College football’s biggest event starts Saturday. These are the essentials, from the teams involved to how to watch to who’s probably going to win (Alabama, eventually).
2018’s College Football Playoff is underway. Are you just catching up on the season? That’s cool. Already pretty well caught up? That’s great too. Let’s run through the essentials of the season’s biggest games.
Who’s winning, and when is all this happening?
- Clemson 9, Notre Dame 3 in the second quarter.
- Alabama plays Oklahoma in the Orange at 8 p.m. ET.
Watch all of this on ESPN. Stream it via WatchESPN.
This is one of those big events that causes the network to roll out the MEGACAST, in which you can view each game from 326 different angles and have 72 different people commentating on it for you, depending on which ESPN channel you’re on. Detailed information is here.
What’d Vegas expect?
Alabama and Clemson entered as heavy favorites (by about two touchdowns apiece in Vegas) to win the semis. (Computer projection systems see a closer set of games, however.)
After that, Alabama’s the favorite to win the fourth Bama-Clemson Playoff meeting in four years.
How does the Playoff work, format-wise?
Four teams, single-elimination. The two semifinals are at regular bowl sites, which this year are the Cotton (Arlington, Texas) and Orange (Miami).
The title game is Jan. 7 at the 49ers’ big strip mall of a stadium in Santa Clara, California. The Playoff only plays games in NFL stadiums, save for the years the Rose Bowl hosts a semifinal.
Wow, just four teams. Still? When’s the Playoff getting bigger?
Unclear, but eventually. The FBS conferences and ESPN would have to make a deal to do that. Right now, they’re in the fifth year of a 12-year contract that has the field at four teams. Pretty much anything they could do will still make some people mad, but there’s too much money to be had for the field to not grow at some point or another.
What were the biggest things to know about each team?
- Alabama has the best offense it’s ever had under Nick Saban, in large part because he finally found an elite passing quarterback in Heisman finalist sophomore Tua Tagovailoa. The Tide also have an excellent defense as usual, led by tackle Quinnen Williams:
The Outland Trophy winner is what that award says he is: the best interior lineman in college football.
A dominant nose isn’t supposed to have huge numbers. He’s supposed to draw double teams, take up space, free his teammates, and divert the offense from where it wants to go. We’re supposed to say he’s the most important player no one’s talking about.
Usual rules don’t apply to Williams. He has 25 run stuffs, ninth-most in the country, fourth in the Power 5, and first among tackles. The 295-pounder has eight sacks; no one in or near the 300-pound club has more, and only Notre Dame’s Jerry Tillery has as many.
Williams has done all of this against SEC blue chippers. Most of the players competing with him statistically are in Group of 5 leagues.
- Oklahoma has a horrible defense, but it hasn’t mattered to date, because the Sooners have the best offense in the country. The star is Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray, a two-sport athlete who’s (probably) about to join the Oakland A’s as a center fielder. Murray beat out Tagovailoa in a riveting Heisman race and runs the most dazzling show in college football:
Some of Oklahoma’s dominance comes down to talent. Murray is an otherworldly athlete. The Sooners have four-star recruits all around him. But lots of teams with blue chip talent don’t have attacks nearly this good.
They play in the offense-oriented Big 12, but that doesn’t fully explain it, either. S&P+ is opponent- and pace-adjusted, and it consistently says the Sooners’ offense is better than anyone else’s. (And we saw last year’s team dominate the Big Ten champs and take the SEC champs to overtime, so OU’s proved it’s not just a conference thing.)
Oklahoma’s been smarter than most teams and created open space where other offenses might be challenged. That helped OU survive Baker Mayfield’s exit, a Week 2 injury to star back Rodney Anderson, and one of the worst defenses in the Power 5.
- Clemson has the No. 1 defense in the country, and that’s proved to be plenty for the Tigers. But the Tigers have added five-star freshman QB Trevor Lawrence to the fold, and now they have an elite offense to make them as scary as ever:
The Tigers built their offense around the ground game. That’s worked well with Travis Etienne, arguably the best back Dabo Swinney’s ever had.
For years, Clemson’s been a spread-to-run team. Its goal has been to stretch the field horizontally with athletic receivers and then mash ahead. The Tigers have been in that mold since even before Swinney got there, like when zone-read architect Rich Rodriguez was the coordinator. Swinney ramped it up with OC Chad Morris in the 2010s, before Morris took the smashmouth spread to SMU and Arkansas.
The Tigers have become way more comfortable chucking the ball around as they’ve recruited elite passing QBs in Deshaun Watson and now Trevor Lawrence. They were one of the most pass-happy teams in Watson’s 2016 and are on that end of the spectrum with the five-star freshman this year.
- Notre Dame is the least sexy of the four Playoff teams. The Irish aren’t amazing at any one thing, but their offense has thrived under QB Ian Book, and the defense is the epitome of a unit that bends but doesn’t break:
Every great defense has to play as a unit. But the Irish have made it an art form, succeeding while doing nothing exciting.
They don’t get many turnovers. They are 42nd in Havoc Rate, a stat that rolls in interceptions, forced fumbles, sacks, tackles for loss, and pass breakups. They don’t have a megastar.
But everyone’s good, and on the occasions this defense slips up, it almost always gets its act together in time.
And what were the biggest storylines that came up recently?
- Clemson defensive tackle Dexter Lawerence, a key member of that elite defense, is suspended along with two lesser-used teammates after testing positive for a performance-enhancing drug before the Cotton Bowl. The Tigers could appeal and get Lawerence back for a hypothetical title game, but his college career also might be over.
- Tagovailoa, Bama’s star QB, is hurt all the time, generally with leg injuries of some sort or another. He left the SEC Championship against Georgia but should be OK now.
- Alabama suspended three players for the Playoff, including starting left guard Deonte Brown. The Tide will just plug in another blue-chip veteran to replace him.
- Nobody knows for sure if Murray will honor the contract he signed with the A’s or change his mind and go into the NFL Draft. He and Oklahoma have given increasingly open-ended answers to questions about that recently, but baseball would be the status-quo decision.
- Notre Dame backup QB Brandon Wimbush and Alabama backup QB Jalen Hurts are both considered prime transfer candidates after the season, with reports already indicating Wimbush will leave. Expect to hear some chatter about both on the broadcasts.