Pate argued that SMU winning the ACC championship over Miami this season is harder than the head-to-head suggests, not because of anything Miami does on the field but because of where SMU has to sleep in November. The matchup, in his view, is the least interesting part of this prediction. The travel is the story.
Some context the prediction skips past: Miami has never actually won an ACC title, and it enters this season as the league's clear favorite. SMU's Kevin Jennings already has a win over Miami on his resume, from a rainy-then-sunny afternoon in Dallas last season that Pate brought up unprompted. So this isn't a case of Pate doubting SMU can beat Miami. It's a case of Pate doubting SMU can survive the three weeks before it gets the chance to.
The schedule alert
Pate started the prediction — SMU wins its first ACC title before Miami does — at a 9.25 on his boldness scale. Then he pulled up the schedule.
SMU plays at Notre Dame on November 21st, then at Stanford on November 28th. If the Mustangs are still alive for the conference title after that, they play a third straight game away from home, in Charlotte.
Pate called it out directly: "This is a big-time schedule alert, red flag, double warning situation."
“This is a big-time schedule alert, red flag, double warning situation.”— Josh Pate
Dallas to South Bend and back. Palo Alto and back. Charlotte and back. That's not a rough patch. That's a full month living out of a suitcase, right when the games matter most.
His reasoning tracked how these stretches actually break teams — not through talent gaps but through the small stuff that shows up on tape in December. Legs get heavy in the fourth quarter of the third road trip. Line calls get muddier when a team hasn't practiced at home in three weeks. None of that requires Miami to be better. It just requires SMU to be tired at the wrong moment, against a team that will be rested. Pate revised the number live because of it.
"I changed my mind. Jesse, it's a 9.5. I'm going to bump it up to a 9. Schedule dynamics. I'm going to bump it up to a 9.5."
The honest complication
Here's the wrinkle Pate raised himself and then moved past too quickly: Miami faced this exact gauntlet last season. The ACC scheduled the Hurricanes for back-to-back road games late in the year, and Miami didn't grind through it — it simply didn't make the conference title game, and still played for a national championship anyway. That's not proof the travel problem doesn't exist. It's proof there's a workaround. If SMU finds the same one — win the head-to-head with Miami, miss Charlotte, still get into the Playoff — the entire schedule argument stops mattering, because the prediction never required a title game appearance to feel true in spirit even if it fails on the letter.
There's also this: Jennings has already beaten Miami once, on the road, in bad weather that turned into good weather. Whatever fatigue theory applies to November doesn't seem to have applied to him in the moment that mattered most last time these two shared a field.
Still, Pate's broader point stands on its own outside the specific prediction. Leagues don't hand out sympathy for good football played on tired legs, and the ACC handed SMU a closing stretch that punishes success. Win your way into Charlotte, and you're rewarded with the hardest version of the trip you just survived.
That's the actual bet buried in this prediction. Not whether SMU can beat Miami. Whether the ACC's own map lets them try.
Articles are drafted from Josh Pate's College Football Show under the site's editorial standards and monitored by the editorial team — corrections are timestamped, never silent.
CONTINUED FROM THE NOTEBOOK
Pate Argues Luke Fickell Is Safer Than the Hot Seat Lists Suggest
Wisconsin's coach keeps showing up on preseason hot seat rundowns, but Pate said the schedule does him a favor few people are talking about.
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The Pate State StaffAUG 9, 2026
Pate argued that Luke Fickell is going to survive the 2025 season, and the reasoning has almost nothing to do with talent evaluation and almost everything to do with a Wisconsin schedule that quietly lets him off the hook.
The premise needing context: Pete Nakos at On3 published a hot seat roundup that lumped Fickell in with names like Mike Norvell, Dave Aranda and Mike Locksley — coaches facing real programmatic pressure. Pate said he saw the piece and wanted to push back specifically on where Fickell landed on that list, not the others.
The case for Fickell
Pate's defense of Fickell starts with circumstance, not scheme.
He called Fickell's run at Wisconsin defined by "the worst quarterback injury luck of any major head coach over the last few years," and paired that with an admission that Fickell's early staffing decisions didn't help. But Pate treated that as closed business — "that's ancient history, can't do anything about that now" — and pivoted to the idea that a coach can wander too far down a bad road and simply run out of gas before he can turn it around. That's the frame Pate used for the whole segment: not is Fickell good, but did he get too far down the wrong road to recover in time.
“Luke Fickell's not a bad football coach. He got down the wrong road too far.”— Josh Pate
Then came the part that actually built the argument: the schedule.
Pate walked through it live — Wisconsin opens against Notre Dame at Lambeau Field, a game he expects them to lose, followed by Western Illinois and Eastern Michigan, two games that should function as bye weeks in disguise. The next real test doesn't arrive until Penn State in week four. After that, Pate ran down what Wisconsin avoids entirely this year: no Ohio State, no Michigan, no Indiana, no Oregon. For a program that was the preseason runaway favorite for toughest Big Ten schedule a year ago, per Rhett Lashlee's strength-of-schedule rankings, that's a significant swing in the other direction. Fewer marquee losses means less rope needed to survive the year, and Pate's read is that the floor under Fickell is higher than the hot seat framing implies.
The forward-looking wrinkle to Pate's argument: he said that if Fickell does get fired anyway, he'd be a coach in demand, not a coach nobody wants.
Pate specifically floated North Carolina and a hypothetical Penn State opening as programs he'd expect to chase Fickell hard, on the logic that a bad circumstantial stretch doesn't erase what he showed he could do before it. That's a notably different treatment than most hot seat conversations get — usually the list is the point. Here, being on the list was the thing Pate wanted to argue with.
Where the argument gets shaky
The honest complication showed up in the room in real time. Jesse's staff had reportedly penciled in the Penn State game as a win, and Pate flagged that immediately: "there's nothing given about that day. You need to be careful." A soft schedule only saves a coach's job if the team actually wins the games it's supposed to win, and Pate himself expects a loss to open the season against Notre Dame. If Wisconsin stumbles against Western Illinois or Eastern Michigan — unlikely, but not impossible in a sport that produces upsets every September — or gets run off the field at Penn State, the same light schedule that Pate says protects Fickell starts to look like a series of exposed weaknesses instead. Pate acknowledged the skepticism head-on: "a lot of people disagree with me on that." He didn't pretend the room was unanimous.
There's also a version of this where the schedule argument cuts the other way entirely. A team that's supposed to beat everyone but Notre Dame and Penn State doesn't get credit for going 8-4 against that slate — it gets criticized for not going 10-2. Hot seat logic isn't only about losses to good teams; it's about failing to meet a lowered bar, and Wisconsin's bar just got lowered considerably.
Still, Pate's broader point wasn't really about wins and losses. It was about proportion — treating a coach who inherited bad injury luck and made early staffing mistakes he's since tried to fix differently than a coach whose program has structurally decayed. Whether Wisconsin fans in Madison feel that same patience by November is a separate question. Pate's just betting the schedule buys Fickell the time to find out.
