One could easily make the case that, as with the UEFA Champions League in soccer, the creation of the College Football Playoff took a sport already defined by its haves-versus-have-nots divisions and increased them.
Of 28 CFP bids handed out in seven years, 20 have gone to four schools: Alabama (six), Clemson (six), Oklahoma (four) and Ohio State (four). They’ve won 22 conference titles between them in that span, leaving even other well-run programs — the Georgias and Notre Dames and, briefly, LSUs of the world — to forage for scraps.
The top four in 2021’s SP+ projections? Alabama, Clemson, Oklahoma and Ohio State. They could be the top four in the preseason AP poll as well. If they aren’t, it’s because Georgia butted ahead of one of them, but that wouldn’t be much of a sign of parity. After all, the Dawgs reached a CFP final (in the 2017 season), have established maybe the highest level of recruiting outside of Tuscaloosa and have finished in the AP top 10 for four straight years. A have-not, they are not.
This isn’t exactly the 1970s, when nine schools accounted for 69 of 80 spots in the year-end AP polls, but it’s not far off. And it becomes easy to forget that one of the names in the current list of dominant forces is a newbie of sorts.
At the end of 2014, Dabo Swinney’s Clemson was regarded as one of a few programs on the rise. The Tigers had won double-digit games for four straight seasons and had squeezed out a top-10 finish, the program’s first in 23 years, in 2013. They had signed a blue-chip quarterback in Deshaun Watson, who looked the part when given the chance, but he had torn his ACL at the end of 2014. AP voters cautiously started the Tigers 12th in 2015, two spots behind three-time defending ACC champ Florida State.
They ignited in 2015, of course, reaching the national title game, then winning it the next season. They’ve gone 79-7 over the past six years, ranking No. 1 in the AP poll at least briefly each year and making six consecutive CFPs. Watson was the first of many five-star quarterbacks signed by Swinney, who invested heavily in his pool of assistants, raised the program’s overall recruiting game (Clemson averaged 8.0 ESPN 300 signees from 2011 to 2014 and 14.3 from 2018 to 2021) and slowly built a purple-and-orange ACC Death Star. The Tigers had won two league titles from 1989 to 2014; they’ve now won six in a row.
While so much of this sport is dominated by the same schools that have always been members of the oligarchy — Alabama, Ohio State and Oklahoma were on the 1970s blue bloods list, too, after all — Clemson followed a script that technically anyone with power conference money, an invested fan base and good, old-fashioned commitment can follow: make a good hire, support that hire, win a little bit, recruit better and better, win more and more.
Just because almost no one actually pulls this off doesn’t mean no one else can. And someone else will at some point.
Who might that ‘someone’ be?
To begin answering that, let’s first digress and return to a topic I brought up in October, as one of a few potential New Clemsons was getting its season underway. Granted, that piece proved my unlimited jinxing powers — Penn State, the subject of the piece, proceeded to start its 2020 season with five losses — but within that piece I laid out what I hoped was an interesting new way of looking at the sport.
The idea is pretty simple: apply point totals to basically everything that happens in a football game. Any time your offense makes a successful play (gaining 50% of necessary yardage on first down, 70% on second or 100% on third or fourth) or your defense prevents one, it’s a “win.” Every win is worth 0.3 points, and bonus points are given in key situations (third or fourth downs, red zone — high-leverage situations), or for big plays or turnover chances. Special-teams events have point values too.
The result of this approach is that, for most teams, you get an estimated scoring margin quite close to the team’s actual scoring margin, and you have a strong idea of how the team got there — via particular success in the big-play department, or by simply winning a lot more plays than its opponents, etc.
This idea has excited me for a while because of the way it puts things in coaches’ terms. While my SP+ ratings are predictive and forward-facing, this is more descriptive and prescriptive; it assigns value to aspects of the game coaches have long stressed, and in a currency coaches value above all else: points. Instead of explaining what a measure like my marginal explosiveness means, or what goes into a given expected points added (EPA) model, you can say, “Team A is gaining X points per game because of big plays and losing X points per game because of turnovers.” It can serve as a gateway into the more nitty-gritty stuff. (I was also pleased to discover that, as mentioned in the October piece, this approach works well at the high school and pro play-by-play levels with just a few tweaks.)
You can also use it to dive into what separates wheat from chaff in college football.
Let’s circle back to the questions at hand: What drove Clemson’s rise, and who compares well to the Tigers. To start, let’s compare four things: the statistical profiles of the average national champion, the average CFP participant and both pre-breakthrough Clemson (2012-14) and post-breakthrough Clemson (2015-20).
While recruiting has indeed picked up for Clemson through the years, Swinney’s Tigers broke through without signing quite as many blue-chippers as other national powers. They made a few more big plays and shored up their special teams a bit, but the biggest gains were made in the key plays department. Over the past six seasons, teams have gained an average of at least 9.5 points per game from key plays only 16 times — Clemson has done it five times, and the other 129 FBS teams have combined for 11.
The Tigers won the national championship game over Alabama in 2019 almost entirely because of those key-play situations — they won 19 of the game’s 28 third downs (they were 10-for-15, Bama 4-for-13) and four of seven fourth downs, and not including an end-of-game kneel-down possession, they scored 37 points in six scoring opportunities while Alabama scored just 16 in six. Toss in a pick-six, and that’s how you win by 28 while creating the same number of scoring chances as your opponent.
That was a particularly extreme example — even the best third-down and red zone teams can’t accomplish that often, and applying extra value to a small sample of plays in an already small-sample sport can be fraught. Still, situational football is a real thing, and Clemson has leveraged games with elite play in these situations for a long time. Those numbers aren’t flukes.
Which teams are closest to club membership? To take into account both Clemson’s on-field improvement and its solid recruiting in the time leading up to 2015’s breakthrough, let’s look at the 12 programs that have both (a) averaged at least six ESPN 300 signees per season and (b) generated at least a 0.600 win percentage over the past three years.
Because using scoring margins as a measure of health is always tricky with strength-of-schedule differences (which is why measures like SP+ and FPI are so useful), and because all 2020 numbers are a little bit wonky because of the lack of nonconference games, here are these teams’ average SP+ ratings over the past three years for added context:
With all this data in mind, here are the five programs I think have the best chance of becoming the new Clemson, the team we look at a few years from now as a program that broke through in 2021 (or maybe 2022) and unleashed a run of CFP bids on an unsuspecting universe.
Should this one even count? Like JT Daniels being the most likely Next Mac Jones for 2021, it’s almost too obvious a choice.
Kirby Smart’s Dawgs indeed made the national title game in 2017, their average SP+ rating is higher than OU’s, they’ve got the top-10 finishes mentioned above and the only team that has landed more ESPN 300 prospects than UGA over the past three years is Bama. The only thing they’re lacking is a sustained, CFP-level breakthrough.
So why hasn’t it happened yet? Two things:
Bama’s in the same league. And if the Crimson Tide aren’t in the way, a historically great LSU is (in 2019). Dan Mullen’s Florida was good enough to end the Dawgs’ three-year SEC East title streak in 2020 as well. Nick Saban’s success has distracted us from the fact that, for everyone else, it’s really hard to consistently stand out in the SEC.
The offense hasn’t come around just yet. Saban underwent an offensive modernization attempt starting around 2015, and LSU followed suit with the perfect concoction of talent (Joe Burrow et al) and new coaching input in 2019, but Smart appeared to hold on to his “defense, field position and a sturdy run game” ideals a bit longer. It works most of the time, but the Dawgs couldn’t keep up with elite Bama and Florida offenses last fall, and even with a late surge they ranked just 21st in offensive SP+ after finishing 32nd in 2019.
It’s not hard to wonder if this is the year, though. Georgia did surge offensively late in 2020, and in a seemingly sustainable way — Daniels, a former blue-chipper who produced a solid track record at USC before transferring, was finally healthy after dealing with knee issues for more than a year. With his big arm and a legion of blue-chip receivers thriving with big-play opportunities, the Dawgs were able to spread the field in ways first-year coordinator Todd Monken had previously only dreamed of since moving to Athens.
Monken should be able to execute his full vision in 2021; the Dawgs return Daniels, virtually every skill player and three starting offensive linemen. An elite UGA defense has to replace six of its top eight defensive backs and edge rusher Azeez Ojulari, but after ranking first in defensive SP+ for back-to-back seasons, we’re going to guess the ceiling is still awfully high.
Even if we assume that Alabama remains Alabama despite replacing key pieces itself, Florida is losing some truly elite offensive talent, Auburn is getting started with a new head coach and Texas A&M and LSU aren’t on the Dawgs’ schedule. The stars might all be aligning as much as they possibly can for a non-Bama SEC team.
This is another one that only sort of feels like it should count — the Fighting Irish have made the CFP in two of the past three seasons. But their appearances made it clear that there’s still work to be done.
That said, Brian Kelly is signing more blue-chippers per year than Swinney was in the 2012-14 range, the Irish showed true top-five upside for much of 2020 before cratering against Clemson and Alabama late in the year, and if you’re of the belief that mastering the key plays is a sustainable approach, among the group above only Georgia averages more points per game in that category.
Of course, there’s no Deshaun Watson, at least not that we know of. Clemson broke through because it had elite quarterback play on top of all the other positive traits; Wisconsin transfer Jack Coan could potentially play at an Ian Book level, but Book wasn’t Watson either. Is incoming freshman Tyler Buchner? Redshirt freshman Drew Pyne? That might be all that’s missing, but it’s quite the important piece.
Here are the teams that signed more ESPN 300 prospects than Oregon in the 2021 class: Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State. Mario Cristobal is wrecking shop in the recruiting department, but that’s only one of two reasons why the Ducks rank this highly. The other? They’re in the Pac-12, the only conference not currently monopolized by one of the four powers this piece is built around.
The Pac-12 could have incredible depth in 2021, with most teams returning a vast majority of the brief 2020 season’s production. But there’s no slam-dunk national title contender, and the first program that can go from good to potentially elite could reap long-term dividends. Washington and USC have high amounts of potential, too, and I’m fascinated by what Arizona State’s offense might be capable of this fall. But while an unclear quarterback situation could hold the Ducks back in the short term, whenever Cristobal and offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead get the QB situation squared away, said signal-caller is going to be supported by blue-chippers in virtually every unit on the two-deep. I still give the Ducks the long-term edge here due to potential and recent recruiting.
Last year I would have ranked the Nittany Lions behind only Georgia on a list like this. The Nittany Lions were sixth in SP+ in both 2017 and 2019 and averaged more than 10 blue-chip signings per year from 2018 to 2020. Their biggest issue — one that won’t be rectified anytime soon (until all of college football adopts my “down with divisions” mantra) — was and is the fact that they share a division with Ohio State.
Last year was an obvious setback. Granted, even with the wretched start and 4-5 finish, close games and bad fortune meant they still finished the year 18th in SP+. But when combined with a shakier-than-normal recruiting class and the shaken aura that comes with a sub-.500 record, the Nittany Lions’ stock price is a bit lower this year.
That’s when you buy a stock, right? James Franklin swung big by hiring offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich to pep up a solid but less-than-spectacular attack, and the defense hasn’t ranked worse than 14th in defensive SP+ since 2016. His 2021 team will be his most experienced in a while, and there could be more upside here than you think.
Honestly, any of the teams in the above table could fit into the top five here, but let’s go with the wild card that we absolutely know has the upside required for a breakthrough. LSU finished 2019 playing some of the best football we’ve ever seen, and while almost all of the primary contributors to that breakthrough are gone, we know the Tigers clear the recruiting bar, and we know they’re going to have the athletes to thrive if head coach Ed Orgeron gets his coaching staff figured out.
The table above hints at LSU’s biggest issue in 2020. How in the world can a team that has boasted the offensive talent the Tigers have had in recent years — Ja’Marr Chase, Justin Jefferson, Terrace Marshall Jr., Clyde Edwards-Helaire and now Kayshon Boutte — lose the explosiveness battle on average? That’s how horrendously glitchy last year’s defense was.
Orgeron replaced departed defensive coordinator (and current Baylor head coach) Dave Aranda with old friend Bo Pelini in 2020 and paid for it; it was a regressive hire, and LSU’s defense allowed an explosive play rate (12-yard rushes, 16-yard passes) of 16.5% last year, 122nd in FBS. If new DC Daronte Jones can bring some cohesiveness to the defensive attack, and the right players get fully healthy on both sides of the ball, a strong bounce-back is conceivable.
The Tigers are here because of raw upside, but man, do they have a lot to prove after last year. National champions don’t collapse like the Tigers did last year, even when they lose a lot of breakthrough players, so the road back to the land of the elite is unclear.