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Five of the Top Eight Fell in One Day: Walking Through College Football's Most Unhinged Saturday
By MVPeav · @MVPeav ·
I have watched a lot of college football in my life and I have never seen a Saturday do that. Eight ranked teams lost. Three of them were top-5 teams.
ESPN Research went digging and came back with the kind of note you only get to write once: five of the top eight in the AP poll losing on the same day had never happened since the poll started in 1936. Ninety years of Saturdays, and this was the one that broke the record book.
So let's walk through it, because every one of these games had its own flavor of nonsense, and because the playoff picture at kickoff looked nothing like the playoff picture by the time the lights went out.
No. 1 Goes Down Again: Auburn Kicks Georgia Off the Throne
I had the double box going. One side was the Tide getting abused in Knoxville. The other side was our bitter rival Auburn beating my least favorite team in the world, the Georgia Bulldogs. I have never been so miserable and so entertained at the same time, and I'm not sure which feeling won.
Auburn 27, Georgia 24, on Alex McPherson's 34-yard field goal as time expired. A 4-2 Auburn team. Against No. 1. My sims gave Georgia 87% before kickoff with a median score of 33-17, and the real game looked nothing like that from the first quarter on.
Georgia had the ball and was driving for the go-ahead field goal with under a minute left, and then Gunner Stockton fumbled at the Auburn 46 with 58 seconds to go. That was his third giveaway of the day after 2 interceptions, and Auburn finished with zero. You can't hand a rival three turnovers on the road and act surprised when the kick goes through.
The part that should scare Georgia fans more than the turnovers is the line of scrimmage. Byrum Brown ran it 26 times for 115 yards and a touchdown, and Auburn outrushed Georgia 192-113. That's not a fluke. That's a team being physically outplayed by an opponent it had beaten 9 years in a row.
The streaks that died: 53 straight wins over unranked teams, 9 straight over Auburn, and the No. 1 team has now lost in back-to-back weeks for the first time since October 1990 (that one's Sportradar's). Alex Golesh kept it simple afterward: "We're going to build Auburn back to where everybody wants it, one game at a time." He's one game in and he already has a win most Auburn coaches never got.
Provo Loses Its Mind, Then the Big 12 Admits It Blew the Clock
BYU 28, Notre Dame 24. Bear Bachmeier threw a 6-yard touchdown to Walker Lyons with 1:47 left for the lead, and a 6-0 BYU team beat the Irish for the first time since 2004. My sims had Notre Dame at 71% with a median of 25-17, so this was a real upset, but not the kind where the better team got robbed.
Then the ending. Notre Dame's last throw, from the BYU 9 with 4 seconds showing, fell incomplete and the game was over. Except the Big 12, which supplied the officials because Notre Dame is an independent, came out Sunday and said replay cleared the play incorrectly and there was still time on the clock when the ball hit the ground. The Irish deserved one more snap.
Notice what the Big 12 didn't say. It didn't say that snap changes the result, and nobody honest can. One play from the 9 is a coin flip at best for an offense that had struggled all night.
That's the actual story. CJ Carr went 27-of-49 for 261 yards and no touchdowns, and Jaden Greathouse's 8 catches for 125 yards were the only thing that moved consistently. BYU went 8-of-12 on third down while Notre Dame went 8-of-19, and that gap is the game, clock or no clock.
Bachmeier afterward: "We're tired of being disrespected. We know who we are." I'd say the respect is coming now whether they want it or not.
One Toe: Ohio State Gets Its Revenge on Indiana
Ohio State 19, Indiana 15, and the whole thing came down to a left foot. Nick Marsh caught what would have been the go-ahead touchdown with 1:02 left, and his foot landed out of bounds. That's it. That's the margin between the Buckeyes keeping their season on the rails and a second straight loss to Indiana.
And it was revenge. Indiana beat them in last December's Big Ten title game, and this time Ohio State got to be the one walking off happy. The longest win streaks in FBS stay alive: 22 straight overall and 19 straight at home.
My sims had Ohio State at 60%, which is about as close to a toss-up as a top-5 home team gets, and the game played like a toss-up. Indiana fans have every right to feel sick about an inch of chalk. That was a really good team playing a really good team to a standstill.
Ohio State is 6-1 and 4-0 in the Big Ten, with a bye next, then a trip to USC on Oct. 31. After a day where everyone around them fell over, a week off might be the best thing that happened to them.
Tennessee Didn't Upset Alabama. It Bullied Alabama
My first instinct is to chalk this up to a hangover from last week, when we went the distance with UGA in a hard-fought one. That excuse only goes so far, though. This offense has looked stuck in a rut more than once this season, and that's the part I can't wave away. I'm still okay with DeBoer. Ryan Grubb is the one I'm starting to have questions about.
Tennessee 26, Alabama 10, and the box score reads like a mugging. DeSean Bishop carried it 32 times for 159 yards and 2 touchdowns, and Tennessee just kept handing it to him because nothing we did suggested we could stop it.
Our side of the ball was worse. Alabama finished with 201 total yards, 54 of them rushing. We turned it over 4 times. We went 2-of-13 on third down. There's no quarter you can point to and say that's where it slipped, because it never started.
Keelon Russell was honest about it: "It was just a lack of a plan that I had." Josh Heupel called his defense "suffocating, elite," and I don't have a counterargument.
The history is the part that hurts. That's the first time Alabama has lost consecutive regular-season games since 2007. And after 15 straight losses in this series, Tennessee has now won 3 of the last 5, all three of them in Knoxville. My sims had us at 80% with a median of 31-19, which tells you how far off the real thing was from what either team's season said it should be.
A First-Time Starter Walks Into Austin and Walks Out a Winner
Florida 27, Texas 24, in Austin, with Tramell Jones Jr. making his first career start. Texas led 17-3. My sims had the Longhorns at 79%. None of that mattered once Florida's defensive line decided Arch Manning wasn't going to have a quiet evening.
Five sacks. The last one forced a fumble on Texas' final possession, which is about as decisive as a defensive stat line gets. Texas finished with 272 total yards and has now lost two straight.
Jones threw 2 touchdowns, both to Lacota Dippre, and erased a two-score hole on the road in his first start. It's Florida's first road win over a top-10 opponent since 2012, and that's with a lot of talented Florida teams in between that couldn't pull it off.
Jon Sumrall didn't dress it up: "We kept fighting... When things got tough, we flinched the last couple weeks." Florida is 5-2 and 3-2 in the SEC, which a month ago would have sounded like a strange sentence.
Texas fans, I get it. Two straight is a bad feeling in October. The yardage total is the thing I'd worry about more than the result.
Miami Survives the Chaos, Barely
Miami 43, Florida State 35, in double overtime, and the Hurricanes were a holding call away from joining the pile.
Malachi Toney was the whole night. He caught the winning 3-yard touchdown and then threw the 2-point conversion, on top of 11 catches for 154 yards. Bryce Fitzgerald ended it with an interception on the last play of the second overtime.
Florida State had every chance to steal it. Duce Robinson hit a 75-yard touchdown that tied it at 28 with 2:39 left in regulation. In the second overtime, FSU converted a 4th-and-21 with a 36-yard completion, and a holding penalty wiped it off the board. That's a brutal way to drop your 14th straight game away from Tallahassee, and Noles fans deserve better than that kind of ending.
Miami is 6-0 and 4-0 in the ACC, and my sims had them at 85% going in. ESPN's projection has them on top of the playoff board and in the same breath notes they still don't have a statement win. Surviving the Noles in 2OT isn't it.
Rapid Fire: The Rest of the Carnage
Houston 35, Oklahoma State 32. Conner Weigman threw 5 touchdowns for 343 yards, Houston is 6-1 and has won 4 straight. The Cougars are quietly becoming a problem.
LSU 31, Mississippi State 0. Sam Leavitt went 31-of-38 with 4 touchdowns, and the Bulldogs, with a first-time starting quarterback, got inside the LSU 40 five times and came away with nothing, every drive ending on a failed fourth down. Credit the LSU front and credit the aggression, even if it didn't pay off.
Ole Miss 31, Missouri 3. Not close, not interesting, which on this day counts as a statement.
Kentucky 21, Oklahoma 13. The Wildcats are 6-1 and 4-1 in the SEC, which puts them even with Georgia atop the league. Read that sentence again if you need to.
Where This Saturday Ranks All-Time
Eight ranked losses, five of them top-10 teams, three of them top-5. Two ranked teams, Georgia and Texas, lost to unranked opponents. Four FBS games went to overtime.
The top two teams in the country lost on the same regular-season day for the first time since Nov. 17, 2012, according to Sportradar. Georgia, Alabama and Texas, the SEC's three highest-ranked teams, all went down on the same day, and SI says that hadn't happened since 1996.
And then the big one, from ESPN Research: five of the top eight losing on one Saturday, never before in the AP poll era going back to 1936. I'll let the historians fight over the fine print on that. From the couch, it felt like the one.
The Playoff Board After the Bomb Went Off
Nobody is safe. That's the whole section, but I'll show my work.
ESPN's projected playoff top 12 after Week 7 has Miami first, then Ohio State, BYU, Notre Dame, Indiana and Georgia. SI's live bracket sees it differently: Notre Dame 1, Ohio State 2, Miami 3, Georgia 4, Ole Miss 5, UCLA 6, Indiana 7, BYU 8 (and that one may have been built before all the final scores came in). When two outlets can't agree on who's No. 1 and who's No. 4, that's a league with no settled top.
The one thing everybody agrees on is Ohio State. FPI and CBS both give the Buckeyes about a 90% chance to make the field, and FPI and SP+ both rate them the best team in the country. A 19-15 escape by a toe doesn't change a rating, apparently.
Then there's the SEC eating itself. Georgia, Tennessee and Ole Miss all hold losses, and CBS's bowl projection expects at least two three-loss SEC teams in the bracket, and that's with Georgia, Tennessee and Ole Miss still finishing 10-2. A year ago a third loss in that league was a funeral. Now it's a projection.
Miami still needs a statement win and gets Pittsburgh at home next Saturday. BYU, the team the whole country just discovered, goes to UCF the same day. Both are the kind of game you lose when you believe your own ranking, and after this Saturday I'm not assuming anything about anyone.