College football 2023 live news updates: Coaching changes, roster moves and analysis

By now, you probably have seen the clip: David Pollack, an ESPN analyst and a Georgia legend, stating that Georgia “has taken hold of college football,” sitting next to Alabama head coach Nick Saban, who sat stone-faced, perhaps wondering why he bothered to fly to Los Angeles just for this.

Or maybe he knew, and that was the point.

In the context of the past two years, Georgia is clearly on top of college football. But is it permanent, or is Alabama still laying in wait? Where do things go from here? The two writers on the ground in Tuscaloosa (Aaron Suttles) and Athens (Seth Emerson) discuss.

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(Photo: Getty Images)

The 2022 college football season ended Monday — sometime during the first quarter, if we’re being honest — and you already have questions about the 2023 season …

Which first-year coach do you see being the most successful or having the biggest turnaround in their first year? — Clay

Everyone taking over a program this offseason faces a high bar set by one Daniel Dykes — bet you didn’t know Sonny’s real first name — after Dykes took TCU from 5-7 to the national title game in his first season. Can any of the newcomers put their team in the title game in 2023? Doubtful. Can some new coaches help their teams make big jumps? Absolutely.

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A swarm of students returned to the Cincinnati campus this weekend to mark the end of winter break and the start of the spring semester. That included several Bearcats football players, many of whom hadn’t been in town since returning from the Fenway Bowl on Dec. 17.

Head coach Scott Satterfield and the team held a return meeting Sunday, which offered the first opportunity for some of the recently hired coaches on Satterfield’s staff to meet with players in person.

That was not the case for new defensive coordinator Bryan Brown and much of Cincinnati’s returning defensive line.

“They were here working out over the break, here every day getting it in,” Brown said Tuesday, speaking with local media for the first time since arriving in Cincinnati. “I haven’t seen anything like it.”

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(Photo: AP)

Minnesota is hiring Syracuse safeties coach Nick Monroe as its cornerbacks coach.

Georgia won back-to-back national titles thanks to an excellent defense loaded with NFL talent that once again played its best on the biggest stage. This year, though, the champs did not finish No. 1 in stop rate.

What is stop rate? It’s a basic measurement of success: the percentage of a defense’s drives that end in punts, turnovers or a turnover on downs. This simple metric can offer a more accurate reflection of a defense’s effectiveness in today’s faster-tempo game than yards per game or points per game. We’ve been tracking this for each of the past five seasons (here are the final standings for 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017) along with every defense’s points per drive average.

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Minnesota is hiring Andrew Sowder as tight ends coach and Nic McKissic-Luke as running backs coach.

Sowder was offensive coordinator at Kent State and a finalist to succeed Sean Lewis as head coach there. McKissic-Luke coached RBs and special teams at Northern Illinois.

Lincoln Riley spoke with the media for two hours on Tuesday morning. While the news that Alex Grinch will be retained as defensive coordinator was the headline, Riley also talked about the new transfers, some young players to watch and his quality of life as the Trojans coach, among other topics.

So let’s sort through some thoughts on the year-end news conference.

Riley was less guarded and more relaxed with the media than he’s been at any point in his first year and change at USC. That meant there were some pretty blunt assessments about what he inherited from a roster standpoint.

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Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren is off to the Chicago Bears after spending fewer than 30 months in Rosemont, Ill. It was a short but eventful tenure — from facing a pandemic just months into the job and canceling the Big Ten’s college football season before restarting it, to adding USC and UCLA and signing a record-setting seven-year, $8 million media rights deal.

The open Big Ten job is one of the two most powerful positions in all of college sports, alongside SEC commissioner Greg Sankey. The two leagues bring in significantly more money than their peers on an annual basis, with the gap only widening in the coming years.

So, where does the Big Ten look? Almost the entire Council of Presidents and Chancellors has turned over since Warren was hired, which makes it harder to predict — and presidents tend to be an unpredictable group in the first place. Do they opt for another outsider like Warren, who had no college sports experience when he was hired? The Big 12, Pac-12 and even the NCAA just opted for outside hires for their biggest jobs. The potential remains for the Big Ten to go outside of college sports once again.

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The Bears are expected to hire Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren as their team president and CEO, multiple people close to the situation but not authorized to speak publicly confirmed to The Athletic. Here’s what you need to know:

Warren was interviewed at least twice with the Bears at Halas Hall, according to sources.

The Bears have been searching for a new president and CEO after Ted Phillips announced his plans in September to retire at the end of the 2022 season.

Warren became commissioner of the Big Ten in 2020 after more than 20 years working in the NFL with the Rams, Lions and Vikings.

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On Monday, for the first time in three years, media were allowed back on the field for the postgame celebration at a national championship game. As Georgia coaches and players celebrated in the rain (because apparently it can rain sideways in a stadium with a roof), I had déjà vu to Alabama’s 2012 championship win over Notre Dame in Miami Gardens.

Not so much because they were both blowouts, but because of the feeling of inevitability. Knowing I was probably going to be covering a lot more of these.

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By the time coach Kalen DeBoer finished his first recruiting class at Washington, it included only eight high school prospects, and only four who had previously committed to former coach Jimmy Lake. Numbers were tight to begin with, and the Huskies also had immediate needs — quarterback, cornerback, linebacker — best addressed through the transfer portal.

As might have been expected, then, Washington didn’t rely much on its true freshmen in 2022. The eight-player class — not counting junior college transfers — combined to play 350 snaps on offense and defense, per Pro Football Focus, or about 1.7 percent of Washington’s total snaps. The most significant single-game action: cornerback Jaivion Green’s 70 snaps against Oregon in relief of an injured Jordan Perryman, which accounted for nearly one-third of Green’s snaps this season. He played more than twice as much as any other Washington true freshman in 2022.

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There’s a house in the Five Points section of Athens that could end up having a big impact on the Georgia football team’s quarterback situation. The house has a linebacker who cooks and two offensive players named Brock who appreciate it.

“It’s three big dudes in there,” said Brock Vandagriff, the second-year quarterback. “Chaz (Chambliss) loves to cook, and me and Brock (Bowers) love to eat. We cook a lot of deer burgers and play a lot of games. It’s a really competitive house.”

Speaking of competition, Vandagriff is about to be engaged in a much more high-profile one.

Stetson Bennett’s college career is finally over, and Georgia needs a new starting quarterback. The favorite is Carson Beck, who was the top backup this season and was briefly ahead of Bennett early in the 2021 season. That has created speculation that Vandagriff, who was a five-star recruit two years ago, would leave, but he has vowed during the past two weeks he plans to at least stick around to see what happens in the spring.

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(Photo: Getty Images)

Former USC Trojans running back and Heisman Trophy winner Charles White died Wednesday in Newport Beach, Calif., the school announced. He was 64.

“Charles White was one of the all-time great Trojans,” said USC athletic director Mike Bohn. “A Rose Bowl legend, a two-time unanimous All-American and an NCAA record setter, he made USC proud donning the cardinal and gold.”

White played for the Trojans from 1976 to 1979, finishing his college career with 6,245 rushing yards and 49 touchdowns. He starred on USC’s national championship team in 1978 and twice led the NCAA in rushing yards.

In 1979, White rushed for 2,050 yards on 332 carries, scoring 19 touchdowns and becoming USC’s third Heisman Trophy winner.

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(Photo: AP)

Clemson wide receiver Joseph Ngata tweeted Wednesday night that he is entering the NFL Draft. Ngata caught 88 passes during his Clemson career for 1,287 yards and six touchdowns.

Kirby Smart is the answer to college football’s scariest hypothetical question. What if Georgia ever gets the right head coach at the right time?

Georgia, quite obviously, has surpassed Alabama as the sport’s standard bearer. In a legitimate rebuilding year after losing 15 NFL Draft picks and five first-rounders off its defense, Georgia became just the third team in the College Football Playoff era to go 15-0.

Kirby Smart spent nearly a decade working underneath the sport’s best coach ever: Nick Saban. Now, Smart is applying that blueprint to one of the only jobs in college football with a bigger upside than the program Saban operates.

Two decades after leaving Athens at the end of his playing career, Smart is back. And he’s tapping into Georgia’s limitless potential.

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(Photo: USA Today)

There will not be a Week 0 college football game between Colorado and Arizona State to open the 2023 season, an administrative source involved in the process confirmed to The Athletic on Wednesday. The news comes two days after ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit suggested during the broadcast of the national championship game that the Week 0 game would take place.

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