The Biggest College Football Storylines of Week 5

Week 4 had the Notre Dame-Georgia showdown, the A&M-Auburn SEC West duel, the Michigan-Wisconsin Big Ten battle, and the Utah-USC Pac-12 South clash.

The Week 5 schedule isn’t as attractive, but there are still plenty of interesting storylines and tension points to consider:

1 – Pac-12 Peril

The Pac-12 is in huge trouble as far as the College Football Playoff and New Year’s Six bowls are concerned, but the conference – displaying a typically counterintuitive reality – has the best games of the weekend.

Washington State at Utah – the game which will be especially easy for Australians to watch (noon Melbourne time on Sunday, late night in the United States on Saturday) – is hugely important. Both teams lost conference games last week and cannot afford to fall to 0-2.

Very similarly, USC and Washington have already lost one game (USC in a non-conference game, Washington in a conference game). A second loss before the end of September would fully eliminate the losing team from the playoff. Washington, having lost a Pac-12 game to California earlier in September, cannot stumble a second time in the conference. Oregon would have the inside track to the Pac-12 North title if Washington loses here.

A loss for Washington would sting even more because USC is playing a third-string quarterback, Matt Fink. The Trojans’ top two quarterbacks, J.T. Daniels and Kedon Slovis, have been injured this season.

2 – Virginia gets its big chance

The Virginia Cavaliers are the only member of the seven-team ACC Coastal Division which has not yet won a division title. (The other six teams: Duke, North Carolina, Georgia Tech, Miami, Virginia Tech, and last year’s first-time division champion, Pittsburgh.) Precisely because Virginia isn’t playing an ACC game on Saturday at Notre Dame, the Cavaliers can be aggressive if they want to.

Will they try anything and everything to beat Notre Dame… and if they are ambitious, will they be able to execute a high-risk, low-margin game plan?

Notre Dame, for its part, will need to play a focused and energetic game after the emotionally draining loss to Georgia. This is the best game of the weekend… on paper, at least.

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3 – Survival

The games between teams in the top tier of a conference are the games television executives and fans long for. However, the games between mid-tier teams in conferences are hugely important in shaping the contours of a season.

Some examples in Week 5: North Carolina State versus Florida State in the ACC Atlantic Division; Minnesota versus Purdue in the Big Ten West Division; Kansas State versus Oklahoma State in the Big 12; Kentucky versus South Carolina in the SEC; UCLA versus Arizona in the Pac-12.

The losers will face severe uphill battles to finish in the upper half of their division or conference (or both). The winners will gain breathing room and much better odds of making a bowl game.

4 – Nebraska under the lights

Nebraska isn’t producing the results of a primetime program, but the Cornhuskers are playing the primetime Saturday game at 7:30 p.m. New York time (9:30 a.m. Melbourne time on Sunday) against big, bad Ohio State. Nebraska is a huge underdog in this game, but remember this: College football has produced outright upsets (not just against the spread, but straight up) by teams which were underdogs of at least 41 and 36 points. Nebraska is playing at home with no one expecting it to do anything versus the loaded Buckeyes.

Let’s see if Nebraska, playing the most important game of its season, can play well for one night. The Huskers won’t be consistently good this season, but in one game – one four-hour sequence – maybe they can play above their heads. Don’t expect it, but almost anything is possible in college football.

5 – Monitoring the Mountain West

The Mountain West has had a better season than the American Athletic Conference (AAC) through four weeks. Will this equation change in Week 5, or remain the same? Stay tuned.

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