Saturday night’s annual early-November showcase between LSU and Alabama started slowly, enough to create thousands of references to the 2011 game between the two schools.
If you follow college football on Twitter (as I do, using our Student Section account to live-tweet the action on Saturdays), you saw plenty of “9-6” or “2011” or “3-0 might be enough for Alabama” tweets in the early stages of Tigers-Tide from Tuscaloosa. The fact that Alabama scored 30 points and turned that contest into something very different from 2011 is beside the point.
What matters is that the 2011 season and that four-year-old LSU-Bama game showed us something very important about the rhythms and workings of college football: There’s never a good time to lose, but losing in early November is not the death-knell it seems to be in the present moment.
Sure, Alabama is the SEC favorite and the team most likely to represent the conference in the College Football Playoff.
Sure, Clemson is in the best position of any team to make the playoff.
Sure, Ohio State or Iowa will get in if they run the table and have a shiny 13-0 medallion to present to the selection committee.
However, those are all statements which have to be accompanied by results… results that are not yet past-tense and affirmed.
Alabama could lose one of its remaining road games. Clemson could lose to North Carolina in Charlotte, assuming the Tar Heels do wrap up the ACC Coastal. Ohio State could lose to Michigan State, which cou, ld then beat Iowa.
In an indirect way, I’ve already given away the core point of this column: A lot of football’s left to be played.
You could stop reading right now, and I wouldn’t blame you, but there’s a little more to be said about this topic, especially if you reside in Fort Worth, East Lansing, or Baton Rouge.
If you think TCU, Michigan State, and LSU are done — toasted, roasted, cooked, and no longer alive — as far as the College Football Playoff is concerned, you’re wrong… at least if “done” means “this team does in fact have no remaining chance of getting in.”
You might want the word “done” to mean something along the lines of, “Given the injury to Josh Doctson, TCU is done.” Okay — if you mean the word THAT way, fine. No problem. If, however, you are officially pronouncing TCU as being eliminated from the playoff hunt, that is simply an incorrect statement.
The 2011 season and other very recent examples show as much.
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Here’s the thing about college football seasons: It is almost always better to lose early rather than late. See Ohio State last year as a perfect example. The reason why I say “almost always” is that if you lose to the one team you can’t afford to lose to (in TCU’s case from 2014, that one oppoent was Baylor), your case is weakened. Generally, though, yes — losing early is better than losing late.
Given this reality, one might think — quite reasonably — that losing in early November is a bad time to lose. On a larger level, sure. One thing I said Saturday night about the Michigan State loss to Nebraska is that it removed any remaining margin for error from the Spartans’ season. Losses at this stage of the game create suffocating pressure for the final few battles which linger in the next month. New Year’s Six bowl slots are jeopardized. Teams that get to 12-0 but then lose game 13 will still get NY6 slots. Some (maybe all) of Saturday’s losers will be shut out. In that sense, these early-November losses are huge.
However, for the teams which are able to rebound and finish 11-1 or even 12-1, these results are hardly season-enders as far as the playoff is concerned.
First, let’s simply look at the details: TCU, at 11-1, would own wins over Oklahoma and Baylor. If Baylor beats Oklahoma State, TCU would be part of a three-way tie. Other results in the Big 12’s backloaded schedule could swing the pendulum even more in the Frogs’ direction.
I mentioned 2011 above. Guess who plays this week? Oklahoma State goes to Iowa State.
Hey, didn’t OSU visit Ames in 2011 and get knocked off? Didn’t that stunner enable Alabama, which had just lost to LSU in early November, to move past Oklahoma State in the rankings (whether justified or not, it happened)?
There you go.
Need more proof that early-November losses don’t kill? In 2012, one year after benefiting from another team’s loss in the middle stages of November, Alabama again suffered an early-November defeat at home, this time to Texas A&M.
In the ensuing weeks, the Tide watched Baylor knock off Kansas State and Stanford cut down Oregon. Just like that, the Tide were swept into the BCS title tilt against Notre Dame.
We don’t even have to cite the exceptional and aberrational 2007 season, when nearly everyone (not Kansas!) lost twice, and both Missouri and West Virginia lost a Game 13 to put Ohio State and LSU in the 2008 natty in Nawlins.
Early-November losses are not the same as late-November losses. When you lose in late November — think of 2013 Alabama against Auburn — there’s no Game 13 in many instances. There’s no subsequent chance to change voters’ minds. There’s no added stack of possibilities beyond a single conference championship game.
At this point in the season, with many playoff contenders having at least three, maybe four, games to play, so much is still in flux. LSU, TCU, and Michigan State still have EVERYTHING to play for.
If you’re convinced those three seasons are all shot and shattered, you’re not paying attention — to the present moment, or to recent college football history.