College football coaching tiers have a new look, plus Georgia Tech gets the upset and last laugh

Until Saturday Newsletter 🏈 | This is The Athletic ’s college football newsletter. Sign up here to receive Until Saturday directly in your inbox. It’s Week 1 .

.. but don’t reveal your depth chart! None of the cool kids are doing that these days.



Today, we’re focusing on Florida State ’s Week 0 upset loss, coaching tiers without Nick Saban and Netflix’s new documentary “Sign Stealer.” You’ll also have a chance to submit your preseason predictions for this season. Florida State’s Fall After all the talk of being snubbed from last year’s College Football Playoff and wanting to ditch the ACC, No.

10 Florida State opened the 2024 college football season in ...

well ...

underwhelming fashion . In a 24-21 loss to Georgia Tech , it was brutally obvious how much Florida State missed QB Jordan Travis and last season’s plethora of offensive weapons (the Seminoles totaled just 98 rushing yards). Even more, Florida State’s defense was completely outmatched by the Yellow Jackets and mobile QB Haynes King .

Advertisement No, it’s not entirely fair to point fingers and mock the Seminoles (despite online critics calling them the biggest whiners in the sport). But we can use their loss as the perfect case study for what regular-season upsets mean in this new 12-team Playoff era . Simply put, Florida State is still entirely in the CFP conversation (the beauty of this expanded format).

The silver lining, as The Athletic’s Chris Vannini noted on the Until Saturday podcast , is that the Seminoles’ transfer-heavy roster may need some time to jell. If that’s the case, Florida State could be competing for the ACC auto-bid in the conference championship a few months from now. Grace Raynor and Manny Navarro went deeper into the Seminoles’ new CFP path, which you can read here .

As a bonus, Florida State and Georgia Tech gave us the best dance battle nobody asked for in some fun Week 0 drama. The winner here? I’m not an expert in the Irish Jig, but I’ll have to give the trophy to the Yellow Jackets for getting the last laugh. Coach Tiers This year’s college football coach tiers look a lot different without Saban slotting as the best of the best.

(But the former Alabama coach did a pretty good job in his debut as an official analyst on ESPN’s “College GameDay” last weekend.) Still, the college football coaching world must adapt and move on. So in the newest tiers — which evaluate coaches from measurable success to resources to length of track record and more — Georgia ’s Kirby Smart and Clemson ’s Dabo Swinney took over Tier 1 as the only active FBS coaches with multiple national titles.

Here are a few more things I found interesting: Read the full coach tiers story here . Make Your Picks Last week I shared my preseason 12-team CFP projection with you. Today, I want to hear your thoughts.

Submit your picks for this season’s national champion, Heisman Trophy winner and more here . We’ll review the picks on Thursday. Documentary Takeaways Netflix’s documentary “Sign Stealer” about ex-Michigan staffer Connor Stalions premiered this morning.

It tells the story of last season’s sign-stealing scandal at Michigan through the lens of the staffer at the center of it all. The only problem? Stalions is an unreliable narrator. Wolverines writer Austin Meek wrote a deep dive into what we learned (and mostly didn’t) from the documentary today.

For a quick summary, I pulled an excerpt of Austin’s biggest takeaway: “The documentary confirmed my impression that Stalions is neither a supervillain nor an innocent guy caught up in a vast web of conspiracy. It’s possible he’s an eccentric person in a sport full of eccentric people, someone with the right combination of intelligence, ambition and naivete to become the main character in one of college football’s most surreal scandals.” Advertisement Stewart Mandel wrote today that Stalions wants you to believe he’s a victim.

And we shouldn’t believe him. For more, listen to “The Audible” podcast , as “Sign Stealer” director Micah Brown joined Stewart and Bruce Feldman. I was curious if the documentary would answer my biggest burning question: Was that really Stalions on the Central Michigan sideline in a fake mustache and Chippewas attire ? While Stalions neither confirms nor denies it, Barstool founder and Wolverines diehard Dave Portnoy says on camera that Stalions confided it was indeed him.

Quick Snaps Michigan State is starting with the basics under new coach Jonathan Smith . Is the program ready to start picking up the pieces ? After a tumultuous ending at Miami , is Tyler Van Dyke ready for a fresh start in Madison? Jesse Temple has the story on Wisconsin ’s new starting quarterback. How equipped is LSU to make a College Football Playoff run? The Tigers could be a trendy wild-card pick .

How well-represented will the SEC be in the 12-team field? The Athletic ranks the conference’s top contenders. You can buy tickets to every college football game here . Enjoy this? Sign up for our other newsletters! Scoop City 🏈 | The Bounce 🏀 | Full Time ⚽ | The Windup ⚾ | Prime Tire 🏁 | The Pulse 📣 (Top photo of Kyle Efford : Tom Maher / INPHO via USA Today).