Dear Andy: What would a USC win at Michigan mean?

One of the biggest games in the new Big Ten is Saturday, and you, the listeners of Andy Staples On3, have questions. Let’s dive into the latest edition of Dear Andy to answer your college football questions.

From @Ddwag:
If USC wins at the Big House on Saturday, what percentage chance would you give of the following: USC in Big 10 title game, winning the conference, making the College Football Playoff, winning the national title.

This is a great question, because USC-Michigan is one of those games that should offer some clarity on this season. We watched USC beat LSU, but how good is LSU? We watched Michigan get trounced by Texas, but is Texas awesome or Michigan bad — or is the answer somewhere in between?

We’ve only seen USC twice, but so far it appears new coordinator D’Anton Lynn has made the defense better. The Trojans made open-field tackles. They didn’t have major coverage busts. As usual, Lincoln Riley is running a potent offense. Quarterback Miller Moss looks like he’s been practicing this particular scheme his entire life.

Michigan made a last-second quarterback switch before the season-opener, and the Wolverines have looked like a team that prepared for months to play one style of offense and then abruptly switched to another before the games began. By deciding Alex Orji will start at QB against the Trojans, coach Sherrone Moore has essentially admitted that he thinks swapping Orji for Davis Warren was a mistake. We don’t yet know whether it was a mistake. We’ll learn that on Saturday.

Michigan’s defense still has elite top-end talent. Cornerback Will Johnson and defensive tackles Mason Graham and Kenneth Grant should be first-round picks in April. Texas moved the ball easily against the Wolverines, but the question is whether USC’s offense is as potent as the Longhorns’ offense. We’re about to find out, and this piece of the puzzle is the one that probably will influence how much I believe in the Trojans if they come out of Ann Arbor with a win. Because if they can move the ball successfully against Michigan, not many future opponents will be able to slow them down.

So let’s take a crack at these percentages if USC beats Michigan…

Chance of making the Big Ten title game: 50 percent

USC misses Ohio State and Oregon, so the Trojans would have a cleaner path to Indianapolis than most. They play Penn State on Oct. 12. Their next toughest game is probably Notre Dame on Nov. 30, but that has nothing to do with the Big Ten standings. The Nebraska game at the Coliseum probably is the next toughest Big Ten game behind Penn State. So if the Trojans beat the Wolverines, then it probably comes down to whether USC can beat Penn State. If they do, they would be in the driver’s seat to make the Big Ten title game.

Chance of winning the conference: 25 percent

This would be where USC would meet Ohio State or Oregon (or maybe Penn State again). I’m essentially multiplying the 50 percent chance of making the Big Ten title game by a 50 percent chance of winning it.

Chance of making the CFP: 50 percent

If the Trojans make the Big Ten title game, they’re probably making the CFP. They might even be in a position where they could lose the Notre Dame game and still make the playoff.

Chance of winning the national title: Shrug emoji

Getting to the CFP gives you a chance, but it’s either a three- or four-game gauntlet at that point. I’m not sure even a win against Michigan gives us enough information to accurately predict this.

From Craig:
In the portal era — where you can completely upgrade a position group in a off-season — how much leeway should new coaches get? “Gotta let him recruit in his guys” carries less weight. (A Wisconsin fan waiting for the Fickell era to feel different than the end of the Chryst era.)

If you want to know whether someone understands college football in 2024, look for the phrase in quotation marks in Craig’s question. That phrase doesn’t carry less weight now. It carries no weight now. If you’re talking to a fan who says “We’ve got to give Coach some time to bring in his guys,” assume that fan has no clue how the sport works now. If you’re talking to an athletic director who says “We’ve got to give Coach some time to bring in his guys,” then you’re probably talking to an AD who is about to get fired.

I did a story at my last job about Tennessee athletic director Danny White’s hiring strategy. He’s hired a lot of successful coaches. Aside from hiring Josh Heupel twice, he hired football coach Lance Leipold and basketball coach Nate Oates at Buffalo. One of the things White made clear is that he doesn’t believe in a Year Zero. No matter how bad things look, the right coach can turn them around quickly in this era.

Heupel is a great example of that. When Tennessee players began streaming into the portal following the firing of Jeremy Pruitt, we assumed it would take five years to resurrect the program. Heupel made the Volunteers better in year one and good in year two. This probably is the current acceptable timeline. If your new coach hasn’t made the program better by year two, it means that either your coach can’t properly evaluate talent, your NIL operation can’t afford good players or a combination of both.

At Wisconsin, Fickell’s team should be good in year two. Getting beaten down by Alabama doesn’t necessarily eliminate that possibility, but in the Badgers’ first two wins they didn’t look much more dynamic than they did last year. And like last year, they’ve lost their starting quarterback to an injury. Tanner Mordecai missed three games midseason, requiring Braedyn Locke to replace him. Tyler Van Dyke, the Miami transfer Wisconsin brought in this season, is now out for the year with a torn ACL. So Locke is the starter for the rest of the way.

The QB injury situation won’t excuse underachieving, though. Fickell is getting paid $7.6 million a year. It’s his job to have more than capable QB on his roster every season. We’ll find out as the Badgers enter Big Ten play whether Wisconsin is improved. I assumed when the notoriously picky Fickell took the Badgers job that everyone in the organization was serious about actually competing for Big Ten titles, but Wisconsin’s roster moves to this point have not suggested that. Perhaps we just haven’t seen it yet. The Badgers get a chance to start proving themselves next week against USC.

If they’re not any better, then Fickell had better make big moves this offseason. Otherwise, he’s in danger of falling into a hole like Billy Napier did at Florida. Napier’s slow-playing of nearly every roster situation is one of the reasons — hiring a subpar staff is the other — that he’s going to get fired at Florida. Napier and Scott Stricklin (the athletic director who hired him) were still preaching patience in the summer before season three began. This should have been a huge red flag. If you’re not already good by year two, then you’d better have a bunch of unrepentant asskickers coming back in year three. Presumably Napier knew Florida didn’t, and that’s his fault because he’s had three offseasons to fix the roster.

From Jeremy:
1. Could ESPN re-up the SEC deal if they wanted SEC to expand and go to nine games?
2. In 2030 we don’t know who is the owner of Fox, with the succession drama. It’ll be interesting how calibration of what the reality of these payouts are as the cable bundle cracks. The Big Ten deal was a year sooner before austerity came in. The same with those crazy Monday Night Football deals.

Jeremy’s question dovetails with the news that the ACC is considering a compromise with Clemson and Florida State — in exchange for those two schools dropping their lawsuits — that would give those schools more money annually and would end the ACC’s grant of rights in 2030 rather than 2036. The new date is more important than the money; it would make Clemson and Florida State (and North Carolina and anyone else who may want to leave) free agents the year the Big Ten starts a new media rights deal and a year before the Big 12 starts its next media rights deal. (And three years before the SEC’s next deal.)

This either sets the detonation clock on the ACC or gives the ACC a chance to negotiate a better situation that might keep the league together. The former feels more likely than the latter. 

So let’s explain how that relates to Jeremy’s questions:

ESPN can renegotiate its deal with the SEC at any time provided it wants to give the SEC more money. The league was headed toward a nine-game conference schedule, but that has snagged because of ESPN’s reluctance to pay more for a product that it got at a significant bargain. The SEC did its deal early during the pandemic, and league officials probably wanted to puke when they saw how much CBS and NBC are paying for Big Ten games that don’t come close to what the SEC has to offer. As CBS learned when it refused to renegotiate the best deal in sports media history — $55 million a year for the best SEC game of each week and the SEC title game from 2009 through last year — the SEC has a long memory. By 2033, the SEC might be the only rights ESPN can still afford, or the NFL and NBA might have decided to sell direct-to-consumer. It would be wise for the Disney-owned company to take care of one of its flagship partners. Will it? We’ll see. The SEC doesn’t have to expand for ESPN to give more money for a nine-game conference schedule. All the network has to do is say “Here is some more money, please play nine conference games,” and the SEC likely would be inclined to acquiesce (provided it was enough money).

Jeremy’s second question references the sports rights bubble, but I’m still not sure there is one. Live sports has become the strongest ratings driver in television. Nothing else is as reliable. That’s why Amazon hopped in. It’s why NBC has Peacock exclusive games. It’s why Netflix is showing the NFL on Christmas day.

Most of the other things these networks and streamers have tried have proven to be wastes of money. Netflix isn’t going to keep throwing wads of cash at showrunners of scripted series if the return on investment isn’t there. That’s why you’ve seen a slowdown in the production of such shows. They’re expensive and unreliable. Premium sports — and I’d put power conference college football in this bucket — is expensive but reliable. Which is probably why leagues such as the Big Ten and SEC will still get more expensive for broadcasters even as they tighten their belts everywhere else.

A Random Ranking

Reader Justin wants me to rank types of noodles. Away we go…

1. Papperdelle
2. Lamian
3. Soba
4. Pad Thai
5. Ramen
6. Penne
7. Spatzle
8. Bucatini
9. Pho
10. Tortellini