Happy Friday, everyone. Athlon released their college football preview, and Alabama is projected fourth in the SEC.
The Athlon predictions placed Alabama against a familiar face in the first round of the CFP. The projection would have the Crimson Tide facing LSU, in Baton Rouge, for a first-round game.
That’s where the good news ended for the Crimson Tide, at least in one magazine’s projections. Athlon predicted that UA would lose to LSU in the playoff game, before the Tigers are eliminated by Texas in the quarterfinals, on the way to a Longhorn national championship.
Athlon expects big things from Alabama wide receiver Ryan Williams this coming season, naming him a second-tier contender for the Heisman Trophy. The rising sophomore also made the publication’s preseason all-America first-team, alongside UA offensive tackle Kadyn Proctor.
After last season, this is fair. But, based on the roster, Alabama should absolutely be challenging for the conference title this season.
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Blake Toppmeyer is out here writing about SEC propaganda.
The SEC’s most authoritative path to gobbling up at-large playoff spots would be to repeatedly beat Big Ten teams in non-conference clashes.
Consider the SEC’s basketball uprising. It dominated the non-conference schedule last season, including a 14-2 record in the ACC-SEC challenge.
Come Selection Sunday, an NCAA record 14 SEC teams qualified for March Madness. The SEC didn’t need to explain itself, because it owned the scoreboard.
Not too many years ago, that was true of SEC football, too.
This little Big Ten revolution spurred the SEC to double down on talking points. Anyone that spends that much time explaining must be losing a bit too much for comfort.
On cue, Ryan Day said this.
“We’re in the Big Ten, and we have 18 teams and some of the best programs in the country,” Day told ESPN. “I feel like we deserve at least four automatic qualifiers.”
Day noted how the most recent Big Ten expansion added the top teams from the original Pac-12, including the only two — Oregon and Washington — that made the four-team CFP and played for national titles. Washington reached the championship game after the 2023 season, falling to Michigan, and Oregon won the Big Ten last fall and earned the No. 1 overall seed in the CFP, losing to Ohio State in a quarterfinal matchup at the Rose Bowl.
“You would have had at least a team or two [in the CFP] from out there,” Day said, referring to the original Pac-12. “So it only makes sense when you have 18 teams, especially the quality of teams that you would have [in] that many teams representing the Big Ten.”
Sounds like propaganda.
SI has a history of all the realignment in college football since the 70s, if you are so inclined.
Since college football began, schools have been organizing themselves as independents, associations, and conferences. And with more than 150 years of wars, economic rises and falls, civil rights movements, politics, and media money, programs have positioned and repositioned themselves multiple times.
The NCAA began its current three-division structure in 1973. Five years later, the schools formerly in the “University Division” that were made into Division I, were further split into I-A and I-AA, eventually renamed for FBS and FCS. We look at that subdivision of larger schools.
Michigan has a hearing about the Connor Stalions saga today.
This is the penultimate act in the Connor Stalions affair, a bizarre impermissible scouting scandal that broke new ground in the well-plowed landscape of college football cheating. The final act will be the ruling that comes out of this hearing, probably toward the end of the summer (although, this being the NCAA, delays are always possible).
And then we’ll see if this case is the NCAA’s last stand as the sovereign judge and jury of college sports misbehavior. This Michigan vs. NCAA hearing feels like one of the final compelling showdowns in the form we’ve come to know. Massive changes are coming in every facet of the industry, including the eternally controversial rules that govern fair play and who enforces them.
Last, if you’d like to look ahead to bowl season, here you go.
Bowl season will unofficially begin with the Celebration Bowl on Dec. 13, and the first FBS bowl game of the season kicks off at 9 p.m. ET that night with the LA Bowl.
The biggest day of bowl season is Dec. 27. Seven games will be featured on that Saturday along with multiple Week 17 NFL games.
There is a game missing from this year’s bowl slate, however. ESPN announced that the Bahamas Bowl would not take place at the end of the season and that “league commitments will be fulfilled through other ESPN owned-and-operated games.” The network owns 17 bowl games, and the Bahamas Bowl has annually featured teams from Conference USA and the MAC.
That’s about it for today. Have a great weekend.
Roll Tide.
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