Culture
Who will win College Football Playoff? Why Bruce Feldman has Oregon winning his bracket
Who will win the first 12-team College Football Playoff national championship? I believe there are six teams that have the personnel, savvy and leadership to make a run and win it all, handling top competition as the margin for error gets smaller and the spotlight gets so much brighter.
I love so many of these matchups as we game out the bracket. I’ve long been looking forward to this first expanded Playoff, and I’m now downright giddy about what we’re about to see over the next month and a half.
Here are my picks for the Playoff:
First round
(8) Ohio State over (9) Tennessee
8 p.m. ET | Saturday, Dec. 21 | Columbus, Ohio
I love this opening-round matchup. The Vols will have the best defense the Buckeyes have played, and young Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava has been impressive down the stretch, throwing 11 touchdowns and just one interception in five November games. But I think the Buckeyes’ defense will be the difference against a shaky Vols O-line in a very hostile environment.
(5) Texas over (12) Clemson
4 p.m. ET | Saturday, Dec. 21 | Austin, Texas
Clemson, the ACC champ, has won two national titles under Dabo Swinney. But the Tigers are just 2-3 against teams with winning records and 0-2 vs. the SEC, and now they head to Austin. It’s a very intriguing QB battle here. Clemson’s Cade Klubnik, born in Austin, has been terrific and gotten better as the season has gone on, while Quinn Ewers and the Texas offense have sputtered over the past month.
But I’m still going with the Longhorns here. I don’t think Clemson’s defense is stout enough — it ranks No. 14 in the 17-team ACC against the run — to win on the road against a team as talented as Texas.
GO DEEPER
College Football Playoff 12-team debut season verdict: The football is good, my friends
(7) Notre Dame over (10) Indiana
8 p.m. ET | Friday, Dec. 20 | South Bend, Ind.
Indiana doesn’t get a home game, but it won’t have to travel far to visit Notre Dame for the first matchup between the in-state foes since 1991. The Hoosiers have been a great story this season, but Notre Dame’s defense will be too much for IU. And even though the Hoosiers have the top-ranked run defense in the Big Ten, the Irish run game is very dangerous and capable of causing problems.
(6) Penn State over (11) SMU
Noon ET | Saturday, Dec. 21 | State College, Pa.
SMU got into the Playoff with the last at-large bid despite losing to Clemson on Saturday and faces Penn State in Happy Valley, where there will be a raucous crowd. The Nittany Lions have an elite running back tandem in Nicholas Singleton and Kaytron Allen and ran all over a good Oregon defense. The Mustangs have been superb at shutting down the run, with only Boston College averaging more than 4 yards per carry against them this year, and they yield an ACC-best 2.74 yards a rush. SMU also protects its quarterbacks well (only 15 sacks allowed in 13 games).
But I’m not picking against Penn State in Beaver Stadium. I feel like the Nittany Lions will build off an impressive showing by their offense in the Big Ten title game.
Quarterfinals
(1) Oregon over (8) Ohio State
5 p.m. ET | Wednesday, Jan. 1 | Rose Bowl | Pasadena, Calif.
This would be a fun rematch. The Buckeyes almost beat the Ducks in Autzen Stadium at midseason, and now they can play again in the Rose Bowl. I picked Ohio State to win it all in the preseason. I still think the Buckeyes are talented enough to win the title, even after their dud performance against Michigan two weeks ago, but it’s become apparent this squad is struggling under the pressure it seems to be putting on itself now.
On the other side, Dan Lanning’s guys always seem primed for whatever challenge they get, and I think the Ducks have a significant edge at QB with Dillon Gabriel.
(5) Texas over (4) Arizona State
1 p.m. ET | Wednesday, Jan. 1 | Peach Bowl | Atlanta
This matchup would be fascinating for a variety of reasons, but start with this: The Longhorns came within a play of being in the national title game last year, while the Sun Devils were picked to finish last in the Big 12 in the preseason after going 3-9 in Kenny Dillingham’s first season. The Sun Devils are arguably the hottest team in the country right now, winning six in a row. Running back Cam Skattebo has been a beast, and this ASU team looks like it’s really feeding off his energy and his attitude.
I think ASU gives Texas a game … for a half, before the Longhorns’ talent takes over.
(2) Georgia over (7) Notre Dame
8:45 p.m. ET | Wednesday, Jan. 1 | Sugar Bowl | New Orleans
Notre Dame’s O-line, which was such a question mark early in the season, has held up very well, allowing just 15 sacks in 12 games. But Georgia’s front seven is scary — just ask Ewers and Texas, whose solid O-line the Dawgs have overwhelmed twice. I do think the Irish’s defense is good enough to keep this one close, but the Georgia athleticism comes at you in waves. The Bulldogs will force a big turnover or two in the second half to pull away.
(6) Penn State over (3) Boise State
7:30 p.m. ET | Tuesday, Dec. 31 | Fiesta Bowl | Glendale, Ariz.
Penn State lost to Ohio State at home and Oregon in the Big Ten title game, yet it got a more favorable draw than either of them. In SMU and now Boise State, the Nittany Lions face two teams that were both G5 programs last year.
While this isn’t a great Penn State run defense — USC averaged almost 8 yards a carry on PSU and Oregon just ran for 183 yards on it — and Ashton Jeanty is a much better back than either of those teams have, the Nittany Lions have enough athletes to not let the Boise State superstar run wild. Expect this one to be close. Jeanty probably goes for around 200 yards, but the Nittany Lions’ combination of tight end Tyler Warren and two elite running backs in a very good system comes up big down the stretch.
GO DEEPER
Penn State has the most favorable path through the College Football Playoff
Semifinals
(1) Oregon over (5) Texas
7:30 p.m. ET | Friday, Jan. 10 | Cotton Bowl | Arlington, Texas
Gabriel has seen plenty of Texas from his Oklahoma days. He beat a really good UT team last year with the Sooners and didn’t play in the 2022 game when the Horns blew out the Sooners. His legs will be a key here; he ran for 113 yards on Texas last year.
(2) Georgia over (6) Penn State
7:30 p.m. ET | Thursday, Jan. 9 | Orange Bowl | Miami Gardens, Fla.
Georgia’s offense has been really inconsistent, but as long as its front seven is healthy, the Bulldogs present big problems. Winning two Playoff games is a step in the right direction for James Franklin’s Nittany Lions. But I don’t see them handling the Dawgs, who are just bigger and more physical than the first two CFP opponents Penn State got.
National championship
(1) Oregon over (2) Georgia
7:30 p.m. ET | Monday, Jan. 20 | Atlanta
Dan Lanning against his old boss Kirby Smart in the title game is a sweet subplot. The Ducks are built a lot like Smart’s squad. They have a lot of those same elite big players — maybe not quite as many of them in the front seven — and they also have better skill talent and the edge at quarterback, especially given Carson Beck’s injury questions.
To me, Oregon has the top QB in this entire field in Gabriel. He’s very experienced and accurate and has a quick release and A-plus leadership skills. Consider this: Gabriel has a 22-to-3 TD-to-INT ratio against ranked opponents over the past three seasons. The guy seems to be at his best when the spotlight gets hotter and the competition gets better, and this game is as big as it can get. Nike founder and Oregon booster Phil Knight, at 86, finally gets his college football national title.
GO DEEPER
Oregon goes unbeaten (with swagger) in first Big Ten season. And the Ducks aren’t finished
(Top illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: James Black, Aaron J. Thornton, James Gilbert / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
-
Missouri3 minutes agoRobbie O’Connor, Carmelo Musacchia power Northeastern past Missouri State at Lawrence Regional | Whole Hog Sports
-
Montana6 minutes ago
Montana Lottery Powerball, Lotto America results for May 30, 2026
-
Nebraska11 minutes agoOle Miss baseball vs. Nebraska in NCAA Tournament suspended by weather until Sunday
-
Nevada18 minutes agoThe Girl Scouts of Southern Nevada names Warren Kay to board of directors
-
New Hampshire21 minutes agoLet’s Talk Nature: The Value of Conserved Land
-
New Jersey26 minutes agoSimon Nemec’s contract demand could ruin any return for New Jersey Devils
-
New Mexico33 minutes agoLand prices soar along High Road to Taos, spurring concerns of cultural loss
-
North Carolina35 minutes ago
NC Lottery Powerball, Pick 3 Day results for May 30, 2026
