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Inspirational thought of the week:

You must think on a different level, like the CIA does.
We’re through the looking glass here, people.
White is black.
And black is white.

— Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison, “JFK”

Under the supervision of the reverse vampires,
they are forcing our parents to go to bed early,
In a fiendish plot to eliminate the meal of dinner!
We are through the looking glass here, people.

— Milhouse Van Houten, “The Simpsons”

Here at Bottom 10 Headquarters, located in Jeff Saturday’s just-vacated wardrobe closet at ESPN, we spent last weekend crystalizing our already-strong feelings that when it comes to knowledge, we know nothing.

The Vanderbilt Commode Doors have been a mainstay of the 2022 Bottom 10, whether they were ranked or sitting on the Waiting List, the losers of 26 straight SEC games long having put the “mean” in “It Just Means More.” Then they beat No. 24 Kentucky in Lexington.

It was just two weeks ago that we promoted/demoted #gobc, aka Boston College, into these standings, after four straight losses. Then they beat No. 16 NC State.

By The Time I Get To Arizona knocked off No. 12 UCLA. The Artist Formerly Known as Pur-don’t upset No. 21 Ill-ugh-noise. And in Storrs, Connecticut, the team we used to call U-Can’t totally U-Did, extinguishing the AP’s 19th-ranked Liberty Flames to become bowl eligible for the first time in seven years.

But to be clear, this is no conspiracy theory. This is real. The Bottom 10 multiverse is legit. We know this because we walked through the looking glass. OK, we actually walked into a sliding glass door, but when we were asked, “How many fingers am I holding up?” she definitely had 12. We’re sure of it.

With apologies to Dr. Steven Strange, Oliver Stone, former Alabama A&M quarterback Aqeel Glass and Steve Harvey, here are the post-Week 11 Bottom 10 rankings.

1. UMess (1-9)

The Minutemen lost the Pillow Fight of Week at then-No. 8 Arkansaw State 35-33 when a late rally came up just short — like, half a yard short of a 2-point conversion that could have forced overtime. It was also the second time in three weeks that we had an unexpected Bottom 10 bureau reporter on site to watch UMass lose. Now the Minutemen face an unexpected opponent in the year’s most unexpected edition of the Pillow Fight of the Week. But to find out who that foe shall be, you’re gonna have to keep reading and wait a minute, man.

2. US(notC)F (1-9)

The Bulls cashed in their Bottom 10 Hey We Just Fired Our Coach FastPass one week ago and followed that up with a coach-less loss to SMU. Now they travel to face Bottom 10 Waiting List member Living on Tulsa Time, which is still suffering from a totally understandable year-long Myrtle Beach Bowl championship hangover.

3. Akronmonious (1-9)

The Zips dropped their home finale with a loss to Eastern Not Western Or Central Michigan, but their Bottom 10 title hopes took a hit when then-No. 7 Northern Ill-ugh-noise had the audacity to earn its third win of the season, over Western Not Eastern Or Central Michigan. That stole some zip from their Thanksgiving weekend season finale, which had had serious Bottom 10 Megabowl potential.

4. Colora-duh (1-9)

The Buffs continued their “How can we help your Heisman candidate?” goodwill tour, as they allowed a five-touchdown performance by USC quarterback Caleb Williams on the heels of allowing a five-touchdown performance by Oregon quarterback Bo Nix. I’m no Nostradamus, but I’m here to say that this weekend Washington quarterback Michael Penix Jr. will account for five touchdowns against the Buffs.

5. The Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (3-7)

Have you seen this trend within collegiate athletics where big donors have coaching positions and even entire position groups named for them? For example, Stanford head coach David Shaw is the Bradford M. Freeman Director of Football and Notre Dame’s Tommy Rees is the John and Bobbie Arlotta Family Offensive Coordinator/Quarterbacks Coach. Well, we’d like to extend an invitation to our friends in College Station to make this the John James “Jimbo” Fisher Jr. Coveted Fifth Spot. Perhaps we could make the announcement during halftime of this weekend’s Pillow Fight of the Week vs. UMass.

6. North by Northworstern (1-9)

Shoutout to back in the day — like, I dunno, two years ago? — when the Mildcats would look at regular season-ending matchups with Purdue and Illinois and already be buying bottles of sunscreen for their inevitable holiday trip to a Florida bowl game. Now they are looking at those games and are already buying bottles of Lysol for their inevitable holiday trip to an Evanston toilet bowl.

7. Whew Mexico No-bos (2-9)

The Mountain West invasion of these rankings begins New Mexico Not New Mexico State, who have lost seven in a row and already have their Bottom 10 eyes trying to focus on two weeks from now when they face Colorado State. But …

8. No-vada (2-8)

Colorado State isn’t ranked in this spot because it beat Nevada back in Week 5 and the very next week the Oof Pack lost to …

9. Huh-why-yuh (2-9)

The Warriors have won only twice this year, but one of those was that Week 5 win over Nevada, which they immediately followed up with a loss to …

10. Colora-duh State (2-8)

So, to recap, the Rams beat Hawai’i and Nevada and will host New Mexico in the Black Friday season finale. Our plan to sort it all out is to bribe the people over at ESPN Stats & Information research, begging them to input all of this into their computers to see what FPI says about it. Bribe them with what? Some deep-fried Cajun turkey leftovers from Thanksgiving. Have you ever seen the fire that erupts from one of those fryers if you don’t thaw the turkey all the way? That’s exactly what that FPI machine is gonna look like when the Mountain West is done with it.

Waiting list: Charlotte 2-and-9ers, Arkansaw State, Texas State Armadillos, Virginia Tech No-kies, Old Duh-minion, Northern Ill-ugh-noise, Western Not Eastern Or Central Michigan, Temple of Doom, both sides of the Big Game.

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Gundy calls out Ducks’ budget; Lanning fires back

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Gundy calls out Ducks' budget; Lanning fires back

Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy and Oregon coach Dan Lanning are unexpectedly giving the Week 2 matchup between their teams some extra juice.

While speaking on his radio show Monday, Gundy said Oklahoma State spent “around $7 million” on its team over the past three years before referring to how much the Ducks have spent on their roster in recent years.

“I think Oregon spent close to $40 [million] last year alone,” Gundy said. “So, that was just one year. Now, I might be off a few million.”

Gundy made several other comments about Oregon’s resources — he said “it’ll cost a lot of money to keep” Ducks quarterback Dante Moore and that he believes Oregon’s budget should determine the programs they schedule outside of the Big Ten.

“Oregon is paying a lot, a lot of money for their team,” Gundy said. “From a nonconference standpoint, there’s coaches saying they should [play teams with similar budgets].”

On Monday night during his weekly news conference, Lanning responded.

“If you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better be invested in winning. We spend to win,” Lanning said when asked about Gundy’s comments. “Some people save to have an excuse for why they don’t. … I can’t speak on their situation; I have no idea what they got in their pockets over there.”

Lanning added that he has “a lot of respect” for Gundy and praised how Gundy has consistently led his team to winning seasons over his 20-year tenure in Stillwater. Both teams are 1-0 this season; the Ducks are ranked No. 7 and are expected to be vying for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

“Over the last three to five years, they’ve elevated themselves. They have a lot of resources,” Gundy said. “They’ve got them stacked out there pretty good right now.”

Last year, Georgia coach Kirby Smart referenced Oregon’s resources, saying at SEC media days that he wishes he could get “some of that NIL money” that Oregon alum and Nike founder Phil Knight “has been sharing with Dan Lanning.”

“I think it’s impressive that guys like Kirby have been signing the No. 1 class in the nation without any NIL money this entire time,” Lanning said jokingly in response to Smart during Big Ten media days last year. “Obviously, Coach Smart took a little shot at us. But if you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better have great support. We have that.”

While Smart’s and Lanning’s barbs had the tone of two coaches who have worked together (Lanning was Georgia’s defensive coordinator from 2019 to 2021), the back-and-forth with Gundy on Monday was unexpected.

“I’m sure UT-Martin maybe didn’t have as much as them last week, and they played,” Lanning said of Oklahoma State. “So, we’ll let it play out.”

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Belichick: Heels ‘better than what we were tonight’

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Belichick: Heels 'better than what we were tonight'

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — If Bill Belichick were still in New England, still helming a team he’d coached for a quarter-century, where he’d won six Super Bowls, he could have shrugged off Monday’s debacle against TCU as just a hiccup on a long road to somewhere better, answering his critics with his now ubiquitous retort: On to the next game.

In Chapel Hill on Monday, with a sell-out crowd eager to get its first glimpse of a new era of North Carolina football under the tutelage of one of the game’s all-time greats, what happened couldn’t be shrugged off so easily.

Belichick’s Tar Heels were embarrassed, with TCU rolling to a 48-14 win in which UNC didn’t simply look like the lesser team, but one that often appeared utterly unprepared for the moment.

“We’re better than what we were tonight but we have to go out there and show that and prove it,” Belichick said. “Nobody’s going to do it for us. We’re going to have to do it ourselves, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Through the first drive of Belichick’s tenure as a college coach, everything had gone right.

Crowds filled the bars and restaurants along Franklin Street in Chapel Hill hours before kickoff. A pregame concert, headlined by country star and UNC alum Chase Rice, set the stage for a star-studded event. Michael Jordan and Lawrence Taylor and Mia Hamm were all in attendance as the Belichick era at North Carolina finally kicked off.

And then the Tar Heels delivered a flawlessly executed 83-yard touchdown drive, and the packed house at Kenan Stadium exploded.

This was the dream when UNC shocked the college football world by landing Belichick, and suddenly Belichick’s promise of bringing a national championship to a program that hasn’t even won an ACC title in more than half a century felt entirely plausible.

Then TCU delivered one cold dose of reality after another, and by midway through the third quarter, after Devean Deal‘s scoop-and-score on a Gio Lopez fumble put the Horned Frogs up by 34, the once-frenetic stands emptied out and the hope for something magical in Chapel Hill seemed a distant memory.

“They out-played us, out-coached us, and they were just better than we were tonight,” Belichick said. “It’s all there was to it. They did a lot more things right than we did.”

Belichick turned over the bulk of North Carolina’s roster in one offseason, bringing in 70 new players — nearly half of whom arrived after spring practice. The transformation of the roster along with Belichick’s famously guarded approach to media meant few outside of North Carolina’s locker room had a clear vision of just what this squad would look like.

By the time the bludgeoning was over, the mantra from the Tar Heels’ perspective was that this performance hardly showcased what they’d seen on the practice field for the past six weeks.

“I thought we were prepared for the game,” backup quarterback Max Johnson said. “We prepared for a week and a half for TCU specifically, but we’ve been working on our fundamentals for a year now. We need to do a better job executing.”

After the opening touchdown drive, North Carolina went three-and-out on five of its next six drives. Lopez went more than two hours of real time between completions. UNC failed to convert its first six third-down tries, and Lopez threw a pick-six late in the first half that seemed to be the last gasp for the Tar Heels. The defense was equally catastrophic. TCU racked up 542 yards of total offense and ran for 258 yards, including a 75-yard scamper by Kevorian Barnes, and the Heels missed one tackle after another after another.

“Too many three-and-outs, too many long plays on defense, two turnovers for touchdowns. You can’t overcome that,” Belichick said. “We just can’t perform well doing some of the things we did. We’ve got to be better than that. We had too many self-inflicted wounds we have to eliminate before we can even worry about addressing our opponent.”

Johnson came on in relief of Lopez, who left after his sack-fumble with a lower back injury, and he delivered a touchdown drive that at least offered some spark of life for the Heels’ offense. Belichick said it was unclear whether Lopez would be able to play Saturday at Charlotte, but he left open the possibility that the QB competition could be re-opened.

“We’ll see how Gio is,” Belichick said. “Max came in after being off for a long time and hung in there and made some plays in a tough situation. We’ll take a look at it and see where things are at and go from there. It’s too early to tell now.”

Before the game, Belichick spent nearly a half-hour on the field watching both teams go through warm-ups. He chatted with dignitaries and appeared to bask in the moment, but the magic quickly evaporated.

The 48 points scored by TCU in Belichick’s first career game as a college coach are more than his teams allowed in any of his 333 NFL games, and for as much as he’d worked to sell North Carolina as “the 33rd NFL team,” Monday’s disaster felt like a reminder that, regardless of his success in the pros, this was new territory.

His response to the loss, however, was largely in line with what fans have come to expect of the understated coach — simple, succinct and emphatic.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said. “We’ll get at it.”

For a fan base that had waited nine months for this moment, however, it could be harder to turn the page. Belichick never promised a quick fix, but there were reasonable assurances that this team would play with physicality and fundamentals, that UNC wouldn’t be out-coached or out-schemed.

By halftime Monday, the veil had been lifted. Belichick has six Super Bowl rings, but this was a bigger job than perhaps any he’d assumed before.

The excitement that reached its apex after the opening touchdown drive perfectly showcased what this experiment could look like. The question now is whether UNC’s reality will ever match the dream or if Belichick’s first drive as a college coach will be remembered as the pinnacle of his tenure here.

“Don’t lose hope,” Johnson said. “We’re going to continue to put our best foot forward, continue to work and trust in each other.”

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FSU freshman shot, in critical but stable condition

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FSU freshman shot, in critical but stable condition

Florida State freshman linebacker Ethan Pritchard was shot Sunday night and is hospitalized in critical but stable condition in intensive care at a Tallahassee-area hospital, the school said Monday.

According to the Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office, Pritchard was inside a vehicle outside an apartment building when the shooting happened Sunday night in Havana, Florida, which is about 16 miles from Tallahassee, near the Georgia state line. An investigation into the shooting is ongoing.

In its statement, Florida State said Pritchard was visiting family at the time he was shot.

“The Pritchard family is thankful for the support from so many people, as well as the care from first responders and medical professionals, and asks that their privacy be respected at this time,” the FSU statement said.

Pritchard, who is from Sanford, Florida, enrolled at Florida State in January but did not play in the Seminoles’ season-opening victory against Alabama.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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