Moving the Chains: Takeaways from College Football 2025 – Playing Favorites

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I’m on assignment right now so I won’t be able to cover the first round of the

 college football playoffs.  If they’re worth writing about, I’ll do it next week.  

But if they’re anything like last year’s first round games, don’t hold your breath.

My assignment?  Thanks for asking. 

 Writing a deep-dive into what is going on behind the scenes at World Cup soccer.   

I’m hoping to get FIFA’s Pulitzer Prize. 

Sort of like the FIFA Peace Prize they gave the president.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t watch a World Cup soccer match

 if they were playing it in my backyard.

***

As soon as I heard 9 of the 10 talking heads on ESPN and Fox predicting that #1 Ohio State would win the Big Ten championship game against #2 Indiana, I did what anyone with a lick of sense would do: I placed a rather large bet on the 4-point underdog Hoosiers. 

OK, that’s not exactly true: I don’t bet.  And do you know why I don’t bet?  It’s because betting is for suckers.  And if that last part offended anyone: no, I don’t have any money to loan you to pay off your gambling debts.  

I don’t know how making predictions about football games started being a ‘thing,’ but I sure know when I would like it to end.  Right now; the sooner the better.  

Just for fun – OK, actually it was to prove my point that making predictions is a waste of both your time and mine – I compared the ‘before and after’ of a couple notable ‘experts’ in the field: the Associated Press (AP) and Sports Illustrated (SI).   

Starting with the AP preseason poll, the good news first: the first 11 teams in the final rankings were listed amongst their Top 25, although not necessarily in the order predicted.  For example, Indiana was predicted to finish 20^th; they finished #1, which is where the AP predicted Ohio State to be.   

Now for the bad news: almost half of the AP preseason Top 25 (12 teams) failed to finish the season there.  Perhaps the worst prediction of all was Penn State, which was ranked at #3.  The Nittany Lions finished with a 6 – 6 record, and their head coach was fired.  

Other notable ‘misses’ were Clemson, LSU, Arizona State, Illinois, South Carolina, Florida, SMU, Kansas State, Iowa State, Tennessee, and Boise State, which were all in the AP’s preseason Top 25.  Instead they were replaced by BYU, Vanderbilt, Utah, USC, Arizona, Virginia, Tulane, Houston, Georgia Tech, Iowa, James Madison, and North Texas.   

Now for Sports Illustrated, a magazine that hasn’t been relevant since 2018 when it discontinued weekly publication and switched to bi-weekly (and 2 years after that went to monthly, which was even worse). 

SI predicted the 12-team playoff would look like this (from #1 to #12): Penn State (bwahahaha), Texas, Clemson (bwahaha), Ohio State, Notre Dame (bwaha), Georgia, Alabama, Arizona State, LSU, Indiana, Oregon, and Boise State.  

The good news is they got half of the teams right; the bad news is the other half were, of course, wrong.  First the ones that they got right: Texas, Ohio State, Georgia, Alabama, Indiana, and Oregon.  Now for the teams that took the places of the half-dozen they got wrong: Texas Tech, Ole Miss, Oklahoma, Miami, Tulane, and James Madison. 

Now for the bad news; the really bad news if you made holiday travel plans to see your favorite team in the postseason.  SI had the gall to predict all 35 non-playoff bowl games – as in ALL 70 TEAMS that would be playing – well before the first kickoff of the season. They only got 3 of the bowls right; that is, if just naming one of the participants correctly counts as right: Hawaii is in the Hawaii Bowl (big surprise), Minnesota is in the Rate Bowl, and BYU is in the Pop-Tarts Bowl. 

There is one thing SI is good at predicting: losers.  More specifically, coaches who would lose their jobs this season.  Of the dozen coaches they gave the kiss of death, they were right on half of them: Sam Pittman (Arkansas), Hugh Freeze (Auburn), Mike Gundy (Oklahoma State), Brian Kelly (LSU), Brent Pry (Virginia Tech), and Billy Napier (Florida).  

Incidentally, SI missed the boat on Penn State’s James Franklin.  Then again, they had the Nittany Lions at #1 in their preseason rankings.            

To be fair, I’ll end by circling back to a pair of preseason predictions that were made by both Mr. College Football, Tony Barnhart and yours truly.  We both thought Florida would have a great season if their quarterback remained healthy, which he did.  However, the Gators finished 4 – 8. A win over Texas is the only one worthy of mentioning.  On behalf of us both: we apologize.   

The other prediction we both agreed on was the breakdown of teams from each conference in the playoffs.  You can decide how we did: we had 4 teams from the SEC (there are 5), 3 from the Big Ten (3), 2 from the ACC (1), 1 from the Big-12 (1), 1 independent (0), and 1 from the Group of Five (2).  

For the final Top 25 ranking, and this was not Tony’s but mine and mine alone, I had 10 SEC teams (there are 8), 6 from the Big Ten (5), 4 from the Big-12 (4), 3 from the ACC (3), I from the Group of Five (4), and 1 independent (1).  My personal apologies to the Group of Five; you deserve more credit than I gave you.  But, to be honest, I still don’t think either Tulane nor James Madison are playoff caliber.

Finally, a prediction that I make before every season, and can now say has been correct for 37 years in a row: Notre Dame will not win the National Championship.

The same goes for next year.  And while I’m at it, the year after that.