The New Year’s Day bowl games are now in college football’s rear view mirror.
The days which follow bowl season are met with extreme highs and lows for most fanbases. Some teams want to fire their coach – again. Others will fall victim to irrational exuberance. These swings for fans are made worse by the fact that there is no game this weekend to help level out the emotions.
As the state waits breathlessly for the return of Tua Tagovailoa to become official, we join the masses and overreact to bowl season by reexamining the season-ending Yellowhammer Power Poll.
The poll was released immediately following the conference championship games in December.
Let’s see who was ranked too high, too low or just right.
1. LSU
Since our last ranking, Joe Burrow has won the Heisman Trophy and his team put on a clinic against Oklahoma in the Peach Bowl. The Tigers are rolling. There appears to be no better team in college football this year.
Final ranking: Correct
2. OHIO STATE
The Big Ten champion Buckeyes fielded a talented, physical team in the Fiesta Bowl last weekend. There were no weaknesses on that team. Setting aside the officiating for another day, Ohio State simply made one less play than Clemson. If the two teams faced off in a five-game series, we suspect head coach Ryan Day’s squad would come out on top.
Final ranking: Just right
3. CLEMSON
Pick plays, lucky breaks and officials on-the-take, those have been the ingredients for the college playoff runs by Dabo Swinney’s Tigers. Just kidding. Trevor Lawrence is a generational talent at quarterback and it showed on Saturday night. This is a well-coached and confident group. But it was evident in Phoenix that there is a drop off from the 2018 champs to this season’s version of Clemson.
Final ranking: Just right
4. OKLAHOMA
Big whiff. Jalen Hurts produced more than 5,000 yards of offense and came in second in Heisman Trophy voting. Oklahoma never gave Hurts the help he needed to be competitive against LSU. Burrow and LSU have steamrolled nearly every defense they have seen, but the Sooners defense got exposed in the worst way.
Final ranking: Way too high
5. GEORGIA
The Bulldogs were the best ball-control, defensive-oriented team in the country. They were also not going to make the same mistake two years in a row at the Sugar Bowl and lose to an overmatched opponent. Kirby Smart and his coaches deserve credit for getting the team ready to play. As tends to happen after a bowl win, the pendulum of fan emotion swung wildly as social media buzzed with suggestions that Georgia should have been a playoff team after beating a Baylor team which averaged around 35 in recruiting rankings the last three years. We suggest they pump the brakes in case they have forgotten the loss to 4-8 South Carolina and the drubbing in Atlanta.
Final ranking: About right
6. AUBURN
Auburn’s postseason matchup against Minnesota was always going to be a weird game, so we do not put much stock in its outcome. On one sideline was P.J. Fleck rowing his boat and coaching a team foaming at the mouth to play a big-name out of conference opponent. For its part, Auburn was in the middle of a transition with new coordinator Chad Morris no where close to putting his full imprint on the offense. The reality is that if there were games this weekend, not many teams would want to go out and play Auburn.
Final ranking: A little high
7. ALABAMA
The Crimson Tide went to Orlando and hammered a Michigan team which had a lot more incentive to play well than they did. The final version of Alabama was really good. Its receiving corps may have been the greatest in the history of college football. And Mac Jones showed what player development is supposed to look like. Najee Harris turned in a season cut from the same mold as other great Bama running backs. Finally, the metrics point to Saban’s team being among the nation’s best. Both Sagarin and ESPN’s FPI have the Tide ranked No. 4.
Final ranking: Way too low
If we could do it all over again, this is how we would rank them:
Tim Howe is an owner of Yellowhammer Multimedia
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