2022 National Championship contenders: The West
Which teams have the athletes and tactics to actually win the National Championship?
Over the course of this offseason we’ve compiled three different metrics for evaluating high level teams in college football.
Space force theory: The gist here is that elite athletes at left tackle, deep threat receiver, man cornerback, and Edge rusher can have an outsized impact on a game. Their matchups are routinely 1-on-1 battles in space with high stakes for winning or losing (touchdowns, turnovers, etc), so having elite athletes at those positions will matter more than other personnel, save perhaps for having really good decision-making at quarterback.
The rule of three in pass defense: To play elite, modern pass defense you need to be able to handle one of two requirements. To rush the quarterback with only three or to be able to cover a team’s top three receivers in man/match coverage without getting burned. Rushing with only three allows you to get help to defenders anywhere in the secondary, playing three capable man coverage defenders allows you to survive without needing help everywhere.
Pro-style passing wins titles: The most difficult level of college offense to master or to defend is a pro-style, spread passing game. Teams who can execute it with high level personnel will beat other high level teams executing a different style of offense.
Combine those three metrics with our currently limited but not useless sense of the rosters in the game and we can do some decent guesswork on who can win the title this year. By the time the playoffs are settling into focus, we should have a good idea of who will win the title.
For instance, I had Ohio State eliminated before the season last year because the defense had far too many question marks. After the Championship week I had Alabama as the heavy favorite to win it all, which looked great until injuries derailed my prediction. It’s the second time major injuries have foiled my playoff prognostications concerning Georgia and Alabama. I wrote back in 2017 that Jalen Hurts’ limitations as a passer would doom the Tide, which proved wrong only because Nick Saban adjusted and threw freshman Tua Tagovailoa out there and blew the game open.
Anyways, we’re going to travel around the nation and try to do our best to evaluate potential contenders based on these metrics. We’ll be using some Vegas odds to initially sort out teams but I’ll add any with bad odds I think are relevant.
Today we’ll start on the western side of the Mississippi, where the game is currently beset by the turmoil of realignment.
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