Bold predictions for Week 11 in college football
The Paste BN Sports college football staff — Nicole Auerbach, Paul Myerberg, George Schroeder and Dan Wolken — weighs in with some bold predictions for Week 11 of the college football season:
Nicole Auerbach
We’ll still have four unbeaten Power Five teams come Sunday morning. I know history says we most definitely won’t have four at the end of the season, but there are just so few opportunities for these elite teams to lose.
Sure, Pitt will put up a good fight against Clemson. Iowa will be a tougher test than Michigan’s been used to lately. USC is, in my opinion, the best three-loss team in the country, and the Trojans come play at Washington.
Yet despite all of those challenges, we’ll see the same four unblemished teams atop the CFP rankings next week.
Paul Myerberg
Two of the current top four in the College Football Playoff standings will be put to the test on Saturday, though both will survive to remain unbeaten. I think Pittsburgh will score points on Clemson, though the Panthers’ defense has been surprisingly ineffective. Eventually, the Tigers will pull away.
Washington is going to have its hands full with rejuvenated USC, which has talent and firepower to head into Seattle and upend the Playoff race. I still think the Huskies will find a way to take the Trojans’ best shot and pull out the victory.
George Schroeder
It has been a long, hard season for the programs we expect to see battling for Pac-12 supremacy. It’s just plain weird to see Stanford and Oregon in a game that matters for pride — and in Oregon’s case, at least, another in a series of weekly referendums on the future of coach Mark Helfrich.
It’s in Eugene. But Stanford has righted itself a little, winning two in a row. The Cardinal will beat Oregon, ending the Ducks’ faint hopes of reaching a bowl and turning up the heat on Helfrich even more.
Dan Wolken
In a world where there’s an impulse to look for alternatives to established narratives, you’ll see a consensus building after this weekend that Washington quarterback Jake Browning is the primary Heisman Trophy challenger to Louisville’s Lamar Jackson. It seems like the deal with Washington is the more people actually get a look at this team, the more they like what they see.
Of course, being on the West Coast and without a lot of elite depth in the Pac-12 this year, it just doesn’t seem like there are people have seen Washington that much. That should change this weekend on a Saturday where there aren’t a lot of other big games and Washington will sort of have the stage to itself against USC.
How many Heisman voters are even aware at this point that Browning is completing 68% of his passes with an insane 34-to-3 touchdown/interception ratio? If he has a big showing against the Trojans, the buzz will grow considerably as the feeling of inevitably around Jackson begins to work against him down the stretch.
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