College Football Playoffs Thread and Predictions

posted by Laley23

And even that is debatable. ND was better up and down the field yesterday. 

I mean everyone is piling on the “had 3 weeks off wagon”…..Georgia had a QB making his first ever start. That’s kinda big too. I’m happy as hell they lost but they’ve not been very good a lot this year….just kept getting by. Outscored in the 1st qtr for the season. 9 of 13 crappy first half in those games…..with their 24-3 QB. That line was tight for this game….guessing because of the QB situation for as much as the extra week off.

Yeah, I think the "bye = loss" take is a bit misleading.

Of the four bye teams, they all were underdogs entering their game. You had Georgia with a new QB, Oregon playing an OSU team that was #1 at the beginning of the year and looked to be starting to play like it, Boise as a small-conference team and Arizona State as a conference champ from a league that wasn't considered by anyone to be on the level of the Big 10 or SEC. 

Sure, a person could say that having that extra week off made those teams rusty AND with things like Arizona State starting slowly and then playing great in the fourth AND Oregon getting buried early on, there might be something to that. But a person could also say that the teams picked to win were the ones who won and it's hard to single out one thing like a bye week for the losers as the key factor in what happened.