Culture
5 potential College Football Playoff underdogs favorites should fear including…Alabama?
College football has seen its fair share of underdog stories over the years. But too many of them occurred in September or in bowl games that counted for little more than pride. At long last, we’re on the brink of a new era. On Sunday, a genuine playoff bracket will be revealed, the first of its kind in FBS history (sorry, a four-team invitational doesn’t count).
With it comes the introduction of one of the most compelling aspects of sports: the chance for meaningful upsets. And, per our past research charting commonalities from upsets across sports, the most likely team to pull off one of those upsets (should they make the field) is Alabama.
GO DEEPER
College Football Playoff 2024 projections: What will Sunday’s final bracket look like?
Upsets are our niche, dating all the way back to 2006, when we launched the Giant Killers model that projects NCAA Tournament upsets (you know it as Bracket Breakers now). Over the years, we have expanded our reach to identify worthy underdogs in events ranging from the World Cup to the Olympics to the NFL. But all of those competitions had historical data we could analyze in our search for trends.
It will take time to build a robust model unique to the brand new College Football Playoff. (How much of an edge does a first-round home game provide? How much does an underdog’s conference matter in its chances of pulling off an upset?) In the meantime, we can still apply what we’ve learned about upsets in other sports, starting with three key premises that have proven true in just about any sport we have studied.
1. Some underdogs are underrated and under-seeded
Find teams whose underlying statistical strengths outweigh their records, and you’ll pinpoint squads that are likely to overperform in the future. In this case, that leads you to that plucky squad known as … the Alabama Crimson Tide. It also highlights how the current format won’t allow some of the most dangerous teams into the field. More on that later.
2. The best underdogs play high-risk, high-reward styles
Inviting greater variance into the upset equation boosts the chances an underdog can clip a superior opponent. For longshots, inconsistency is a good thing. To examine this, we have looked at the weekly shifts in every FBS team’s basic power rating this season, after adjusting for the strength of their opponents. Our Variability Index measures which programs have the widest range of game-to-game outcomes. Kansas has the craziest gyrations among Power 4 teams, beating BYU and Colorado before getting wiped out by Baylor in the past three weeks.
3. Luck tends to regress to the mean over time
It pays to target underdogs that have been victims of bad fortune, and attack favorites who have received more than their fair share of good breaks. Teamrankings.com measures this by comparing team records with scoring margins. Their Luck Rankings call UCF the unluckiest team in the country: The Knights went just 4-8 but scored 42 points more than their opponents this season.
With all that in mind, let’s take a look at the teams currently sitting on the CFP bubble. We’ll define that as teams that have a realistic chance of playing a first-round road game. We’re not concerned with which teams are most deserving of a bid; we want to know which have the best chance of pulling off a major upset, whether that’s a 12-seed winning a road game against the 5-seed, or a 9-seed taking out the No. 1 team in the quarterfinals.
We will be able to take a deeper dive once we have matchups. And we can address teams that don’t offer particularly strong or weak upset chances – Miami and Clemson, specifically – should they find their way into the bracket. But for now, here are five potential underdogs that favorites should want to avoid and four they should hope to face.
Good dogs
Ole Miss and Alabama
Hey, don’t blame us for shoehorning a couple of the biggest powerhouses in the country into the role of plucky underdogs. The top conferences have expanded to the point where their highly ranked teams can’t all play one another. And the CFP selection committee still hasn’t made its mission clear: Is it out to reward the teams that accomplished the most, or the teams that would make the strongest contenders moving forward?
It’s nearly inevitable for some of the best Power 4 also-rans to end up underseeded. It was also entirely foreseeable, too. Back in May, Oklahoma AD Joe Castiglione asked, “[What] if a team has had a great season and played the toughest schedule in the season and has marquee wins but ends up with a 9-3 record?” So here we are.
No. 1 Oregon has gone 12-0 while scoring 422 points and allowed 194, for a 228-point differential. Alabama is at plus-219 (426-207) against a significantly tougher schedule. Ole Miss is at plus-283 (450-167) against a comparably difficult schedule.
GO DEEPER
How much does the CFP committee punish losing a conference title game?
The Crimson Tide have been unfortunate, winning six games by more than three touchdowns apiece while losing two by a touchdown or fewer. They rate 105th in the luck rankings.
The Rebels fare considerably worse than that, ranking 119th. They’ve walloped South Carolina and Georgia, but sustained three losses by a total of 13 points. Their pre-Thanksgiving game against Florida, where Ole Miss outgained the Gators 464 yards to 344 and had more red zone chances but lost, 24-17, was a particular horror show of uncharacteristic turnovers and fluky plays.
In fact, our Variability Index says Ole Miss has been one of the most consistent teams in the country, with the smallest spread among their very best and very worst performances. The Rebels’ weekly swings have been almost completely due to the strength of their opponents and (mostly bad) luck.
Whatever system you pick — Massey, ESPN’s SP+, the Simple Rating System, etc. — predictive analytics see both Alabama and Ole Miss as top-10 teams. It looks like Ole Miss is out, but if either of these two get in, all we can say is: Favorites, beware.
SMU
SMU enters Saturday night’s ACC Championship Game against Clemson as a 2.5-point favorite. If the Mustangs win, they could land the No. 3 seed.
If they lose, they can still make the Playoff, but probably as the 11- or 12-seed. It’s through that lens that we’re looking at them as a potential underdog. And in that scenario, their slingshot would be very dangerous. SMU ranks 30th in the nation in our Variability Index, the second-highest among all bubble teams — and not because their results have been bouncing all over the place, but because they’ve been improving by leaps and bounds.
SMU entered the national polls after beating Louisville on Oct. 5, and the Mustangs have continued to rise nearly every week since then, pulverizing ACC opponents by ever-increasing margins. In November, they won all four games by double-digits with an average margin of victory of 22.75 points.
SMU has been outstanding in the trenches, rushing for 177.9 yards while allowing just 95.8 per game. (Clemson, for comparison, is at 190.6 and 150.3.) And fairly quietly, quarterback Kevin Jennings has put together a season where he ranks 10th in the country in passer rating.
Point is, SMU is a top-10 team that’s unpredictable because it’s been getting better. If the Mustangs land in the lower reaches of the CFP, they’ll make one hot dog.
Indiana
By now, you know about Indiana’s astounding offense. The Hoosiers have hung 40 or more points on opponents eight times this season. QB Kurtis Rourke has a passer rating of 181.4, and WR Elijah Sarratt is nicknamed “Waffle House” because he’s always open, and he doesn’t even lead the team in yards per reception. That would be Omar Cooper Jr., who leads the country with 21.1 yards a catch.
But Indiana has also allowed just 14.7 points per game, the seventh-lowest total among FBS teams. The Hoosiers’ scoring margin (plus-344) is so huge that analytics systems see them as a top-10 team despite their middling schedule and a loss in their one true test at Ohio State.
Indiana has also had big swings: half a dozen games where they demolished opponents (beating Nebraska by 49, Michigan State by 37), and a handful of others where they won by merely comfortable margins (beating Northwestern by 17, Maryland by 14). Overall, the Hoosiers rank fifth in the country in our Variability Index, the highest among teams with a chance to make the CFP. So they’re very strong and very variable. Even on the road, that’s a recipe for seriously threatening a higher seed.
South Carolina
The Gamecocks aren’t likely to get in the field, but they represent another interesting case when viewed through the underdog lens.
In contrast to Alabama and Ole Miss, the Gamecocks haven’t been unlucky. If anything, their record is slightly better than their season-long numbers. But like SMU, they have been inconsistent because they have been getting better. South Carolina ranks 37th in the country in our Variability Index, second-highest among bubble teams, and you can see why: After three conference losses, including a blowout by Ole Miss, in a four-game stretch, this team turned around and whipped Texas A&M and Vanderbilt, and then overcame Missouri and Clemson by narrow margins.
All the while, South Carolina’s defense has been raising its game. Kyle Kennard now leads the nation with 11.5 sacks and 16 tackles for losses. Nick Emmanwori and Jalon Kilgore have eight interceptions between them. The Gamecocks have allowed just 15.3 points per game over the second half of this season. They’ve already shown that, at their best, they can play with anybody, and they’re showing at the end of the season their best is getting better. Alas, they probably won’t make the field.
Bad dogs
Boise State or UNLV
First things first: Boise State may not even get an opportunity to be a true underdog. Should the Broncos beat UNLV for the Mountain West title, they are likely to earn a first-round bye as the No. 4 or even No. 3 seed. That’s despite ranking just 21st in ESPN’s SP+ rankings. Then again, despite being the higher seed, they should be a significant underdog in the quarterfinals if the No. 5 seed (potentially Penn State or Notre Dame) advances. And the Broncos don’t have the profile of a team that should pose much of a threat.
As we’ve stressed, variability is a key ingredient in an upset. Low floors don’t matter: They are the difference between losing by three or 30. But high ceilings generate unlikely outcomes. Boise State is the antithesis of that type of team. From week to week, the Broncos’ opponent-adjusted power rating has changed (up or down) by an average of only 0.88 points, the smallest bounce in the entire country. They’re also 14th in the nation in “luck” meaning they have likely overperformed against an underwhelming schedule.
Yes, the Broncos took Oregon to the wire in September. And sure, they have Ashton Jeanty doing jaw-dropping things. But the metrics say Boise State’s highest level simply isn’t good enough, and that’s still better than UNLV’s!
The Rebels are ranked in the 30s by most rating systems (and 42nd by Massey), so it’s not like they’re some sort of sleeping giant. They rank in the top half of the country in terms of good luck, and are only in the middle of the pack in our Variability Index. UNLV simply isn’t a Playoff-worthy team and, if they shock Boise State in the Mountain West title game, the Rebels’ stay will be brief.
Iowa State or Arizona State
Whichever team wins the Big 12 Championship Game should savor the moment because it won’t last long. There’s a reason why the CFP committee has consistently ranked Boise State ahead of whichever team has led the Big 12 most of the season. The conference is really weak.
According to ESPN’s SP+ rankings, BYU is the best of the bunch (20th), but the Cougars won’t play for the conference championship. Iowa State ranks 24th – one spot ahead of 6-6 USC. And Arizona State is 39th!
It’s not just that these teams are mediocre (by playoff standards). They also don’t compensate with strong underdog traits. Both teams have been extremely fortunate: The Sun Devils rank ninth in the country in luck rating, and the Cyclones are 15th. Their level of play is also steady. Arizona State is in the top 40 of most consistent teams in the country, which is nice when you’re trying to beat the likes of Kansas and TCU, but not when you need a ceiling-game to beat Notre Dame. Iowa State is the third-most consistent team in the country.
Neither team did much in its nonconference games, unless you’re impressed by Iowa State’s one-point win over Iowa in September or Arizona State’s seven-point win over 2-10 Mississippi State.
In short, one of these teams will win the Big 12, likely play the No. 5 seed on the road … and lose.
(Illustration by Eamonn Dalton; photo of Kevin Jennings: Sam Hodde/Getty Images; photo of Ashton Jeanty: Brandon Vallance / ISI Photos / Getty Images; photo of Jalen Milroe: Jason Clark / Getty Images)
Here we are on Day 4 of the Poetry Challenge, looking up, again, at the sky. (If you’ve just arrived, click here to catch up.)
We’ve considered “The More Loving One” as a witty, teasing love poem, and also peeked into the life of its author, W.H. Auden, to see what it might have meant to him. But maybe it’s time to take this poem at face value, as a meditation on our place in the universe.
You can read the whole poem here, but to recap: We start by admiring the stars even though they don’t feel the same way (or any way, really) about us. Then we wonder … do we care about them all that much? At last, we imagine them extinguished, leaving an emptiness that we tell ourselves would be just fine. Eventually.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
The poem resolves with a sigh that seems to linger, as if the poem didn’t quite want to end. Unlike the concluding lines of the previous stanzas, all of which clocked in at precisely eight syllables, the last line of the last one extends to nine. That may sound trivial, but we know that Auden counted his syllables carefully.
And it isn’t hard to identify the extra particle, the one tweezed in among the others. Auden could just as well have written, “Though this might take a little time.”
That would have maintained the pattern without altering the meaning. The “me” is implied. Adding it might seem redundant. Which is exactly why Auden does it.
Though this might take me a little time.
W.H. Auden, poet
That scant word makes the poem last a little longer. It also emphasizes the human presence of the speaker, a person whose perceptions and feelings are what this is finally all about. He is asking for patience, for grace, as he adjusts his eyes and heart to a stark new situation.
But how much time is “a little”? The split second it takes to utter that extra, unstressed “me”? However much is needed to heal all proverbial wounds? Or are we thinking in astronomical measures, as those stars invite us to suppose? In that case, it might take our poor stargazer more time than he has. Millions of years. Hundreds of millions!
What does it mean to exist as a solitary being in such a vast, incomprehensible cosmos? This may have been an especially timely question when this poem was written; early versions date from 1957, the year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, marking the beginning of the space age. But poets have been looking at the sky for a very long time.
Some find comforting news of heaven, like William Wordsworth:
The stars are mansions built by Nature’s hand,
And, haply, there the spirits of the blest
Dwell, clothed in radiance, their immortal vest’
Others, like Ada Limón, see the projection of our own curiosity:
Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars.
Occasionally a poet (Stephen Crane in this case) will hear an answer that makes Auden’s silent stars seem kind:
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
Auden himself came back to the subject a dozen years after “The More Loving One,” in a poem called “Moon Landing,” which ambivalently hailed the Apollo II mission as a “phallic triumph,” “a grand gesture” of male self-regard. And while he acknowledges the spirit of adventure behind the mission, he doesn’t admire the moon enough to want to see it up close:
Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
and was not charmed
He’d rather contemplate the moon above him — one who “still queens the Heavens” — than tread like Neil Armstrong on its dusty, lifeless surface. The feats of NASA and its astronauts belong to a world of science, politics and media spectacle; Auden prefers the realm of mythology and aesthetics.
He’s in good poetic company. In “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” Walt Whitman, at a lecture, finds himself “tired and sick” of charts and diagrams and scientific discourse.
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
He did not give a damn if they gave a damn.
For Auden, as for Whitman, demystifying the stars risks stripping them of their poetry. A sense of wonder flickers through “The More Loving One,” along with the wit and the romantic weariness. The poem concludes with an almost defiant commitment to awe, the search for sublimity in the heavens.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
Stars or no stars, what matters is the attitude of the person below: receptive, yearning, more in love than he may be willing to admit, even if — or indeed because — he doesn’t quite know what it is he’s worshiping.
As we approach the end of the poem, our own feelings might be in a bit of tangle: admiration, amusement and something else that’s harder to pin down in words or themes. A feeling that, having spent time with a poem largely about solitude, we are less alone.
Let’s nail down those tricky last lines, and come back tomorrow to talk about the whole thing.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the final stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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