I don’t know if y’all saw it yesterday, but The Athletic’s national writers made their CFP picks ($$). Georgia made five of the seven lists (Andy Staples picked the Dawgs to win the natty, FWIW), but, for once, that wasn’t what I found most significant.
Of those seven, one, Bruce Feldman, made a comment about team depth, when he wrote about Clemson, “I think the gap between the Tigers and the rest of the ACC is large enough for them to overcome any unexpected strains on depth that could arise over the course of the season” and another, Max Olsen, talked about Alabama’s “program infrastructure”.
I don’t know if they’re assuming COVID is going to avoid the playoff contenders, or if all of them have sufficient depth to weather whatever storms may come their way (a strange assumption to make in the case of UCF, which one writer picked to make the playoff field), but it seems like a gap in analysis to ignore it, especially when I see that Feldman, in picking Florida to make the playoff field, bases his call in part on “(m)ost of the rest of the top teams in the SEC have had some level of turnover either at the coordinator level or in their quarterback room, which figures to be a much bigger concern than usual given how the pandemic affected the offseason.”
Maybe I’m missing something here, but it seems like roster management is going to be huge in 2020. (Which is why I tend to agree with Olsen that ‘Bama is the most likely team to win it all.)
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