensive and defensive performance
I include the rankings in yards per play of each team. On one hand, the resume focuses on which teams you have beaten, so I stick to only identifying the quality of wins and losses and show you each contenderās remaining games. On the other hand, the committee āwatches teams play,ā which is really not a quantifiable statistic, but something that we can at least try to get a bearing on. Still, itās hard to find an offensive or defensive metric that accurately represents all teams and styles of play.
Some metrics will over-value āair raidā type offenses while some will prefer more consistent, but less explosive, gameplans. The rank in offensive and defensive yards per play gives a basic metric of how efficient and/or consistent a team is on both sides of the ball.
SOS range
The SOS range is taken from numerous computer rankings. Ranges can be quite large, especially as different rankings favor different things. They do, however, give a decent picture of the possibilities of how strong the schedule actually is. Keep in mind, it’s still a little early in the season, so the different SOS methodologies could bring up radically different results. Ranges could still be wide in some cases, but in general they should narrow over the next few weeks.
In this episode, Lamb sits down with Brett Hudson break down Alabama’s first loss of the 2019 season to LSU.
Cecil Hurt and Clint Lamb, through TideSports.com and The Tuscaloosa News, produce a podcast called āThe āBama Beatā, which features all the latest news and analysis surrounding the Alabama Crimson Tide.
In this episode, Lamb sits down with TideSports.com beat writer Brett Hudson break down Alabama’s first loss of the 2019 season, which came against conference rival LSU.
Prior to getting into that, the two break down where things stand with the College Football Playoff rankings and where they believe the Crimson Tide currently sits.
Less than two weeks after being traded from Miami to Arizona, Kenyan Drake is already making waves. Trade: Arizona has reached agreement in principle to trade a conditional 2020 draft pick to Miami for RB Kenyan Drake, league sources tell ESPN. – …
Less than two weeks after being traded from Miami to Arizona, Kenyan Drake is already making waves.
Trade: Arizona has reached agreement in principle to trade a conditional 2020 draft pick to Miami for RB Kenyan Drake, league sources tell ESPN.
In his first week with the Cardinals, Drake took 15 carries for 110 yards and a lone touchdown. An impressive first outing with his new team.
His Arizona debut came at the right time for him, as David Johnson, their solid back for the last few seasons was inactive.
Johnson has been battling injuries, he spent all of 2018 on the sidelines after sustaining a knee injury.
Drake’s second week with the team was a true test, Johnson was back on the field, so it was a true test to see where he would fit into the mix with the incumbent starter.
In the Cardinals’ contest against the Buccaneers, Drake took over as the lead back.
The Alabama product had 10 carries to Johnson five, along with 35 yards to Johnson’s two.
Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury weighed in on Drake’s success with the team.
“We just felt like with Drake, needed to get something going and kept him rolling,” Kingsbury said. “The last couple weeks, practice, games [he] has brought a little pop to the run game, the pass game, and we felt like he was the guy to try and close the game out with.”
There’s still a relatively small sample size when it comes to what he’s capable of with Arizona, but with plenty of time left in the regular season, he will have the ability to show the Dolphins front office what they are missing out on.
Week 10 of the NFL regular season not only shook football fans, but the ‘Tank for Tua’ rankings as well. The Dolphins are on a win streak, the Bengals are still winless, the Patriots haven’t won a game in November and the 49ers lost their first game …
Week 10 of the NFL regular season not only shook football fans, but the ‘Tank for Tua’ rankings as well.
The Dolphins are on a win streak, the Bengals are still winless, the Patriots haven’t won a game in November and the 49ers lost their first game of the season.
All of the aforementioned events have changed the overall landscape of the NFL, let’s dive in and see how this crazy week affected the worst of the worst and if their chances of landing Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa have been hindered.
3. New York Jets
Mandatory Credit: Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports
The New York Jets in Week 10 were able to capture yet another win, this time over their in-state rival, the New York Football Giants.
They are tied for last place in the AFC East, tied with the Miami Dolphins at 2-7, and it seems as if the win column may stay stuck at two for the remainder of the regular season.
The NFL Power Rankings currently has them listed at No. 29, one of the worst teams in the league.
With an inconsistent quarterback, such as Sam Darnold, that ranking may fluctuate higher or lower.
In the Jets’ win over the Giants, Darnold had an impressive outing. He amassed 230 yards, one passing touchdown and a lone rushing touchdown.
While a win must feel nice for the team, it’s still clear a winning culture has not been spread throughout the locker room.
With a team full of talent, there’s only one position on the field to turn to and potentially point the finger. The quarterback.
Whether Darnold is the future of the franchise is still to be determined, but with a lot of elite collegiate talent at the quarterback position in this draft class, it would be hard to believe that the Jets’ front office hasn’t thought about the possibility of bringing in a fresh, and even younger, face, such as Tagovailoa.
What did we learn from the CFP selection committee’s second rankings? Let’s break down what it all means.
In what is a bit of a first from the CFP selection committee, it actually has a very predictable consistent methodology so far this year. However, it’s not a good methodology, and it’s a trend that’s not a good one. The committee isn’t particularly looking at resumes or strength of schedules. It’s not talking about quality wins or schedule strength. No, this year, the committee only seems to care about how much a team wins by.
Maybe this is a bit of an overreaction based on a small sample size. After all, it’s only the second ranking, and there are potentially somewhat reasonable explanations for all of the rankings. (Well, assuming that “Alabama always gets benefit of the doubt” constitutes a somewhat reasonable explanation.)
Let’s look at it, from bottom to top. SMU–the only team to win but drop out of the rankings–very clearly fell out due to a close win over a bad team. The Mustangs still have a considerably stronger schedule and resume than Appalachian State does. That didn’t seem to matter.
Hereās the full #CFBPlayoff Top 25 rankings for games played through November 9.
This is the only explanation for both Baylor and Oklahoma being so low. Baylor is one of five undefeated Power 5 teams, and is ranked all the way down at No. 13. Not only is Baylor ranked behind one-loss teams, it’s ranked behind two-loss teams. And, contrary to claims of Baylor having a bad resume (and I’m perfectly fine with the committee punishing Baylor for an atrocious nonconference schedule), the Bears have two ranked wins–more than some of the teams in front of them. Oklahoma also has two ranked wins (and a loss to a ranked team), yet is ranked behind both Utah and Oregon–who combine for zero ranked wins. Rob Mullens did again hint that Baylor was punished for its nonconference schedule, but this message appears clearer.
The committee doesn’t tell us much often. But, for now, at least, the committee seems to have determined that the eye test is king.
Making sense of Alabama, Minnesota, and Penn State
Last week, the committee somewhat contradicted itself with how it ranked Alabama, Penn State, and Clemson. Penn State’s “superior resume” supposedly put the Nittany Lions in front of Clemson, though now it seems far more likely that Clemson was just being punished for a close win over North Carolina. Penn State also has several close wins, but those were all against teams worse than North Carolina.
Alabama, meanwhile, seems to be skating through on the fact that it has blown everyone out. Of course, none of the teams Alabama blew out were particularly good. Alabama has no ranked wins–in fact, this is the first time that a one-loss team has been ranked as high as No. 5 this early in the season without a win over a committee-ranked team.
Minnesota is down at No. 8. The Golden Gophers have–other than LSU’s win over Alabama–the best win of any ranked team. The Golden Gophers are also undefeated, and yet behind four teams with a loss. I honestly have no idea how to explain the fact that Minnesota is behind Utah. Maybe this is just a bit of an oversight by the committee?
Other notes
I said yesterday to keep an eye on if the committee shifts things around, or if teams stay static from week to week. That will tell us if the voters are really re-evaluating from scratch each week, or just moving teams up or down based on who loses.
Well, this week, not a single team is in the same position it was in last week. You would think that’s an indicator that the committee is re-evaluating. Unfortunately, it’s not. 14 of the 25 teams that moved moved only one spot, and all of that was due to teams around them jumping or falling. Minnesota jumped eight spots for beating Penn State, so everyone above Minnesota fell a spot. Penn State dropped, so everyone behind Penn State rose. Wake Forest and Kansas State dropped with losses, so the teams behind them moved up.
No one stayed in the same place, but every team that didn’t lose or pick up a major win stayed in the same relative position. The committee didn’t do any re-evaluating this week. It just took what it had last week, other than teams that deserved major shifts.
Lastly, I should note that the committee is continuing a trend it has shown consistently since 2014. A team doesn’t drop for a close loss to a better team. The example this week is Iowa, which only slid three spots for its very close loss against Wisconsin. One of those spots was Texas, which jumped all the way into the rankings at No. 19 for its upset of Kansas State.
Maybe next week the committee will do more re-evaluating from scratch, and it’s really only the top four that matter anyway. Still, the little we have seen and heard from the selection committee so far this season is not encouraging, to say the least.
The Alabama Crimson Tide fell to No. 5 after losing to now, No. 1 LSU, 46-41 at home on Saturday.Ā
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On Tuesday night, week two of the College Football Playoff Rankings were announced, and the Alabama Crimson Tide fell to No. 5 after losing to now, No. 1 LSU, 46-41 at home on Saturday.
Hereās the full #CFBPlayoff Top 25 rankings for games played through November 9.
There is still hope for Alabama to make it back into the top 4, especially since No. 12 Auburn hosts No. 4 Georgia on Saturday. If the Tigers beat Georgia, and Alabama has a big road win over Mississippi State on Saturday, the Tide could be back in playoff contention.
Here are the Week 2 Top 25 College Football Playoff Rankings:
The Georgia Bulldogs have been ranked third in this week’s version of SEC power rankings. Not surprisingly, LSU checks in at number one. Alabama is ranked ahead of UGA as well: Week 12 SEC Power Rankings: pic.twitter.com/anlXNhsCcf – SEC Network …
The Georgia Bulldogs have been ranked third in this week’s version of SEC power rankings. Not surprisingly, LSU checks in at number one. Alabama is ranked ahead of UGA as well:
It remains to be seen where the Bulldogs will be ranked in this week’s version of the CFP Rankings. The rankings release tonight at nine. Georgia versus Alabama will certainly be a topic for debate tonight, but if the Dawgs go on to win the SEC, then they’re a lock for the playoff. If Georgia wins the SEC Championship, and the LSU Tigers’ only loss is to UGA, then both LSU and Georgia get in over the Crimson Tide.
Georgia travels to Jordan-Hare Stadium to face the fifth-ranked team in these power rankings: the Auburn Tigers. This will be a grind-it-out defensive battle that’s expected to be low scoring. It should be the Dawgs’ largest remaining test of the regular season, but Georgia’s College Football Playoff lives are on the line every week.
