Your (ND) game day post, Thursday edition

No offense, Week 0, but it sure feels good to have college football back.  Here’s today’s schedule:

Sure, I may dabble a little with some other games, but I think we all know the star attractions are the two games at 8PM.

Florida – Utah is probably going to be closer than I like, because of the Rising injury, but the Utes are tough at home and I expect they’ll send Napier’s team home 0-1.  The Gators are a 6.5-point dog in our pick ’em (the line has dropped to 4.5, by the way) and I expect them to cover.

Nebraska – Minnesota?  Well, the Huskers are a rebuild this season and are a 7.5-point road dog.  I like Minnesota to cover, but I’ll be watching Nebraska to see how much playing time the two former Dawgs now there get.

And you?

One more Fabris Pool reminder

Don’t forget — the first two picks in this week’s FP are for games tonight.  Make sure you get your choices on the board in to be counted.

And there’s still time to sign up!  Just click here and follow through.

Steele’s Week 1 Vegas Power Ratings

The only power poll that really matters is the one with guys putting their money on it.

When I worked for ESPN full time, I put out a weekly article entitled the Vegas Power Ratings. I still have all the sources that I used to produce that article as it featured my plus/minus ratings which closely resemble Vegas’s numbers as well as three different casinos including the fine folks over at the Westgate Las Vegas Sportsbook @SuperBookSports.

This is not the AP poll but gives you an idea of how much teams would be favored over another team if they met on a neutral field. I use these to get an idea of lines on upcoming games. Keep in mind just because a team beat someone last week does not mean they would be favored over them in the Vegas ratings. I will update these each week during the year as always.

In case you’re wondering… Dawgs on top.

And by a decent margin, to boot.

Dead man walking

I bet George Kliavkoff had a swell time at yesterday’s CFP meeting.

It was the first time Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff was in the same room with his peers since Oregon and Washington decided to join USC and UCLA in the Big Ten, and Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado chose to join the Big 12. Kliavkoff has not spoken publicly since and declined to comment about realignment as he hurried past reporters in a meeting room lobby at the DFW Grand Hyatt.

As he walked briskly away, Kliavkoff smiled and said “it was good” to be in the room again with everybody and “nice to focus on everything in the future.”

When asked what his future is, Kliavkoff said, “I’m focused on this year. I’m just focused on us winning a national championship.”

It’s nice to have a goal in the dark times.

When Nick Saban’s happy…

Oh, for the love of Gawd.

Yes, Nick Saban has been smiling more during this year’s Alabama football preseason camp. Significantly more actually.

The Crimson Tide’s head coach has spent 3.42% of his total preseason press conference time smiling in 2023. That’s more than double the percentage of any year from 2017 onward.

The author actually took the time and effort to break down the percentages!  I shit you not.  And here’s the earth shattering conclusion:

Based on the data set, there’s little discernible correlation between Saban’s preseason camp smiles and the eventual success of his Alabama teams. While his least smiley season (2020) resulted in an undefeated national championship run, the Crimson Tide also won the title during the year (2017) when he smiled the second most, both by sheer number and percentage of total press conference time.

Alabama’s legendary head coach may well be smiling more this fall. It doesn’t guarantee success – or failure.

You don’t say.

If somebody asks you if we’re doomed as a species, point to this article.

Hope, cfb fans, is the best of things.

From The Athletic ($$):

That brings us to this year’s results from our Hope-O-Meter survey, in which fans from 58 of the 69 Power 5 schools had more than 50 percent of respondents claim to be “optimistic and hopeful” about the 2022 season. A year ago, four fan bases — Cincinnati, Miami, Ohio State and USC — expressed zero pessimism. This year, there are nine Power 5 teams fan bases completely full of hope…

Josh Heupel is entering his third season at Tennessee, and it’s clear he’s changed the narrative. When he arrived in 2021, Volunteers fans’ confidence and optimism sat at 46 percent. Their Hope-O-Meter is at 100 percent now, even with Hendon Hooker and Jalin Hyatt gone and two-time defending national champion Georgia still in the division.

“This is the first time in almost 20 years I have felt confident going into a season,” Vols fan Nick wrote. “Josh Heupel has been nothing short of a miracle worker.”

At least it is until your team doesn’t live up to the expectations.

Todd speaks about life after Todd

Last year’s offensive coordinator is pretty bullish about this year’s edition of the Dawgs.

“They’re going to be tremendous,” Monken told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They’ve got really good players. Carson has waited his turn, so it’s not as if this is a new quarterback or a freshman. You’ve got experience in the O-line, which matters most. You have an elite tight end (Brock Bowers). You’ve got some really good wideouts. You should be great on defense again – you’re always going to be great on defense because of the coach (Kirby Smart) and staff. So they’re going to be fun to watch.”

“The tough part now is just worry about the next game,” Monken said. “Because we went through where we won one after we hadn’t in 40 years. Then they said, ‘Well, you can’t win it back to back.’ Now it’s like, ‘Oh (expletive).’ But they should have a great year, be fun to watch because Coach won’t allow it to be any other way. That’s the biggest thing is it starts at the top. But that’s a fact. That’s the way it is, everybody knows it. I was just a piece of it.”

That’s nice, but I’d feel better if he were still in Athens.

It sounds like there are times when he misses being in Athens.

“People asked did you leave because you felt like there was no more you could do? No, that wasn’t it,” Monken said. “At the end of the day, it didn’t finish the right way at Cleveland when I was there. And there was some unfinished business there of wanting to do it again. Do it, give it a shot. But it had to be at a place I thought mirrored Georgia. A great organization structure. Head coach, right? Structure. Security’s not the right word, but where you had a head coach in place, years of success, a mentality. In a lot of ways, a similar mentality, toughness, defense. The way you structure things, how you win. I think that’s important to coaches. Like yeah, he’s a defensive coach, but he wants to be damn good on offense. But there’s a certain mentality of the way you’ve got to play at University of Georgia, and I felt the same way here.

“So yeah, it was hard to leave. It was. It wasn’t easy to say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to pick up, leave a great job.’ I went back and forth at times with it, but I can’t be two places at once. At the end of the day, I had to take one more run at it. I didn’t know when that opportunity like this would come around again. It might’ve, but I didn’t know that.

“And I had to live with ‘don’t look back.’ It is what it is. There are certain things that I do miss about Georgia. There are certain things that I missed about being in the NFL. So I’ve been really lucky people thought enough of me to hire me, and hopefully, wherever I’ve been, I’ve fought to hold up my end of the bargain.”

Sigh.  Life is complicated.

Mandel sizes up the QB situation

From yesterday’s Mailbag ($$):

Stew, I can’t recall so many of the projected top teams (Ohio State, Penn State, Bama and Georgia) breaking in new quarterbacks, and it seems no one is even questioning this. Of the four situations, which one are you most and least confident about?

Of the four, I’m most confident in Georgia, despite the fact we’ve yet to see Carson Beck in meaningful action. For one thing, he looked great in the Dawgs’ spring game. The offense picked up where it left off against TCU. It’s also encouraging that he ran away with the job; much like Drew Allar at Penn State, there was never much doubt which quarterback would take the first snaps of the season. And most importantly: He’s got Brock Bowers, Ladd McConkey and Missouri transfer Dominic Lovett to throw to, and four preseason All-SEC linemen blocking for him.

It’s pretty much the ideal scenario for a first-time starting quarterback.

And he didn’t even mention the schedule!

As for the least confident, well, I can’t argue with this:

And if you’ve been reading my recent stories, you know well which one I’m feeling least confident about: Alabama. It looks like Jalen Milroe will be the first guy out of the gate. Milroe had his moments last season, filling in admirably against Texas A&M, but he was clearly more of a runner than a thrower. After watching Milroe and Ty Simpson compete for 15 practices, Saban felt it was necessary to bring in Notre Dame transfer Tyler Buchner. You only do that if you think he can win the starting job. He has not.

Combine that with the fact that receiver is arguably Alabama’s biggest question mark, and running back, while deep, doesn’t appear to have a Derrick Henry or Jahmyr Gibbs-level talent, and the situation does not inspire a ton of confidence.

When you’ve lost Montana…

Number two, but they try harder.

In the latest version of 247Sports College Football Team Talent rankings, Georgia ranks second, behind the team that supposedly has a collective chip on their shoulder because they think they’re being disrespected.

Not miss a beat

Shot.

You can’t claim a guy who finished 4th in the Heisman vote never got the respect he deserved, but it is telling that the preseason consensus is to treat Stetson Bennett like just another interchangeable cog in the machine. For all his success, Bennett never completely shed the stigma of the sub-6-foot walk-on who managed to hang around long enough to luck into an ideal situation and then rode it for all it was worth. (After all, he lasted until the 4th round of the draft for a reason.) All the available evidence, though, reinforces the fact that he was just a straight-up very good college quarterback.

He ranked in the top nationally in ESPN’s Total QBR metric each of the past 2 seasons, finishing with virtually identical numbers to Bryce Young and CJ Stroud both years, and was at his best when the stakes were the highest. Facing 4th-quarter deficits against Alabama in the 2021 title game and Ohio State in last year’s semifinal, he led multiple touchdown drives on both occasions to put Georgia over the top. There was always the question of whether it was still possible to win big in the Playoff era with an underwhelming specimen like Bennett behind center, but in the end it was more likely that the Dawgs couldn’t have won without him.

All of which is to say that replacing Bennett, as well as NFL-bound OC Todd Monken, is not a negligible concern.

Chaser.

Smart was then asked to tell people more about Carson Beck that college football fans may not know and brought up some interesting points about his new starting quarterback.

“He keeps his emotions in check. He told me “I’ve been that way since a kid…’ He was a really talented baseball player, committed to Florida in high school, and then decided to go the football route. He’s different. The players enjoy him; they rally around him. He has a way with the skill players. Calm, cool, collected, and poised in the pocket. The interesting thing about Carson that people don’t talk about during our national championship run is there was a time when he was the two in our first national championship run, and Stetson [Bennett] was a three. – Carson spoke to the team about missing that opportunity and how it affected him, and he didn’t think he prepared the right way and as prepared. It went on that Stetson played two more years, but Carson could’ve been our quarterback that whole time.”  [Emphasis added.]

So, who’s got it right here?  Are Bennett and Beck merely interchangeable cogs in the wheel that is the Georgia football program?  Or is Smart pumping up Beck?