2022 Blog Poll: Week 5: If you have to win ONE GAME are you taking Drinkwitz, Harsin or Jimbo?

Oct 3, 2022 - 3:45 PM

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There were a lot of shakeups in the Poll this week, owing to practically all of the bottom 2/3rd of the Top 25 dropping games (Arkansas, FSU, Oklahoma, Aggie etc.). And now, after five weeks, there’s a bit more clarity coming into focus, including some fairly surprising teams.

We’ll go through that after the poll, but for now, here are our Week 5 results. The usual caveats apply. The criteria are nebulous, far-ranging, and capricious — strength of schedule, bad and good coaching, injuries, exigent circumstances, home/away results, defense or lack thereof, offense or lack thereof, line play, power poll-ishness, can you cover a spread (Vegas is pretty smart about how good a team is), head-to-head where possible or prudent, and my own lying eyeballs.

G5/Indies — DKY that Liberty is one point away in a road loss to a Top 15ish Wake team from being undefeated? Ditto a curious end-of-game sequence by South Alabama at UCLA, or this could be an AP-ranked team. We still like them. Maybe actually the best SBC team out there. Still not fully onboard with BYU as a Top 25, but they’re solid. JMU is an absolute machine. We’ll see what they do in the heart of the SBC. Coastal is rebounding from a lackluster 2021. Memphis got the early yips out of their system, and even clobbered Navy on the road (which almost never happens). Cincy...so hard to figure out. How did you lose to that Arkansas team? AFA is going to regret laying an egg against Wyoming — as wide open as the NY6 slot is this year, “why not us” could have been effective. And, given their NCAA woes, this may be the last good year of Air Force football for the next decade: the Falcons got hit with the closest thing to the Death Penalty you’ll see in the modern era.

ACC — Is doing their usual thing of One Very Good Team (Clemson), Two-Three Teams We Are Supposed To Pretend Can Get It Done (Wake, NC State), and a handful of decent bowl teams (Syracuse, UNC, FSU, maybe Duke). Followed by a lot of mediocrities-to-downright-bad-teams. It’s so predictable, we even wrote about it three seasons ago. Check out the link below!

Big 12 — This is the kissing cousin for 2022. OU’s defense is abominable. Texas doesn’t know what it wants to be. Iowa State is one dimensional AF. OSU and Kansas State are quietly destroying people, even as the spotlight falls on two exciting, offense-first teams: Kansas, TCU: and both of those are objectively good squads. And it turns out that some darlings (Baylor), just can’t reload as easily as expected.

Pac 12 — This is the healthiest the P12 has been in a decade, and it is because the names that are supposed to be good are good: USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington. Those tent pole coastal franchises have always held it down for the Left Coast (we’ll throw the Ducks in there, since they’ve spent the last 25 years terrorizing the P12). Throw in a very solid Wazzu team, along with Utah who looks indestructible at home, and you have a conference that is far more solid than the Big 12 is at the moment. Hell, we didn’t even include some teams in here that are a lot better than expected but that can cause some trouble on the right weekend: Cal, Arizona, and Oregon State. It’s almost like coaching matters, huh?

SEC — No surprise here: UGA and Alabama at the top, with about half a dozen teams who could legitimately strike and win a division with the right breaks: Ole Miss, LSU, Mississippi State, Kentucky, Tennessee. Don’t let their records fool you either: Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, and Mizzou are tough outs as well. The job Barry Odom has done with a depleted and rebuilding Tigers roster as DC has been outstanding. Eli best hire an OC though, or he’ll be in the same pink slip line with Bryan Harsin. And, let’s all laugh and point at Aggie. Good thing for Harsin usurping his crown, because otherwise Jimbo would be the worst in-game coach in the conference, and remains among the very worst in the nation in preparing teams or developing all that talent he’s corruptly paying for. He’s always been a bagman out-talenting other teams, and at age 61, he’s not likely to change his ways.

Still, Harsin or Drinkwitz or Jimbo is one helluva’ Sophie’s Choice.

Big 10 — Ohio State, Penn State and Michigan, you know. But look at what the Illini are doing under BERT, the great job that Locksley has done this year with Maryland. Minnesota got derailed this weekend, sure, but that division is still theirs for the taking and Purdue could slide in there are well. Some teams have underperformed this year (Sparty, Wisconsin), so it’s not as strong as we thought it might be. But the very top is full of nuclear-grade heavy hitters and will field at least one, perhaps two playoff participants if things play out favorably.