Eight weeks into the season, potential conference championship matchups across college football are taking shape, but questions remain.
Will Ohio State and Indiana meet back in Indianapolis for a 2025 Big Ten rematch? Does UCLA continue its hot streak and reach its first-ever Big Ten title match instead? Despite its loss to Auburn, Georgia continues to make its case as the SEC’s top team. But who could the Bulldogs face? A two-loss Ole Miss team, or could a contender like Kentucky earn a spot in the SEC championship?Â
On the latest episode of “The Joel Klatt Show,” FOX Sports’ Joel Klatt made his projections heading into Week 9 of the regular season.
Klatt’s thoughts: “I’m going to give Ohio State the benefit of the doubt. They’re going to figure something out on offense, and I think Ohio State gets themselves to Indianapolis and they’re going to play for the Big Ten Championship. So that leaves the next spot. Is it going to be UCLA? Now I don’t think UCLA is going to run the table. I just think that that’s too difficult. We see every single week that it is difficult for these 18-to-24-year olds, and some older at this point. But you know what I’m saying. It’s difficult for these young men to play at a consistent level. We see it week in and week out. So to expect UCLA to just run off into Indianapolis and get to the Big Ten championship game, I think would be naive of us. I think UCLA gets tripped up one time, which means those two teams would actually be in a tiebreak, and the tiebreak would be that game against Michigan. In this case, in this scenario, I think that Michigan were to trip up UCLA. Indiana got that win last week [against Michigan], which means Indiana is in the Big Ten championship game.
“So here, we have for the second-straight year an Ohio State-Indiana matchup. And by the way, please, that would be amazing because the two previous games that we’ve seen from these teams have been amazing, amazing games. Last year in the championship game, what we just witnessed two weeks ago with Nick Marsh’s foot being just out of bounds, that was an amazing game. I would love to see this, and we know how evenly matched these teams are ⦠If you tell me, if you take that at face value and you’ve got Julian Sayin not on the field for Ohio State, it’s really hard for me to say that Ohio State’s going to beat Indiana, in particular with how evenly matched I know that they are.Â
“If they don’t have Sayin on the field, Indiana is going to win the Big Ten championship over Ohio State.”
Klatt’s thoughts: “This one’s much more difficult. In a good way ⦠It’s hard to project what’s going on from week-to-week, and we see that with Georgia losing to Auburn, and then all of a sudden LSU destroys Auburn. We see this week in and week out. Florida and Missouri, Ole Miss, Texas. I think it’s a mess in the most beautiful way, because it’s going to be very difficult to actually project what we see during the course of this last month ⦠I see Georgia as my SEC favorite. I think Georgia is the best team in the SEC, partly because they’re the most consistent. Even though they lost to Auburn, I get it ⦠Now we have to figure out, okay, who else is going to Atlanta now? Because this is where it’s a real mess. Ole Miss only has one ranked opponent left on the schedule. It happens to be that Georgia game ⦠Do we really anticipate anyone winning out? I don’t know. I got to be honest with you. I really don’t.
“But they have a quarterback that I trust that almost came back on the road against Texas, in a game in which Texas showed that they’re playing the best football that they had played all season long, and Ole Miss still almost came back and beat them. So do I trust Ole Miss? Yeah, I kind of do. Where does that all land us? Well, it lands us in this scenario. There would be a large tie in the standings in which Ole Miss essentially wins the tiebreaker. I’m not quite sure. I just d
