After an offseason dominated by discussions of board meetings and television contracts and featuring more than enough uses of the phrase “grant of rights” to last several lifetimes, the 2023 season is finally set to kick off this weekend.
For hardcore fans of the sport, it will likely be the last version that resembles the product we’ve been accustomed to for decades. Realignment will finally remove practically any semblance of regionality, and an expanded College Football Playoff will drastically change the stakes of the regular season.
While the 2023 season will likely prove to be wistful in several ways, that doesn’t change the on-field concerns each power conference will face. With that in mind, here’s one burning question for each league in the Power Five.
ACC: Will someone knock Clemson off its pedestal?
It’s hard to talk about the ACC without talking about the Clemson Tigers. Aside from the 2021 season, coach Dabo Swinney’s team has captured the conference title every year since 2015.
After failing to win the Atlantic Division in a (relatively) down 2021 season, Clemson got back to its conference title-winning ways in 2022 but was still a step or two behind the best teams in the country.
There’s certainly some optimism in Clemson entering 2023 with former five-star Cade Klubnik poised to potentially break out as a sophomore after taking over the starting quarterback job in the ACC championship game last year. To direct the offense, the Tigers brought in Garrett Riley — younger brother of Lincoln — from TCU.
The move to bring in Riley, an outsider, is a good sign for what has been an insular Clemson program, but it may not be enough to maintain the advantage the team has enjoyed in the conference for much of the last decade.
Florida State seems like the top contender. Coach Mike Norvell’s team enters the year ranked higher than Clemson in both polls after a surprisingly successful 2022 season. Quarterback Jordan Travis is back, as is one of the nation’s best defensive players in Jared Verse, who chose to return to Tallahassee rather than enter the draft.
Norvell’s team is certainly the safest bet for a non-Clemson champion, but it’s not the only one who will be in contention. North Carolina returns a Heisman candidate at quarterback in Drake Maye, while N.C. State adds Virginia transfer Brennan Armstrong, who will look to bounce back from a disappointing 2022 season with the change of scenery.
Still, the Sept. 23 matchup between Florida State and Clemson could have both conference and playoff implications. And with the abolition of divisions in the ACC, it may not be the only matchup between the two teams we see this fall.
Big 12: Will a post-2023 power emerge?
It’s no secret that the Big 12 is set to lose its two preeminent programs in Oklahoma and Texas following the 2023 season. Though Cincinnati, UCF, Houston and BYU join this season and Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Arizona State are set to complete the new-look conference in 2024, there seems to be a significant power vacuum in the conference after this fall.
Of course, neither the Longhorns nor the Sooners won the conference or even played in its title game last year. TCU came out of nowhere in Year 1 under Sonny Dykes to represent the Big 12 in the CFP, but the Horned Frogs lost a lot of pieces and are likely heading for something of a rebuilding year.
We can’t ignore the conference’s actual champion in Kansas State, which lost an elite playmaker in running back Deuce Vaughn but brings back Will Howard, who became the starting quarterback due to injury but ultimately emerged as one of the league’s best.
Still, finding dark horses in this conference isn’t the easiest. Texas has a lot to prove but looks like the most talented team in the conference, and while Oklahoma isn’t drawing a ton of hype after a 6-7 finish in Year 1 under Brent Venables, the Sooners are still among the league’s more talented teams.
Maybe Texas Tech and Kansas, two programs rapidly building, can make a jump this fall. Perhaps Oklahoma State and Baylor, the 2021 title game participants, can get back to contention after each turned in disappointing follow-ups in 2022.
Unlike the Pac-12, quick action allowed the Big 12 to survive its two top programs being poached. But the new group still lacks a clear blue blood, and 2023 presents a great opportunity for someone to stake that claim before the final additions arrive next summer.
Big Ten: Is this league still capable of winning the national title?
The decision to include Ohio State in the very first four-team playoff field back in 2014 was a source of quite a bit of controversy at the time, but the Buckeyes proved the doubters wrong by capturing the first national title in CFP era.
Despite clearly asserting itself as a top-two conference in the sport since then, the Big Ten is still looking for its first national title in nearly a decade.
Ohio State has only won a single playoff game since its 2014 run, and it’s seen three semifinal exits in the College Football Playoff. Michigan, which finally ended its losing streak to the Buckeyes in 2021, has won this conference the last two years but suffered embarrassing losses in both playoff appearances.
Entering the 2023 season, the Wolverines look like the top championship contender in the league once again as they return quarterback J.J. McCarthy and talented running back duo Donovan Edwards and Blake Corum. Ohio State lost C.J. Stroud, but likely new starting quarterback Kyle McCord’s job will be made easier by the presence of perhaps the top receiver in college football in Marvin Harrison Jr.
Ohio State very nearly knocked off eventual champion Georgia in the semifinal last year. If that happened, Ryan Day’s team likely would have won a national title and this question would be rendered moot.
But it didn’t happen, and we still haven’t seen a Big Ten power overtake the SEC’s best teams on the national stage. Perhaps Ohio State or Michigan — or maybe even a Penn State team potentially on the verge of a breakout — will get over that hump this season.
Until then, it remains a question mark.
SEC: Can Georgia be dethroned while Kirby Smart is there?
The idea of another program dominating the SEC while Nick Saban remained at Alabama seemed unthinkable just a few years ago, but that just goes to show how phenomenal a job Smart has done in Athens to turn this program into a machine.
Winners of the last two national titles and coming off a 15-0 2022 season, there isn’t really a clear challenger for a Bulldogs team that is the current favorite to three-peat. But if it’s going to happen, 2023 will be the year to do it.
Stetson Bennett has finally moved on, as did tight end Darnell Washington and a handful of defensive stars. But Georgia is still loaded with talent — most notably tight end Brock Bowers, who may be the best overall player in college football — and won’t be easy to take down.
As for the Tide, they enter another big transition under Saban. Tommy Rees was brought in to reform the offense, and there could be some fall-off on offense with the departure of Bryce Young and top playmaker Jahmyr Gibbs.
LSU ultimately won the West last season in a surprisingly successful Year 1 under Brian Kelly, and while the team returns many of its top players, it will likely need to take a significant step to compete with a Georgia team that dealt with the Tigers easily in Atlanta last December.
Other contenders exist in the league like Tennessee, Ole Miss and (potentially) South Carolina. But if someone is going to stand between Georgia and an unthinkable third-straight national title, it will likely have to be either the Tigers or Tide.
Pac-12: Can any good feelings be salvaged from the season?
It’s hard to even discuss on-the-field questions for the Pac-12 given all the existential ones the league faces. The 2023 season could be its last in existence after more than a century, and anything good that happens in the league this year would provide little consolation.
To put it bluntly, the biggest question facing the league is as follows: Can anything good come from this? And more specifically, would it even matter if it did?
The Pac-12 is still looking for its first CFP representative since 2016, and with four teams in the preseason top-15 in USC, Washington, Utah and Oregon, there’s a pretty decent chance that will actually happen this fall. This is the best collection of teams the conference has had in a while, and it’s arguably the best collection of quarterbacks in the entire country.
But would USC reaching the CFP as it leaves a smoldering Pac-12 in its wake bring the league any positive feelings? It’s hard to imagine it would, certainly not for the four teams being left behind.
Even if Oregon State had a historic season and won the conference, it’s hard to imagine it would provide much more than a bit of consolatory revenge. The Beavers are still in limbo beyond this season, and many of the teams it would have to beat out are not.
Is there any way for the Pac-12’s season to serve as anything more meaningful than a cautionary tale for how easily programs that don’t considerably impact the bottom line will be discarded in a sport controlled by television interests?
