Special teams are still a mess, both the defense and offense played well most of the time, but mistakes let BC get back to a single-score game in the 4th quarter and Nebraska missed some opportunities to put the game away. The Big Ten is full of teams ready to pounce on mistakes and failures to ice the victory, like USC did to Texas A&M last night.
Nebraska took some chances on offense, some worked, some didn’t, but I like seeing them not play ultra conservative football.
The margin of error is increasingly small in college football as parity increases too. I agree, Mike, they’ve got to clean up the mistakes to improve. The difference in a 7-6 team and a 10-3 team is very small and, most of the time is special teams, penalties and turnovers.
I would have said kick coverages were below average, but the NCAA statistics site seems to have gotten reset at the end of the regular season because teams only have one game (Army and Navy have 2 but Army-Navy was the week after the conference championships.)
Looking at the regular season for FBS, I’d divide teams into 4 categories:
4 victories or less: These are teams that are incomplete in some respect.
5-7 victories: These are teams that have most of the pieces in place, but the difference between 5 wins and 7 wins is often penalties, turnovers and special teams.
8-10 wins: These are teams that are well-stocked with talent
11-12 wins: These are the elite teams, well stocked and well coached.
I think coaching can move a team up or down one level. Building a complete team is the key in the Transfer Portal/NIL era. Some coaches can do it, but a lot of them are really struggling with that new skill set. ESPN had an article on the Miami BB coach who just retired, I think he didn’t feel he could handle the player roster issue and dealing with agents. There was apparently a transfer player Miami was after and they put together what they thought was a good NIL deal only to be told they weren’t even in the ballpark.
Bowl games and playoffs are another whole issue, Michigan has a lot of players who are sitting out their game against Alabama, who will have a fairly intact team. I expect Michigan to get blasted out.
With the upcoming revenue-sharing, is it possible the schools can (or will) have contracts with the players concerning opting out of bowl games? I don’t keep up with the business details of college sports like many do and an curious if the on-boarding deals with players might require them to play in post season games.
There may be separate bonuses for playing in each type of post-season games, including conference championships, bowl games that aren’t part of the playoffs and games that are part of the playoffs.
Minor bowl games are often money-losing for teams, this won’t help that.
Colorado apparently bought some mega-sized insurance contracts for players like Shadeur and Hunter, but they can’t/won’t say how big they were, claiming some kind of privacy issue.
Without an overall collective bargaining agreement, this is likely to be (somewhat) organized chaos, even more so than the current system.
I think contracts with players are inevitable, and probably sooner than later. The current NIL collective system looks a lot like a giant money laundering scheme, and I can’t believe the IRS or DOJ hasn’t started asking questions about it yet.
The only fair and legal solution is that college athletes become pro athletes with collective bargaining agreements setting the minimum expectations from schools.
The absence of strong management at the NCAA and a Congress that doesn’t do its job (eg, being lawmakers) most of the time means the NIL/Transfer Portal saga will continue to be a pachinko game of unexpected and nearly random changes in direction based on some judge’s rulings.