The Week That Will Be: Welcome to Atlanta

The Horns seek their second straight conference title, and it is a growing nemesis standing in their way.

Last Week: 6-0 ATS 5-1 SU

For the Year: 44-39-1 (.524) ($50) ATS 64-20 (.762) SU

Chalk (Michigan +21 @ Ohio State)

Ryan Day versus Michigan: 1-4

Ryan Day against the rest of the Big 10: 44-1

The temperature is high in Columbus, and rightfully so, but think about this – if his kicker can make a field goal from 38 yards and 34 yards, we’re not having this conversation. Life can be brutal.

Bad Beat (insert shrug emoji here)

When you go 6-0 there are no bad beats...

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“Hats off to them because they physically annihilated us” -- Texas A&M coach Mike Elko

Mike Elko but not know what school is the flagship school in Texas, but he was right about that the other night.

In the weeks leading up to the game, I would ask friends and family how they felt about that matchup, and most had a lot of trepidation and shook their heads and just muttered something about things happening there, and the offense, etc.

My response was always the same -- “tell me how they score.”

And as it turns out, the Texas A&M offense did not score.

The Texas Longhorns under Steve Sarkisian have now won 11 road games in a row. And once again, it was because Texas was more physical than their opponent. I didn’t quite know what to expect when Sarkisian was hired from Alabama. But having the best defense in the country and “physically annihilating” an opponent in a quasi-SEC semi-final was not on the bingo card.

The explosive plays that had been lacking at times in recent weeks showed themselves in College Station – the Longhorns had five passing plays of 20 or more yards. The Aggies had one. The Longhorns had eight runs of 10 or more yards. The Aggies had one.

The Longhorns ran for 240 yards – the Aggies had 244 total yards.

This defense is elite. And it is going to win the Longhorns the SEC in their first year in the conference.

The training staff didn’t even have to launder Quinn Ewers’s uniform after the game.

This offensive line is going to win the Longhorns the SEC in their first year in the conference.

“A lot of our guys have been hearing since the day it got announced we were going to the SEC that we were going to struggle in the SEC, that it’d be hard, that we were going to come into this environment tonight and it was going to be the toughest environment in college football and we wouldn’t be ready for it,” head coach Steve Sarkisian said after the game.

“There were a lot of things we’ve been challenged with that have been brewing inside a lot of people in that locker room, coaches and players included. To do it in the fashion we did, that wasn’t a gimmick win.”

And there are bigger challenges ahead.

You can bet that this team has been challenged to respect their opponent, but know that they didn’t give it their best shot last time.

You can bet that this team will be challenged to represent their school and their brand in the post-season that is just weeks away, because last year was just not good enough.

Redemption, not revenge.

A redemption arc that might just carry them to a return trip to Atlanta next month.

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AAC Championship: Tulane –4.5 @ Army

Tulane was still in the playoff picture before falling 34-24 to Memphis at home last weekend – it also means that they have to travel to Army this week instead of having the game in New Orleans. The Green Wave have won 32 games since 2022 -- only Georgia, Oregon and Michigan have won more in that timespan.

Army went undefeated in the conference, only losing to Notre Dame last month. They haven’t lost at home since October of 2023, but they’ll have their hands full with a Tulane offense that ranks fifth in the country in scoring.

Tulane 34 Army 26

Mountain West Championship: Boise State –4 vs. UNLV

These two met October 25^th in Las Vegas, with Boise prevailing 29-24. Ashton Jeanty had a modest 128 yards on 33 carries in that one, his second lowest output of the year (by a yard on 21 more carries). They also met last year in the Mountain West title game and Boise State won 44-20, racking up 527 total yards. This also has the extra cherry on top of a spot in the inaugural College Football Playoff.

Jeanty had his fifth 200-yard game of the season last week against Oregon State, and has now rushed for 2,288 yards and scored 28 touchdowns – with two more touchdowns he’ll join Barry Sanders as the only members of the 2,000/30 club.

UNLV is the ugly stepchild of this matchup, but they only have two losses on the year – a three-point loss to Syracuse in overtime and that earlier game against Boise State. Quarterback Hajj-Malik Williams took over after Matthew Sluka quit the team in a NIL related tantrum, and it might have improved the offense, which is 11^th in the country in scoring. The Rebels can play some defense, too – they have 36 sacks on the year.

This has the potential to be a shoot-out, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the Rebels avenged their losses. But I have to roll with Boise in this one.

Boise 37 UNLV 31

Big 12 Championship: Iowa State vs. Arizona State –2.5

It’s probably not surprising that these two teams have never met before but this is college football in the year 2024. Iowa State won their 10^th game of the season last weekend, the first time they have achieved that in program history. This weekend they go for their first conference title in 112 years, back when they were members of the Missouri Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Association – quite a mouthful.

Arizona State was 3-9 in Kenny Dillingham’s first season and were projected to finish last in the 16-team conference this season by the media – until Cam Skattebo had other ideas. The senior running back rushed for 177 yards and three touchdowns in their 49-7 win over Arizona. He now has 1,398 yards and 17 touchdowns on the season, and also caught 35 passes.

The Sun Devils are without leading wide receiver Jordyn Tyson. That’s huge, he caught 75 balls for 1,101 yards and 10 touchdowns this year.

Iowa State 28 Arizona State 23

ACC Championship: SMU –2.5 vs. Clemson

Last weekend Clemson allowed LaNorris Sellers to rush for 171 yards and missed 18 tackles – this week the #17 in the CFP Tigers are playing for a Top-4 seed in the playoff.

Make it make sense. It wasn’t a conference game, of course, but it just shows the fallacy of the auto-bid for conference champions – eventually one will get in that doesn’t belong.

SMU is (perhaps) in the field win or lose as they look for their 10^th straight win. The Mustangs offense gets all the headlines but their defense has only given up 13 points in their last two games, and rank 12^th in defensive yards per play and 11^th in third down defense.

We shall see if the spotlight is too bright for SMU, but in a vacuum they should be able to handle a Clemson team that has feasted on a week schedule and done very poorly against teams with a pulse.

SMU 28 Clemson 24

Big Ten Championship: Oregon –3.5 vs. Penn State

Penn State wasn’t supposed to be here (insert meme of guy drinking a beer and pointing to himself with a “who me” look on this face here), but now they are, and it is either winning the Big 10 and getting a bye or losing and perhaps losing a first round home game that they were no doubt preparing for last week.

Oregon has had one one-score game since that defeat of Ohio State in Eugene back in October, leaning on Dillon Gabriel and their offensive line that struggled mightily the first couple weeks of the season but this week was named a nominee for the Joe Moore Award.

Penn State last won the Big 10 in 2016 – they will have to wait at least another year.

Oregon 28 Penn State 24

SEC Championship: Texas –3 vs. Georgia

And here we go again.

The Bulldogs had a rough Thanksgiving weekend, going to EIGHT overtimes and having to defend more than 100 snaps of the ball and 563 yards from the Georgia Tech offense, which is great news for Texas, before dispatching them and then acting like it was akin to surviving the Siege of Bastogne instead of a self-inflicted wound....yet again in 2024.

There was the 6-0 lead at halftime against a very average Clemson team. There was the 13-12 win over a Kentucky team that yelled mercy at Texas a couple of weeks ago. There was the 28-0 hole they fell into in Tuscaloosa before the last of the tailgate stragglers had even found their seats. There was the 300 passing yards allowed and 31 points to a Mississippi State team that finished 2-10. There was the Florida game where they were tied with a Gators team that Texas ran out of the building midway through the fourth quarter. There was scoring only 10 points and getting manhandled by an Ole Miss team that manhandled few other teams with a pulse. There was the 10-0 deficit they had at the hands of Tennessee in their own stadium. There was the 351 yards, 21 points and 226 rushing yards given up to 2-10 Massachusetts.

And then there was the Texas game.

Where afterwards, Kirby Smart, who has won two national championships this decade and whose team has won at least 13 games the last three years, acted like his team had just won a third and popped off to a television reporter afterwards.

That game was strangely personal for Georgia, even though the teams had met once this century in a game where of course the Bulldogs famously didn’t care about.

You almost wonder if they were so determined to beat Texas that they did something like stole Texas’s signals and then pretended theirs didn’t work when it was found out.

Surely not.

Carson Beck has been in a season-long funk, but he’s been more like himself since that loss to Ole Miss – he has 11 touchdowns and 0 interceptions in his last three games (granted one of those was against UMass). Trevor Ettiene hasn’t had a great year, either, but he was effective when he needed to be against Texas. He’ll most likely miss this one with an injury. In his absence, Georgia has decided to just not run the ball, Beck has 145 pass attempts in the last four games.

In theory, you should be able to pin your ears back and go after the quarterback, but after giving up five sacks against Ole Miss, they didn’t allow any against a formidable Tennessee front (by going quickly and not allowing the Volunteers to sub) and allowed just three against UMass and Georgia Tech.

Still, it’s something to watch, especially if Texas can get creative with their rush packages.

Defensively, Texas will have to find an answer that they didn’t have in October for Georgia linebacker Jalon Walker, who had 3 sacks against Texas but yet has 2.5 against the other 11 teams on their schedule. The Texas quarterbacks were not good in the first matchup, but the Texas offensive line HAS to win the line of scrimmage, much like they did against Texas A&M, for the quarterbacks to stand a chance.

9

9

5

7

5

11

5

7

Halftime

4

7

5

7

2

12

3

6

Those were the distances needed on third down for Texas in the October matchup. Two instances of 3^rd and less than 4, both when the game was 30-15 and all but decided. Unsurprisingly, Texas finished the game converting 2-of-15 third downs and just 1-of-5 fourth downs.

You cannot win football games doing that. It’s a miracle they scored 15, honestly.

It comes down to this – Georgia played just about as well as they can defensively against Texas. Can they do it again? Texas played about as poorly as they could on offense against Georgia. Yards were there. Will they do that again?

Of course that isn’t the only avenue to victory for Georgia, but this Texas team is second in the country in EPA margin, their defense ranks second in that metric and their offensive fifth. This team simply did not throw their best punch against the Bulldogs the first time, and I think they will be more than motivated for the rematch.

Steve Sarkisian, who is known for his obsession to the craft, likely did a LOT of self-scouting since then, knowing that at least one and maybe two matchups were Georgia were yet to come this year. A senior analyst was likely assigned nothing but Georgia prep the rest of season and likely at this point knows what kind of toilet paper Kirby Smart has in his house – probably single ply.

He made adjustments – but adjustments that didn’t need to be shown on tape against Vanderbilt with the game already in hand, didn’t need to be shown against an Arkansas team that couldn’t drive the field consistently, and didn’t need to be shown against a Texas A&M team that they could smell the defeat on them as soon as they ran out of the tunnel to Kanye West.

But he will need them this week, and I expect to see them.

Revenge isn’t the word of the week is – it is redemption.

Texas 30 Georgia 20

For entertainment purposes only. Save your money for New Orleans.

Author’s Note: There will be no column next week, but we’ll be back for the College Football Playoff — and who knows, maybe pick a bowl game or two.