College football pick-six: James Franklin is not elite, ND may be elite and UK is...something?

A weekly journey through the vast landscape of college football, along with a few brief asides.

Cliched storyline of the week

Let’s just get this out of the way and then leave it behind, preferably until the end of time: I have been watching Penn State play football for an achingly long time, and what happened on the final snap of the game against Ohio State Saturday night will not cease to perplex me anytime soon. James Franklin made a baffling decision to take the ball out of the hands of his quarterback, Trace McSorley, and Franklin admitted afterward that he made the wrong call. And now the question is: Can Franklin recover from burning through two years of accumulated good will in the course of one play?

I do not know the answer, but I do know that we received an oft-infuriating answer to the question I had posed on Friday — Penn State has not caught up to Ohio State. After the game, Franklin reverted to his default position as a full-on, used-car salesman, launching an emotive stemwinder centered around the idea — no doubt targeted at the recruits watching him speak — that Penn State remains a step below an elite program like Ohio State and that he is going to turn into an absolute “psychopath” until that changes. 

But taking that final step will not be easy, in part because Penn State never really fit the template of an elite program, even when it was winning national championships under Joe Paterno in the 1980s. The Paterno model was to accumulate athletes who would develop under his coaching staff’s watch and, therefore, eventually be able to outplay more talented athletes at schools like Notre Dame and Miami. That worked in the olden days. It doesn’t work now, which is why the top four programs in the country this season — Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, Clemson (and perhaps Oklahoma) — are all ensconced in recruit-rich areas of the country and have established an assembly line of blue-chippers that allows them to both overcome injuries and overcome fourth-quarter deficits by wearing opponents into submission.

It’s clear that Penn State isn’t there yet. It’s clear that Urban Meyer, by dint of his national-championship winning past, has maintained an edge over Franklin, both in terms of his ability to navigate those crucial moments of a game and in terms of his ability to stockpile depth charts replete with absurdist levels of talent. The Nittany Lions are seeking a way in, and so is a Notre Dame team that appears to be the most talented Brian Kelly has ever had. But given the rock-solid firmament established by Meyer and others, I’m not sure how they — or anyone else — can do so until that firmament is fully shaken up.

Distant Playoff watch of the week

I am not right about much, so allow me one moment to gloat: I’ve seen this Notre Dame thing careening down Interstate 90 for quite some time now. The Irish have finally found a quarterback who resembles the slightly square-yet-meticulous Notre Dame quarterbacks of old; that the Irish manhandled a Stanford team that is accustomed to be the manhandlers rather than the manhandlees would appear to mean that they’ve turned the corner away from the fully collapsible fake-dead-girlfriend Notre Dame team we last saw when they emerged onto the national scene.

But we are also at that point in the season when otherwise highly respectable sports columnists declare that Notre Dame is now essentially a shoo-in for the Playoff — that winning out shouldn’t be an issue given the soft remainder of their schedule. This is the kind of presumption that Nick Saban would liken to rodenticide, and perhaps with good reason, because given the extended length of the college football season and given the nature of injuries — like the season-ending one to Notre Dame’s best lineman, Alex Bars — and the ripple effect of sudden quarterback transfers, nothing is a given. Do you know how many teams have gone undefeated since college football adopted the playoff system in 2014?

One. And that was Central Florida last season.

(Bonus list of possible playoff teams I'm not sure what to think about at this point: Michigan, LSU, Washington, Oregon, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Miami, Central Florida.)               

The “Don’t call me Francis” dudes of the week

Ten days ago, the football team at the United States Military Academy nearly upset the University of Oklahoma in a game that could be viewed only by those willing to spring for a pay-per-view broadcast. And then this past weekend, Army bounced back from that defeat by throttling a previously undefeated Buffalo team, 42-13.

And do you know how many passes Army threw in that game?

Five.

In other words, if this were a pay-per-view broadcast, it would have cost $11 per Army throw.

The week in weird

There was very little interesting about Georgia’s defeat of a floundering Tennessee team, with the exception of this extra point, which sort of reminded me of that time I opened the door to a silver Prius, thinking it was my Lyft Line, only to realize it was fully occupied by a troupe of Ringling Brothers clowns: