Welcome to the Morning Five, a weekly list of five quick facts to supercharge your college football week.
There’s a strong temptation for us to focus singularly on Georgia Bulldog football, but there’s actually a whole lot of other stuff going on around college football these days. So this morning we’re bringing you five quick observations from around the sport that you may have missed.
#1 Illinois might be….good? Illini fans stormed the field on Saturday after a victory over #19 Kansas. It was the first home sellout for the Illini in almost a decade, and the gang from Urbana-Champagne is undefeated and garnering votes in the AP poll. Behold, the Brett Bielema dynasty.
#2 There’s no good time to learn you don’t have a quarterback. But week two is among the worst times to figure that out. Auburn dropped a home game to Cal and Kentucky got pasted on the road at South Carolina. Notre Dame couldn’t pull away from Northern Illinois, and Michigan was never really in it against Texas. The common denominator? Struggles at the quarterback position.
There was a time when fans would put up with a coach breaking in an underclassman quarterback because it guaranteed a veteran signal caller down the road. Remember Matt Stafford’s 2006? Aaron Murray’s 2010?
Now however, in the transfer portal era, fans expect their coach to go out and find the next Cam Ward or Quinn Ewers, a veteran leader who can step in and make the offense hum from day one. The corollary to that is that there are a lot fewer Carson Becks out there, veteran quarterbacks with years in the system and in the locker room who waited their turn without transferring.
If you have serious questions at the QB spot two weeks into the season, things are unlikely to get significantly better.
#3 Michigan won their title the old-fashioned way: they caught lightning in a bottle. Before Nick Saban came to Tuscaloosa winning a national championship was usually the result of building a roster over two or three seasons, until finally finding the right mix of personnel, having some scheduling luck, some fortune in the injury department, and a sprinkling of pixie dust. Saban was among the first coaches to really brute force attack the process, putting together title-contending teams year after year after year. It is an incredibly difficult thing to do.
Kirby Smart has been able to replicate the Process at Georgia. But Sherrone Moore and Michigan appear to have taken a real step back from their 2023 title. There really is a limit to how much talent you can lose in one NFL Draft and still remain elite. The Wolverines were pushed around on both lines by Texas in Ann Arbor on Saturday, and will likely get the same treatment in a few weeks from Ohio State. For all the jokes about Connor Stallions and sign stealing, the truth is that Michigan is just rebuilding.
#4 Superman probably wears Ashton Jeanty pajamas. The Boise State tailback rushed for six touchdowns in the opener against Georgia Southern, then followed that up with three touchdowns in a losing effort against Oregon. That’s nine rushing touchdowns through two games of a 12 game regular season. The NCAA record for rushing touchdowns in a season is held by the legendary Barry Sanders, who clocked 37 during his 1988 junior year. Assuming that the Boise State coaches don’t run Jeanty right into a full body cast by midseason, I have every expectation that he will not only break Sanders record, but put it out of reach until the eventual heat death of the universe.
#5 It’s good to be good. It’s better to be deep. There is a cadre of very good football teams already emerging at the top of the college football ranks. I am relatively confident that the eventual national champion will be one of Georgia, Texas, Ohio State, or Alabama. I don’t think we can know which is the favorite at this point. Because that will be decided based on which team is healthiest when we get to the college football semifinals. This season more than any other in recent college football memory is going to test teams depth and injury luck.
Could an Ole Miss, Tennessee, Miami or Utah make a deep playoff run? Sure. But those teams would need luck on par with Georgia’s 2017 team, which didn’t suffer a single season-ending injury in the two deep until Charlie Woerner broke his leg in the Rose Bowl semifinal. If I were a betting man (and I’ve watched too much college football to bet on it comfortably, so I’m not), I’d put my money down on one of the four super deep teams at the top to hoist the trophy at season’s end. Until later…
Go ‘Dawgs!!!