In this age of media hyperbole, it’s not often that the media actually gets it right.
In one of the most remarkable weekends of college football that I have ever witnessed, five of the Top 10 teams and nine of the Top 25 teams in the nation lost. On a day that is already being dubbed as Insanity Saturday, the supposed powerhouses treated us to every type of loss imaginable. They lost close games. They lost by big margins. They shot themselves in the foot. They were simply outplayed. They lost on the road AND they lost at home. They lost to ranked teams, sure, but most of them were losses to UNRANKED teams. How many times have you seen not one, but THREE 17-point dogs win outright on the same weekend? Even the winners have taken some hits, as evidenced by #1 USC's hard-fought victory over Washington that resulted in USC being jumped by a (only slightly) more impressive LSU squad. No team was safe, no reputation was safe, no lead was safe.
Before you dismiss this weekend’s happenings as flukes, a result of the full moon or something like that, take a look at the schools in the AP top 25. Some familiar names are missing, and quite a few outsiders are crashing the party this year. Perennial powerhouses like Michigan, Auburn, and Notre Dame are conspicuously absent from the polls. They have been replaced by newcomers like Hawaii, Kentucky, and South Florida. These schools are defying the odds with every rung they climb on the ladder of college football success. The Bowl Championship Series was invented specifically to exclude these schools. The powers that be in college football are twisting themselves into knots trying to explain how they meant for this to happen all along!
College football has long been about cycles. Look in the history books and you’ll see that once upon a time the landscape was very different. Harvard, Army, Rice, and Duke were all regulars in the top 20. So it’s no surprise that we are seeing a slowly evolving landscape. But the evolution has accelerated with a suddenness that nobody expected. It started last year, with Boise State crashing the BCS party and Rutgers and Wake Forest staying in it until the very end. But this year has been crazy.
No single weekend has been crazier than this one. I heard a hundred reasons why as I was watching ESPN last night. But what I didn’t hear was one explanation that covered ALL of the losses we saw yesterday or all of the losses we have seen this year so far. That’s OK, though. It must be scary for the Establishment to see what is happening and realize that their cushy positions as the elite in their field are being threatened. Since I have no such laurels to rest on, my vision is clear, and I have come up with a theory which I have termed the Appalachian State Corollary. I’ll explain more when I come back. It’s Sunday, and I am ready for some (more) football!
