Pate wasn't just handing out gold stars for easy schedules. Buried in the middle of a rundown that touched Notre Dame, Penn State, Virginia and Alabama, he stopped on Iowa and made an actual argument — one with playoff stakes attached.
The setup is simple. Iowa doesn't play Indiana. Iowa doesn't play Oregon. Two of the Big Ten's best landmines, gone from the schedule before the season even starts. What's left, in Pate's framing, is a season that lives or dies in one condensed window.
Context matters here. This ran as the companion to a prior show on the sport's toughest schedules — Pate circling the opposite end of the spectrum conference by conference. Notre Dame got the same soft-schedule label without any doubt cast on the roster: “There is no stretch on this schedule. I'm not trying to sell you that Notre Dame schedule's tough.” That's Pate crediting the team while being honest about the slate — a distinction he was careful to draw before he ever got to Iowa.
The case
Iowa's version of an easy schedule isn't wall-to-wall soft. It's soft with one hard seam running through the middle, and that seam is the whole season. As Pate put it: “The season basically boils down to like a three-week stretch. It's at Michigan, it's Ohio State, and it's at Washington.”
Here's the Film Room mechanism underneath that. Iowa isn't being asked to survive a full slate of ranked opponents — it's being asked to clear exactly three tests, back to back to back, with nothing before or after to cushion a bad week. Win two of three, and the rest of the schedule — the part Pate already stripped of Indiana and Oregon — does the rest of the work. Lose more than one, and the whole soft-schedule advantage evaporates, because there's no marquee win left to fall back on.
That's the trigger for Pate's real question, the one that turns a scheduling note into a playoff argument.
“What's the committee going to do with a 10-2 Big 10 team there?”— Josh Pate
“What's the committee going to do with a 10-2 Big 10 team there?” It's a fair question because the committee has never had to answer it with this specific combination — a Big Ten team that beat nobody outside that three-game window but also lost to nobody it wasn't supposed to.
Penn State's case backs up how real the conference-wide advantage is. Pate noted the Nittany Lions avoid Ohio State, Oregon and Indiana entirely and get a soft out-of-conference slate before facing USC and Michigan back-to-back at the midpoint — a schedule shaped to protect a good team, not just flatter a mediocre one. Iowa's is shaped the same way, just with a shorter fuse.
The honest complication
Here's where Pate's own framing works against him. A three-week gauntlet that decides an entire résumé is also the fastest way to have no résumé at all. If Iowa splits that stretch — beats one of the three, drops two — the ten-win season never happens, and the committee doesn't have to answer the hypothetical because there's nothing left to debate. Soft schedules cut two ways: they can make a two-loss team look untested just as easily as they make a ten-win team look unproven. Pate's argument depends on Iowa clearing a bar most Big Ten teams outside Ohio State and Oregon haven't cleared in years, and history hasn't been kind to committee-resume theories that lean on a team beating people it was favored against anyway.
Still, the argument is specific enough to test in real time, and that's the whole point of raising it in August. Iowa at Michigan, Ohio State at home, at Washington — three results, no hiding, and a committee question nobody's had to answer with this particular resume shape.
Watch that stretch when it arrives. If Iowa is 10-2 in late November, this segment is the one to pull back up.
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 To SEC Bias Truthers: Where's Your Evidence, Will?
A viewer accused the preseason polls of rigging things for the SEC. Pate walked through who actually fills them out — and why the complaint collapses on contact.
ANALYSISProduced with Pate State AI · reviewed by The Pate State editorial teamStandards 📝 The ESPN ShowTS
The Pate State StaffAUG 10, 2026
A viewer named Will from Princeton, Indiana wrote in with a complaint that's become an annual ritual in this sport: the SEC has seven teams in the top 13 of the latest preseason poll, and it's turning him off from the whole thing. Pate's response wasn't a defense of the SEC. It was a takedown of the accusation itself.
Pate's opening move was pure theater — “Confiscate that dude's shoestrings is the first order of business.” — but the real argument came right behind it, and it's the one worth sitting with.
Here's the context a casual reader needs: the poll in question wasn't the AP poll, and it wasn't produced by anyone who covers the sport for a living. It's the coaches poll, filled out by coaches or their sports information directors — people with whistles around their necks, not microphones in front of them.
The case
Pate's core argument is that Will convicted the poll before he had a shred of proof. As Pate put it: “This is an example of a crime in search of evidence.” Will assumed a conspiracy without checking who actually issued the verdict. The people filling out the coaches poll represent programs and conferences from across the country, and per Pate, “the last thing those guys are looking to do is prop up the SEC.”
Then Pate did the arithmetic. Ohio State and Oregon sit one and two. Georgia is fourth. Notre Dame is fifth, Indiana sixth, Miami seventh. The SEC cluster — Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, Alabama, LSU — lands from eight through thirteen. Every one of those five programs made the playoff a year ago, except LSU, which spent big under Lane Kiffin trying to get there. That's not favoritism. That's a preseason poll doing what a preseason poll is designed to do: reward proven playoff pedigree and loaded rosters over hope.
The teams sitting just behind that SEC group — USC, BYU, Michigan, Penn State — don't have the same recent playoff résumé. Pate's challenge to Will was simple: name the team that got "egregiously" left out in favor of a five-team group that all reached the playoff or spent like they meant to. Nobody has an answer, because there isn't one. “I think what you'll find is that just because you don't like something doesn't make it invalid.”
“I think what you'll find is that just because you don't like something doesn't make it invalid.”— Josh Pate
That's the kicker on the bias argument: a poll reflecting recent playoff results isn't rigged. It's just recent playoff results.
The honest complication
Here's where Pate's own logic cuts against the certainty of the ranking he just defended. He's spent years warning fans not to fall in love with these numbers before a snap has been played. “Marrying them. Marrying your preseason rankings is bad.” The same coaches poll that isn't biased against Will is still built on spring and summer projections — the kind Pate himself has watched blow up on him. He conceded that one bad habit, developed over a long offseason of reading preview magazines, is believing those projections harder than the games that actually decide them: “mistakenly you don't understand that one quarter of football in week one is worth more than months and months and months and months of a hard belief system that you developed over the course of spring and summer.”
So the honest complication isn't that the poll is corrupt. It's that the poll — any preseason poll — is a snapshot of assumptions, not a verdict. Five SEC teams with strong 2024 résumés earned their spots on paper. Whether they hold those spots is a September problem, not an August one.
The close
Pate isn't interested in scrapping preseason polls to satisfy people who want college football to look like every other sport. “It's college football. It's one of one.” He'll defend the exercise every summer, and he'll shout down anyone arguing for conformity: “No. No. You got to shout those people down. No.” But the same guy defending the poll's integrity is the one telling you not to trust it past week one.
Will's version of bias doesn't hold up. His instinct to hold the poll loosely might be the one thing he got right by accident. Watch the segment, then go build your own bias-free 1-through-25 the way Pate dared Will to — and see how close it actually lands to the coaches' version before results start rewriting both of them.
