Several teams fell from the unbeaten ranks:
- #18 Pitt and #11 Iowa State proved to be overrated. Pitt wasn’t even remotely competitive against #20 SMU, while Iowa State lost a 23-22 squeaker at home against unranked Texas Tech.
- #3 Penn State lost their first game, but that was no embarrassment since they played #4 THE Ohio State University.
The other unbeaten teams were not seriously challenged:
- #5 Miami won by 22
- #13 Indiana won by 37. They continue to be the year’s biggest surprise. Indiana has never before started 9-0! They have some more difficult opponents coming up, including Ohio State.
- #21 Army won by 17. They have one more easy opponent before the Notre Dame game. Army’s QB, Bryson Daily, has an interesting record this year – he has ZERO sacks and ZERO interceptions. He also has nearly 1000 rushing yards! This curious combination of stats is because Army doesn’t pass much. For the year, they have run 379 rushing plays, versus only 56 passes.
- #1 Oregon is still looking untouchable. They went on the road to take on the defending national champions in Ann Arbor, and won by 21.
Elsewhere:
The leaders or co-leaders in the ACC and SEC both lost. #10 Texas A&M had been the surprising leaders in the SEC, but were crushed by a big second half from South Carolina. #11 Clemson had been undefeated in the ACC, but couldn’t get past Louisville.
The Georgia Bulldogs were down 13-6 at halftime, but they finally remembered that they were fuckin’ Georgia and ended up winning easily.
Kent State had their best weekend – they didn’t have a game.
Jaxson Dart of #19 Ole Miss passed for 515 yards and 6 TDs – with only 31 passes! In his spare time he also had ten carries for 47 yards. His team won 63-31. That’s the only 500-yard performance in the FBS this year.
The NCAA record for most passing yards in a game is 734. Patrick Mahomes put up that number for Texas Tech in 2016 – in a 66-59 loss to Oklahoma! Mahomes was 52 for 88 in that game. The opposing QB was Baker Mayfield, who passed for a mere 545 yards. That’s kinda what the Big 12 was like in that era. Mahomes passed for more than 5000 yards that year and didn’t even come close to the record for his own school! Graham Harrell had passed for 5705 yards for Texas Tech in 2007.
The 1,708 combined yards from scrimmage in that Mahomes/Mayfield game is still the college football record. Oddly enough, the two teams were not even separated by a single yard. It was exactly 854 for each team. Mahomes personally accounted for 819 of those 854 yards because he also had 85 rushing yards.
For the record, the NFL record for passing yards in a single game is 554. Norm Van Brocklin set that record 73 years ago, and nobody has come within 20 yards of it in all these years. It seems to be the most vulnerable significant record in the major sports because there have been many games in the 500s, but nobody can quite ascend to the peak of that mountain.
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PSU is always overrated. They beat nobody and then get higher ranked every year until they lose to a good team. Pretty embarrassing to get stopped at the goal line all those times. And Franklin can’t win a big game to save his life.
I just found out that the CFP rankings, which start tomorrow, are unlike the previous BCS system in that there is no algorithm which uses polls and computers to create the list. The CFP is just 13 guys behind a closed door with no transparency. So after tomorrow, the AP poll and all the other rankings are effectively meaningless (outside of whatever influence they might have on the CFP people).