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  • Chris Low, ESPN Senior WriterOct 31, 2023, 07:00 AM ET

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    • College football reporter
    • Joined ESPN.com in 2007
    • Graduate of the University of Tennessee

Steve Spurrier loves to tell the story about playing golf years ago with then-North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith and then-Kansas basketball coach Roy Williams.

It was sometime in the early 1990s, and the three coaches were at a charity event in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

“Are you guys going to get a playoff in football?” Smith asked Spurrier, who was only a couple of years into his tenure as Florida’s football coach.

Spurrier shrugged and said, “Aaah, I don’t know. Everybody just sort of plays their season, then the bowls come in and pick the teams they want, and then after they play, they get a bunch of sportswriters together and they decide who the national champion is going to be.”

The Head Ball Coach then looked at his two Hall of Fame hoops counterparts and asked his own question: “How would you boys in basketball like it if you did it like that?”

Smith looked at Spurrier and quipped, “We wouldn’t, because that’s stupid.”

So, 25 years ago, the Bowl Championship Series was created in an attempt to move beyond the polls and determine a clear national champion on the field. The BCS gave way to the College Football Playoff in 2014, but it was a major step in helping shape the postseason. That evolution takes another significant turn in 2024, when the playoff field expands from four teams to 12.

As he looks back today, Spurrier, who won a national championship at Florida in 1996, wonders what fans would do if media members and active coaches still made the call on who walked away with the trophy.

“Coach Smith was right,” Spurrier said, “it was stupid.

“It took a while — too long, really. But playoff sports is what America is about.”

THE BCS WAS created in 1998 by then-SEC commissioner Roy Kramer as a way to pair the two highest-ranked teams in a national championship game at a traditional bowl site. The BCS and its precursors, the Bowl Coalition (1992-94) and Bowl Alliance (1995-97), were designed to create a No. 1 vs. No. 2 bowl matchup every year. That previously had happened only eight times.

Prior to the Coalition and Alliance, the postseason was rather chaotic with bowls scrambling to line up teams before the regular season ended. Many of the bowls had tie-ins, such as the SEC champion playing in the Sugar Bowl and the Big Ten and Pac-10 tied to the Rose Bowl, but there were also at-large slots. For the bowls, that meant the business side of locking in attractive teams with hungry fan bases flocking to their cities was the priority, not setting up matchups to determine the national champion.

“We knew we had to do something differently, especially when you had bowls cutting deals well before the end of the regular season and split national championships in three of the previous eight seasons,” said Mark Womack, who was Kramer’s right-hand man and remains the SEC’s executive associate commissioner. “Roy had the vision of putting together a game and twisting as many arms as he had to.”

New Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, then ABC Sports’ vice president for programming, was part of a meeting nearly 30 years ago that set the wheels in motion to get the Big Ten and Pac-10 to buy into the BCS concept, which was a critical piece. Those talks in 1995 were supposed to be about an extension of the Rose Bowl television deal.

“We started talking about how things were shifting in college and how 1 vs. 2 was becoming more important,” Petitti recalled.

After the Big Ten, Pac-10 and Rose Bowl officials huddled to talk among themselves, it was obvious they were none too pleased.

“We were basically booted out of the meeting,” Petitti said with a laugh. “They told us we should go home. I remember my boss [Dennis Swanson] saying when we got back in the car, ‘That was a good first step,’ when I was thinking it was the worst meeting I’d ever been in.”

The seed was planted, though, and Kramer traveled all over the country meeting with different parties to make the BCS a reality.

“Basically, from that first meeting, it took 12 to 15 months to really get everybody in line,” Petitti said. “Give Roy, [Big Ten commissioner] Jim Delany, [Pac-10 commissioner] Tom Hansen and all the Rose Bowl folks credit for thinking differently. But that’s how it started.”

So starting from scratch, Kramer and his trusted colleagues, Womack and Charles Bloom, went to work on their whiteboard in the SEC offices after getting the go-ahead from commissioners from the other conferences. Bloom, then director of SEC media relations, still has some of the notebooks from those early meetings and remembers getting emails from Kramer at 3 o’clock in morning on Sundays.

Bloom said they did 10 years of research prior to finalizing the formula. They worked in a small library on the first floor of the SEC offices.

“This was when everything wasn’t on the internet and we were using record books we had on file that had all the scores from games and doing all the research by hand,” Bloom said.

The plan was to utilize the AP poll, which was voted on by media members, and the coaches poll, but because the polls themselves were part of the problem and susceptible to voters’ biases, Bloom suggested they add computer rankings as part of the formula. Kramer also asked statistics guru Jeff Sagarin to come up with a strength-of-schedule rating.

The original formula included the two polls (AP and coaches), a composite of three computer rankings, a strength-of-schedule element and a point added to a team’s final ranking for every loss — all coming together to produce a score where lower was better.

Even with the BCS in place, Kramer, now 94, knew there would be detractors and that there would need to be tweaks to the system along the way.

“I don’t think anybody ever believed it was a final solution to anything, and nobody thought it was perfect,” said Kramer, who retired as SEC commissioner in 2002. “But whether you liked it or cursed it, it was a better solution to anything that we’d had in the past. So at the moment, I still think it accomplished what we wanted it to.”

And, yes, there was plenty of controversy and angry coaches and fan bases on a regular basis.

“You should have read some of my mail. I kept a lot of it,” Kramer said with a hearty laugh.

Over the years, the BCS formula was tinkered with several times. In 1999, five more computer rankings were added to the mix. In 2001, a “quality wins” component was added to emphasize strength of schedule, and margin of victory was eliminated in 2002. All the while, fans and media alike screamed that the whole thing was rigged or bordered on being a cartel for the blue bloods of the sport.

In 2010, Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter and Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports co-authored a book titled “Death to the BCS,” which was so popular it was later updated and revised.

“I don’t think it was so much that people hated the BCS. They just wanted a playoff, and I knew it was inevitable that we were going to get one,” Kramer said. “I also knew that as soon as we arrived at a number of teams in the playoff that everybody would want that number to increase. There’s always going to be scrutiny, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. People were leery of the BCS computers. Now they’re leery of who’s on the selection committee and what perceived biases they may have.

“I sort of sit back and grin. It looks like they’re still having a little controversy and probably always will.”

IN ITS VERY first year, the BCS flirted with disaster. Eventual national champion Tennessee, Kansas State and UCLA all went into the final week unbeaten. During that week, Sagarin said he had run the numbers and that if all three teams won, he projected Tennessee would drop to third in the rankings and be on the outside looking in even though the Vols were No. 1 in the BCS standings that week.

Kramer called Sagarin and told him to keep his “damn mouth shut.” In the end, it worked itself out because double-digit underdog Texas A&M stunned No. 3 Kansas State in double overtime, and Miami rallied to upset No. 2 UCLA.

But that was just the start of the growing pains.

The 2000 season brought some serious drama as Florida State and Miami both finished the season 11-1, but the Hurricanes had beaten the Seminoles 27-24 the first week of October. Miami was ranked No. 2 and Florida State No. 3 in both polls to end the regular season, but the Seminoles leapfrogged the Hurricanes in the final BCS standings thanks to superior computer rankings.

Naturally, then-Miami coach Butch Davis and the Miami fans were furious, with Davis calling the BCS formula “convoluted.”

Then-FSU coach Bobby Bowden didn’t really disagree. “I feel lucky, but the thing is the formula was made before the season ever started,” he said at the time. “The formula spit this thing out that it was us. Therefore, I feel good about it.”

Florida State went on to lose an ugly 13-2 decision to Oklahoma in the title game.

Then there was 2003, which ended with a split national championship, exactly what the BCS was supposed to prevent.

LSU, under Nick Saban, beat Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl to win the BCS national title. The Sooners had been blown out by Kansas State 35-7 in the Big 12 championship game and fell to No. 3 in both polls, but they still got a spot in the BCS title game. USC finished the regular season No. 1 in both polls but was hurt in the final computer rankings when two teams it beat, Notre Dame and Hawaii, lost to Syracuse and Boise State, respectively, in their final games.

The Trojans were further hurt by margin of victory being taken out of the computer rankings that year as BCS brass feared teams would run up scores to boost their numbers.

LSU squeezed past USC by 0.16 of a point in the final BCS standings to grab the No. 2 spot behind Oklahoma. USC was left to face Michigan in the Rose Bowl and won 28-14. The Trojans held on to the No. 1 spot in the AP poll and a share of the national title.

The coaches who voted in their poll had agreed to select the winner of the BCS National Championship game No. 1 on their ballots. But South Carolina’s Lou Holtz, Oregon’s Mike Bellotti and Illinois’ Ron Turner went against that agreement and voted USC No. 1.

“We knew there was a chance we might run into that, the AP poll voting in a different champion,” Kramer said. “Our goal never changed, though, and that was to create better matchups in bowl games, and hopefully in most years, create a consensus No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup for the national championship. It didn’t happen that year. The computers liked Oklahoma. I would agree that we probably did change the formula too much trying to adjust to all the observations from previous years.”

In the aftermath, the BCS formula was simplified in 2004 with strength of schedule and the “quality win” component eliminated.

USC was dominant that season and won the national title, but there were five unbeaten teams entering the bowl selections, including SEC champion Auburn. Tommy Tuberville’s Tigers finished third in the final BCS standings and played in the Sugar Bowl, finishing the year 13-0.

Auburn being left out of the national championship game intensified then-SEC commissioner Mike Slive’s desire to see college football adopt a four-team playoff.

“I never wanted to see a season again where an unbeaten SEC champion didn’t even get a chance to play for a national title,” Slive told ESPN years later. “I already believed we needed a playoff in college football. I knew after 2004 that we absolutely were going to get there.”

THE BCS ERA left virtually no hope for a Group of 5 team to get into the championship game. Boise State had three unbeaten regular seasons in 2006, 2008 and 2009 and never finished higher than sixth in the final BCS standings. The Broncos won the Fiesta Bowl to cap both the 2006 and 2008 seasons, and their 43-42 win in overtime against Oklahoma in the 2007 game remains one of the more thrilling bowl finishes in history.

Chris Petersen, who went on to coach Washington, led those powerhouse Boise State teams. In 2010, the Broncos had vaulted to No. 4 in the BCS standings and were riding a 24-game winning streak, but lost a heartbreaking 34-31 road game to Nevada in overtime on the final weekend of the regular season after missing a 26-yard field goal that would have won it in regulation.

“I think that’s the best team we ever had, when we lost that last game to Nevada and Colin Kaepernick and missed the field goal there at the end,” Petersen said. “We were winning 24-7 and played one bad half of football, and it cost us.”

The Broncos won two games over nationally ranked Power 5 foes that season (Virginia Tech and Oregon State).

“I never got hung up on ‘We had to win a national championship or had to get to the BCS National Championship game,’ because I knew getting one of those top two spots was going to be hard no matter how many games we won,” Petersen said. “I just felt like if we could run the table, there was no way they could leave us out of the BCS bowl games.

“I guess it might have been interesting had we not lost that Nevada game in 2010, but there was nothing to talk about after, not with a loss.”

In 2008, Utah of the Mountain West Conference was the only unbeaten team in the FBS but didn’t get a chance to play for the title. The Utes beat four nationally ranked teams, including Michigan on the road to open the season, but finished sixth in the final BCS standings. They beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl to close out a 13-0 campaign.

After the season, the Mountain West proposed an eight-team playoff that would have eliminated the BCS formula and created a 12-member committee to choose the at-large teams, but it was rejected by the BCS committee.

That May, Slive presented a plus-one model, which was a version of a four-team playoff, but that also was shot down.

Even President-elect Barack Obama was calling for a playoff. In a “60 Minutes” interview that November, he suggested having an eight-team playoff and added, “I don’t know any serious fan of college football who has disagreed with me on this. So I’m going to throw my weight around on this a little bit. I think it’s the right thing to do.”

NEARLY EVERYBODY ASSOCIATED with college football agrees the 2011 season sealed the fate of the BCS. If it wasn’t already inevitable, there seemed to be no doubt a playoff was coming after Alabama and LSU met in the BCS title game, a rematch of their regular-season affair that LSU won 9-6 in overtime.

Oklahoma State was the most explosive team in the country that season, averaging 51.7 points per game, and the Cowboys were No. 2 in the BCS standings when they were upset 37-31 in two overtimes by Iowa State on Nov. 18. Kramer contends that game had more to do with reshaping college football’s system for determining the national champion than any other game during his tenure. “That’s the game that put Alabama back in the mix,” Kramer said.

But OSU coach Mike Gundy and other critics of the BCS said the Crimson Tide should have never been back in the mix, especially after Oklahoma State routed Oklahoma 44-10 two weeks later to win the Big 12 championship — on a weekend when Alabama sat at home because it hadn’t won its division in the SEC. Oklahoma State finished behind LSU and Alabama in both of the polls, and although the Cowboys were No. 2 in the computer rankings, they finished No. 3 in the final BCS standings.

“We should have been in the championship game that year, and if we had gotten that chance, we would have played LSU and won,” Gundy told ESPN. “They were an overload-the-box, man-to-man team on defense, and you could not play our team in man that year. We were too good. That still bothers me, that we didn’t get a shot.”

Womack knew an all-SEC title game wouldn’t bode well for the future of the BCS.

“I agree with Roy. That was the year that ended any debate,” Womack said. “Having two teams from the same conference playing in a rematch solidified that we were going to a playoff. But once you watch those two teams and look at the talent on those teams [Alabama and LSU], it’s hard to argue those weren’t the two best teams around.”

Just as Kramer predicted, the College Football Playoff became a reality a few months later, in June 2012, beginning with the 2014 season.

THE HOOPLA SURROUNDING the first year of the playoff was immense. The goal, according to CFP executive director Bill Hancock, was to pick the “four best teams,” with the committee instructed to consider strength of schedule, head-to-head matchups, conference championships, common opponents and injuries, among other factors.

Ohio State went on to win the national title despite losing to unranked Virginia Tech the second week of the season, but expanding the field to four teams didn’t mean an end to controversy.

Entering the final weekend of the regular season, TCU was third in the CFP rankings, Ohio State was fifth and Baylor sixth, with all three teams having one loss. The Big 12 at that time had no conference championship game, and in their last games, TCU hammered unranked Iowa State 55-3, and Baylor beat No. 9 Kansas State 38-27. The Horned Frogs and Bears finished as co-Big 12 champs, although Baylor won the regular-season matchup in a wild 61-58 affair. Meanwhile, Ohio State delivered a 59-0 pasting of No. 13 Wisconsin in the Big Ten championship game.

Committee member Steve Wieberg told ESPN in 2018 that he had a “knot in his stomach” as the games played out and realized that “two somebodies are going to be left out.”

Gary Patterson, then TCU’s coach, also had a knot in his stomach. He knew what was coming despite the Frogs’ dominant showing in their last chance to impress the committee. As he and then-Iowa State coach Paul Rhoads met at midfield for their postgame handshake, Rhoads said, “Good luck in the playoff, Gary.”

Patterson grimaced and said, “No way they’re going to let us in, Paul, in the first year.”

When the final playoff rankings came out, TCU fell from No. 3 to No. 6. Ohio State moved up to fourth — and into the playoff. Baylor was fifth.

Even now, Patterson is befuddled at how TCU could fall three spots after winning by 52 points.

“I mean, we were already No. 3 and didn’t do anything to make ourselves look bad,” Patterson said. “We had a share of our conference championship, which was supposed to matter. It doesn’t do any good to bitch about it now and say we were better than those four teams that went ahead of us.

“There are good people on that committee. It’s a hard job. I wouldn’t want their job. That’s why I’ve always been an eight-to-12-team playoff guy and glad to see we’re finally getting there.

“It’s just too late for that team, and I hate it for those players.”

Hancock explained to ESPN at the time that the committee wanted to get away from the “old poll mentality” and look at the season in its entirety in picking the final four teams.

“The committee has a different mentality about it,” Hancock said. “Ohio State’s résumé improved. Baylor’s résumé improved with a victory over a good K-State team, and TCU had the misfortune of playing a team that would finish 2-10 on the last weekend. It helped people understand it’s a new day.”

By 2017, there was already some momentum for the playoff to be expanded, but it went into overdrive when two teams from the same conference made the four-team playoff for the first time. Those two teams, Alabama and Georgia of the SEC, won their semifinals and played for the national championship, with the Crimson Tide winning 26-23 in overtime.

Part of the rub was that Alabama didn’t win its division (similar to 2011 in the BCS days) but still got into the playoff as the No. 4 seed. Wisconsin was No. 4 in the next-to-last rankings but lost to Ohio State in the Big Ten championship game. The Buckeyes’ undoing was a 31-point loss in November to an Iowa team that finished 7-5.

But nobody was more upset about the way things played out that season than UCF, which won 25 straight games during the 2017 and 2018 seasons but never got higher than No. 8 in the final CFP rankings. The Knights, of the American Athletic Conference, were 13-0 in 2017 and beat Auburn in the Peach Bowl. But they were an afterthought when the committee sent in its final rankings, sitting at No. 12.

Tennessee athletic director Danny White, who was UCF’s AD at the time, still bristles at it all.

“I said it then and will say it now. It was ridiculous … to finish 12th?” White said. “I knew we weren’t getting in, but I wasn’t going to be quiet about it. Then we go undefeated again in 2018 in the regular season, and after we made all that ruckus in 2017, so many people went on record and said, ‘If they go undefeated again, then it will be another story.’ But the rhetoric quickly changed. We had ranked wins in the American, but it never really seemed like that had the same weight as even an unranked win against a Power 5 brand.

“It wasn’t a real postseason, not if we were all supposed to be part of the same subdivision in football.”

White immediately proclaimed the Knights national champions after their Peach Bowl win following the 2017 season, and quarterback McKenzie Milton said the playoff should be canceled. UCF had T-shirts and a parade to celebrate its national title, and the Colley Matrix system, a mathematical ranking that had been part of the BCS formula, designated UCF as its national champion that season, as noted in the official NCAA record book.

“It was a real-life example of why we needed to expand the playoff,” White said. “It’s really hard to go through a whole season and win every single game. Those kids and those coaches put pressure on the system, that it was time to change. It was a pretty bold statement, and that group of student-athletes from the 2017 season should feel very much responsible for a big part of playoff expansion.”

A Group of 5 team, Cincinnati, finally made the playoff in 2021, as the Bearcats went 13-0 in the regular season but lost to Alabama in the semifinal at the Cotton Bowl. Then, at the start of the 2022 season, a 12-team playoff was approved.

NOW THAT THE college football playoff is expanding to 12 teams starting in 2024, the question is: How much longer before it expands even further?

And even more pressing: How will the format change in 2024 and beyond in the wake of conference realignment? Most in the sport agree it’s going to change, but to what degree?

The late Mike Leach used to opine that college football needed to go to 64 teams, similar to college basketball. His president at Mississippi State, Mark Keenum, was not a fan of the idea. Keenum is now the chair of the College Football Playoff board of managers. He proposed a 12-team format with no automatic qualifiers last summer, but that idea did not receive enough votes to pass.

“What we’ve learned over the years, going back to the BCS, is that there’s a real desire to get it right when determining the national champion, and that desire has not changed no matter how much things have changed around us,” Keenum said. “I understand there’s great prestige in being a major conference champion. But at the end of the day, we want the best teams, period, competing in our nation’s playoff to determine the champion.”

The 12-team model that was approved last year would include the six highest-ranked conference champions and six at-large teams, with the four highest-ranked conference champions seeded 1 through 4 and receiving first-round byes. The first-round games would be played on campus sites.

But with the Pac-12 whittled to two teams, Keenum said there will be very “earnest discussions” about what the right format is going forward, not to mention what distribution of the revenue generated from the CFP will look like.

“I’m looking forward to 2024, but clearly we’ve got a good bit of work to do,” he said.

Petersen, whose 2017 Washington team was the last Pac-12 team to make the playoff, hopes that whatever tweaks are made aren’t locked in for too long.

“Let’s be sure that we’re not so far out there in a contract that we can’t assess how something is working,” said Petersen, now a Fox studio analyst. “We want to be able to look at this and say, ‘This was really good or not so good,’ whether it’s the way teams are seeded, home-field advantage or whatever it is.”

Petitti, the Big Ten commissioner, agrees that flexibility is key, as is protecting the importance of the regular season.

“Meaningful games in the regular season can never go away,” he said. “I think the 12-team format that’s been talked about does that. It doesn’t mean that it won’t evolve down the road. Postseason formats always seem to change in pretty much every sport, right? Now, how fast does that happen in college football? That’s hard to predict, but if you look at the history of postseason formats, they change.”

Kyle Whittingham, in his 19th season at Utah, isn’t sure any of this playoff debate is going to matter down the road. He’s convinced there’s more upheaval coming.

“Everything is going to be predicated and set up on where’s the most money, and that’s why you’re going to see another round, at least, of change, and it’s ultimately going to streamline into one or two superconferences,” Whittingham, whose school is jumping from the Pac-12 to the Big 12 next year, said in August. “They’ll govern themselves. They’ll break off from the NCAA. They’ll have their own playoff, and that’s just where it’s heading. I don’t think there’s any way around that.”

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, one of 10 FBS commissioners on the playoff committee along with Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick, has run 41 marathons in his life, and he has taken on a marathon mentality in navigating the changes in college sports, including the playoff.

“It’s going to be a long run, not a sprint,” he said.

Sankey said patience will be needed as college football tries to figure out its future. He doesn’t see a drastic near-term move, such as 40 or so of the top football programs breaking away from the NCAA and having their own governance, commissioner and playoff.

“I think those have been, in my view, really unsophisticated observations,” Sankey said. “That doesn’t mean the individuals making the observations are not thoughtful. But I think it doesn’t represent a full consideration of college sports, and we still are in these positions charged with administering college sports, not just college football.”

The current CFP contract goes through the 2025 season. Negotiations for a new media rights deal, which would start with the 2026 season, will begin sometime during the first part of next year.

“I don’t think there’s any system or format that’s going to please everyone,” said Alabama coach Nick Saban, who won four national titles in the BCS era and three more in the playoff era. “We don’t all play the same schedules. We don’t play in the same conferences. It’s not the NFL.

“But once we went down the playoff road, we all had to be willing to accept the consequences. Everything now is geared toward the playoff. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing. I’m just saying that’s the way it is. I’ve always said that if we’re going to do this, let’s do it in such a way that the best teams are in the playoff regardless of conference affiliation.

“In a lot of ways, we’re still trying to figure out how to do that.”

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Bama’s ‘uncharacteristic’ gaffes doom CFP hopes

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November 24, 2024

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Bama's 'uncharacteristic' gaffes doom CFP hopes

  • Eli Lederman, ESPN Staff WriterNov 24, 2024, 02:27 AM ET

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      Eli Lederman covers college football and recruiting for ESPN.com. He joined ESPN in 2024 after covering the University of Oklahoma for Sellout Crowd and the Tulsa World.

NORMAN, Okla. — Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer lamented his team’s “uncharacteristic” mistakes in the aftermath of a 24-3 loss to Oklahoma on Saturday night that dealt a significant blow to the Crimson Tide’s College Football Playoff hopes.

Alabama quarterback Jalen Milroe threw three interceptions, and the Crimson Tide (8-3, 4-3 SEC) never shook off a slow start against an Oklahoma defense that held them to a season-low 70 rushing yards.

Meanwhile, the Sooners (6-5, 2-5) — relying on the legs of quarterback Jackson Arnold and freshman running back Xavier Robinson — gashed Alabama for 257 rushing yards on their way to sealing bowl eligibility for a 26th consecutive season.

The Crimson Tide have three losses for the first time since 2010.

Alabama began Week 13 in line to reach the SEC title game on Dec. 7 with wins over Oklahoma then Auburn during the final two weeks of the regular season. Instead, the Crimson Tide’s road stumble helped No. 10 Georgia clinch a spot in the conference championship and left Alabama’s path into the CFP on shaky ground. Even if the Tide beat the Tigers in the Iron Bowl next weekend, Alabama will need plenty of help in order to land a spot in the 12-team playoff field.

Following the program’s lowest-scoring performance since 2004, DeBoer focused on the Tide’s early errors in a game he said “got away” from them after halftime.

“We got to be better in all ways,” DeBoer said. “Some simple things, uncharacteristic things, happened early in the game where we didn’t get the momentum on our side. And really, it comes down to the end of the first half [with] them scoring a touchdown and the turnovers really kind of changing the momentum of the game there.”

It was a particularly rough night for Milroe. The junior went 11-for-26 for 164 yards passing and managed just 7 yards rushing on 15 attempts. Alabama trailed 10-3 early in the third quarter when Oklahoma cornerback Eli Bowen intercepted Milroe, setting up Robinson’s second touchdown run of the game four plays later. The Sooners’ lead grew to 24-3 on the ensuing possession after linebacker Kip Lewis jumped Milroe’s throw to tight end Robbie Ouzts and returned it 49 yards for a score.

Oklahoma’s 21-point advantage marked Alabama’s largest deficit against an unranked opponent since 2003. The Tide picked up only five first downs and 80 yards total after Milroe’s back-to-back picks. He became the first Alabama quarterback to throw three interceptions in a game since 2015 on Woodi Washington‘s game-sealing pick with 6:53 remaining in the contest.

While Milroe struggled, DeBoer saw wider problems in an offense that never recovered from a sloppy first half, which included punts on three of the Tide’s first four possessions.

“I think stepping back, it just felt like early in the game there were different things — drops, balls we lost in the lights — different, uncharacteristic things. Weird things that happened,” DeBoer said. “I thought [Milroe] was actually putting the ball where he needed to. We just needed to help him out a little bit.”

Sooners coach Brent Venables said Oklahoma was the more “physical football team,” and his offense proved it with 205 first-half rushing yards that marked the most Alabama has allowed in a half since 2007. The Tide continued to struggle against the Sooners’ rushing attack after halftime without linebacker Deontae Lawson. Alabama’s second-leading tackler was ruled out for the remainder of the game after exiting with a lower body injury in the second quarter.

DeBoer did not provide an update on Lawson’s status following the game.

“Anytime you lose a great player like Deontae, it’s going to affect you,” DeBoer said. “His leadership. He’s the guy who makes a lot of the calls on the field. Just seems like he’s always in control.”

The stunning defeat leaves the Tide’s postseason hopes in a precarious position entering the final week of the regular season. With those playoff aspirations no longer in Alabama’s control ahead of an Iron Bowl visit from the Tigers, its quarterback was focused on moving forward.

“It’s all about finish,” Milroe said late Saturday night. “We’ve got to finish. There’s so much left for the football season. We’ve got to get everyone together to have a like-mindedness and just keep on competing. Every opportunity that we have, we’ve just got to seize it.”

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SEC chaos sends UGA back to league title game

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SEC chaos sends UGA back to league title game

  • Adam Rittenberg, ESPN Senior WriterNov 24, 2024, 12:41 AM ET

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      College football reporter; joined ESPN in 2008. Graduate of Northwestern University.

A wild day in the SEC produced only one postseason guarantee: Georgia is headed back to the conference championship game for a fourth consecutive season.

The league confirmed Georgia’s spot in the Dec. 7 title game in Atlanta shortly after No. 15 Texas A&M‘s 43-41 loss at Auburn in four overtimes. The Aggies were one of three top-15 SEC teams to lose to unranked foes on the road Saturday, as No. 7 Alabama lost 24-3 at Oklahoma and No. 9 Ole Miss fell at Florida 24-17.

No. 10 Georgia will face the winner of next week’s game between No. 3 Texas and Texas A&M in College Station. The Longhorns and Aggies have not met since 2011, when they were both members of the Big 12. Texas beat visiting Kentucky 31-14 on Saturday, and the Horns remain the only one-loss team in the SEC.

Georgia, which has lost to both Alabama and Ole Miss on the road but owns wins against Texas and No. 11 Tennessee, beat UMass 59-21 on Saturday at Sanford Stadium.

The Crimson Tide entered the day needing to beat Oklahoma then Auburn and for No. 23 Missouri to win once in its final two league games in order to punch their ticket to Atlanta. (Missouri prevailed 39-20 at Mississippi State on Saturday.)

Georgia lost to Alabama in the 2023 SEC title game, costing the Bulldogs a spot in the final four-team College Football Playoff.

Asked about Georgia’s path to the SEC title game after the UMass game, Bulldogs coach Kirby Smart said he was thinking solely about next week’s regular-season finale against visiting Georgia Tech.

Georgia won the SEC title game in 2017 and 2022, while falling in 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2023.

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What we learned in Week 13: Chaos strikes the SEC, midnight strikes for Cinderellas

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November 24, 2024

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What we learned in Week 13: Chaos strikes the SEC, midnight strikes for Cinderellas

  • David Hale, ESPN Staff WriterNov 24, 2024, 12:55 AM ET

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    • College football reporter.
    • Joined ESPN in 2012.
    • Graduate of the University of Delaware.

Somewhere, Greg Sankey is asking ChatGPT to write an argument in favor of the SEC still gobbling up every vacant playoff spot despite Saturday’s results, and a bunch of servers in Texas are smoking and sputtering and deciding that humanity isn’t worth overtaking.

After weeks of lamentations that the SEC has eaten itself because of the depth of quality in the league, it wasn’t the quality teams that feasted in Week 13. It was the hungry, huddled masses of Auburn, Florida and Oklahoma.

The matinee of this horror festival saw Florida, a team given up for dead a month ago, grant Lane Kiffin his wish to avoid the SEC championship game by delivering a stunning 24-17 win over No. 9 Ole Miss.

That sound you’re hearing? That’s the sound of thousands of Florida fans deleting message board and other social media posts imploring the school to fire Billy Napier and back up a Brink’s truck to land Kiffin as the Gators’ next head coach.

DJ Lagway threw two touchdown passes, Montrell Johnson ran for 107 yards and a score, and the Florida defense racked up three takeaways — including picking off Jaxson Dart on each of Ole Miss’ final two drives — to secure the win.

In the aftermath, Florida players slapped a Gators logo on Ole Miss’ prop basketball hoop and proceeded to dunk — figuratively and literally — on the Rebels.

All of that set up this walk of shame by the Ole Miss equipment staff, forced to recover the hoop with the Gators logo still on it.

That might be the most embarrassing moment involving a basketball hoop since all of the 76ers games this year.

The meat in this Misery McRib came courtesy of Oklahoma, a team so bereft of offense that it fired its coordinator and decided Saturday to just let the defense handle the bulk of the scoring.

The Sooners picked off Jalen Milroe three times in the 24-3 win over No. 7 Alabama, gaining bowl eligibility and handing the Tide a third loss in the regular season for the first time since 2010.

Oklahoma rarely threw the ball in the win, with Jackson Arnold completing just 9 of 11 throws for 68 yards, but he added a game-high 131 on the ground. It was a coming-of-age performance for the young QB, and it also offered some hope to a fan base that had been clinging to Lincoln Riley’s struggles as the only source of happiness in 2024.

The grand finale of the SEC’s assault on mediocrity came on The Plains, as Texas A&M roared back from a 21-0 deficit to take a late lead only to see Auburn tie it on a short kick with seconds to then win it in a fourth overtime when a Marcel Reed pass was dropped in the end zone.

On one hand, it was deflating to see the Aggies play this many overtimes in a game that didn’t end with Jimbo Fisher’s nephew picking a fight with someone. But worse, it also was loss No. 3 on the season for Texas A&M, putting its playoff hopes on life support, too.

And so here’s where the SEC stands with just one Saturday remaining in the regular season: Texas is 10-1 with the renewal of the rivalry against A&M awaiting. Georgia, Tennessee and the Aggies all have two conference losses, but the Dawgs did officially clinch a spot in the conference title game. Alabama and Ole Miss are officially out of the SEC title race.

But forget those standings. Consider this:

Texas was demolished by Georgia, its only game against a team with seven or more wins this year.

Ole Miss beat Georgia, but has lost to Kentucky and Florida.

Alabama beat Georgia, but has lost to Vanderbilt and Oklahoma.

Tennessee beat Alabama, but lost to Arkansas.

A&M beat Missouri and LSU, both ranked in the top 10 at the time, but lost to Auburn.

South Carolina‘s key wins — A&M and Missouri — don’t look so impressive anymore, while the teams the Gamecocks lost to (LSU, Bama and Ole Miss) all have ugly losses themselves now.

So, sure, the SEC has depth. Thirteen teams are now bowl eligible (and Auburn could join them with an Iron Bowl win next week). But it’s hard to argue that depth is the reason the conference is so chock full of teams scuffling along the fringes of the playoff. It’s one thing to make the case an SEC team with more losses warrants special consideration compared with Indiana or SMU or Arizona State when those losses come against Georgia or Texas. It’s another thing when Vanderbilt is involved in the equation.

It’s almost as if the top of the SEC is both quite good and inherently flawed, like every season of “24.” There’s no great reason to suggest the SEC won’t be the last league standing when the first 12-team playoff comes to an end, but there’s also no reason to assume it warrants the lion’s share of the at-large bids either.

So, when the ACC is hilariously punching its third ticket to the dance, and Clemson coach Dabo Swinney pops out of a coffin like The Undertaker, don’t go blaming the committee. Things look different after Week 13. There is no real hierarchy, no conference supremacy. There are a handful of clearly good teams — Oregon, Ohio State, Georgia — and a whole lot of question marks after that.

In the end, that’s probably more fun for everyone.

Well, everyone except Sankey.

Jump to:
So long, Cinderellas | Big 12 chaos | Penn State survives
Miami rebounds | SMU clinches | Nebraska is bowl bound
Illinois survives | Saluting fired coaches
Beavers win Pac-12 | Week 13 trends
Heisman five | Under the radar

Sayonara, Cinderella

In every Cinderella story, there is a point when the clock strikes midnight and the magic wears off, and the beautiful damsel turns back into the 13th-best team in the Big Ten.

In some rare cases, the prince seeks her out anyway, glass slipper in hand, and they live happily ever after. Most of the time though, Cinderella ends up scrubbing kitchens and cleaning the chicken coop and telling her wicked stepsisters that, no, seriously, the committee once had her ranked No. 5 in the country.

Indeed, Saturday held no happy endings for 2024’s Cinderellas. Ohio State crushed Indiana; Kansas, back from the dead, demolished Colorado; and Notre Dame, eager to ruin the hopes and dreams of American patriots everywhere, steamrolled Army.

Perhaps this was all inevitable. Indiana entered play undefeated, but also had the No. 106 strength of schedule, according to ESPN. Army, too, was undefeated, but its schedule was even worse — No. 133. Colorado was 7-2, with the No. 73 schedule and a loss to the only ranked (at game time) team it had played. This wasn’t the work of magic, but of a favorable path to playoff contention.

On Saturday, that path led to a trio of brick walls.

Indiana entered Saturday looking for a movie-like script, hoping to become the first Hoosiers to ever overcome the odds against a heavily favored opponent on a big stage. Unfortunately, after Curt Cignetti pulled out a ladder to measure the height of Ohio State’s D-linemen, it was pretty clear they had no chance. The Buckeyes’ front dominated the Indiana O-line, holding Kurtis Rourke to just 8-of-18 for 68 yards passing and racking up five sacks in a dominant 38-15 win. After an initial 11-play, 70-yard touchdown drive, the Hoosiers managed just 81 more yards in the game.

Curt Cignetti, the college football coach most likely to still post his Wordle results to Facebook every morning, entered Saturday lauded by pundits, armed with a hefty new contract extension, and buoyed by apparently impressive Google results (though you’d still have to scroll through a bunch of sponsored ads before finding them). But by game’s end, he was left answering questions about Indiana’s playoff résumé, in spite of a 10-1 record.

Perhaps Cignetti knew something about the results of the SEC games to come.

Colorado’s playoff hopes, on the other hand, look all but over unless the Buffaloes can go on to win the Big 12 outright.

After a 2-6 start to the season, Kansas has now won three straight, all against ranked teams. On Saturday, the Jayhawks’ offense dominated, with Devin Neal running for 207 yards and three touchdowns — part of a 331-yard rushing day for Kansas that shocked Colorado coach Deion Sanders, who was previously unaware the rules allowed a team to run that often.

As for Army, Saturday’s blowout loss to Notre Dame represented its most humiliating moment since needing to ask the French for help during the Revolutionary War.

Riley Leonard threw for two touchdowns, Notre Dame’s ground game added five more, and the Irish won their eighth straight game. Notre Dame’s average margin of victory during the streak is 32 points. Only one of those wins has come by less than 18. The USC Trojans and the fading images of Week 2 are now all that stand between Notre Dame and a playoff berth.

There are other Cinderellas still alive in the playoff hunt, of course — Boise State, SMU, all those plucky upstarts in the SEC who’ve had to endure such tremendous depth and harsh treatment by the committee.

But Saturday was also a reminder that, for all the talk of parity in 2024, the rich tend to get richer, the kings stay the king and the Big 12 isn’t rigging games for ratings after all.

Whether that ultimately leads to a more entertaining postseason is up for debate. It is, after all, the Cinderella stories we cherish in other sports, even if we ultimately end up watching the biggest and baddest in the end. But what Indiana, Colorado and Army have proven in 2024 is that those stories still matter in college football, too, and if the glass slipper doesn’t fit in the end, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t still worth going to the ball. After all, balls usually have some nice hors d’oeuvres and an open bar, and we can always look back later and remember when everyone wanted to see Indiana take its turn dancing with the prince.

Chaos in the Big 12

Arizona State escaped two late comeback attempts by BYU — first on an interception by Javan Robinson and then by thwarting a Hail Mary after fans had already stormed the field and taken down a goal post — to win 28-23 and take the driver’s seat in the Big 12.

In the same week Skatteburgers went on sale around (most of) the state, Cam Skattebo ran for 147 yards, three touchdowns and a large order of fries in the win.

After jumping out to a 28-9 lead in the second half, Arizona State saw BYU climb back to within five with the ball before Robinson’s late pick. After seeming to run out the clock on a heave by QB Sam Leavitt, fans stormed the field and chaos ensued.

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Chaos ensues as ASU storms the field prematurely

Arizona State fans storm the field and tear down the goalposts with one second left on the clock before re-storming after a failed BYU Hail Mary.

In fairness, it’s hard to fault the Arizona State fans for being a bit unprepared for this moment. The Sun Devils were picked to finish last in the Big 12 and seemed left for dead as recently as one month ago when they lost to Cincinnati.

Arizona State is in the driver’s seat in the Big 12 now, but the path toward the conference title game is still a murky picture.

Iowa State survived a scare from Utah on Saturday despite a dominant defensive performance. Utah managed just nine first downs and 224 yards, but still had a 28-24 lead with less than two minutes to play thanks to a pick-six and a blocked punt. But Rocco Becht led a 10-play, 75-yard touchdown drive and the Utes missed a 54-yard kick to tie, with the Cyclones holding on for a 31-28 win.

Kansas State rebounded from a two-game skid, too, with a 41-15 win over Cincinnati behind 143 yards and two touchdowns from DJ Giddens.

With Colorado‘s Week 13 loss, that leaves four teams tied atop the league at 6-2 and five additional teams just off the pace at 5-3. As many as eight of those nine teams could feasibly end up tied for the conference lead after Week 14. In that case, the league will revert to its eight-team tiebreaker scenario, which is a gladiator-style cage match in which each head coach, armed only with their wits, cunning and a Super Soaker, battle to see who will be the last two survivors.

Nittany Lions survive

Let this be a lesson to coaches everywhere: You can’t score if you don’t have the football.

James Franklin, noted as a brilliant tactician who has never been criticized for controversial decisions in big moments as far as we know, avoided disaster by rolling the dice three times on fourth down in Penn State‘s final drive, running out the clock on a 26-25 win over Minnesota.

Drew Allar threw for 244 yards and accounted for two touchdowns, Nicholas Singleton gave Penn State its first lead in the third quarter with a 12-yard touchdown run, and the defense got two critical turnovers in the win, but it was Franklin’s decisions on the final drive that proved the difference.

Trailing by four, Minnesota settled for a short field goal with 5:48 to go, then kicked back to Penn State. The conservative approach looked to pay dividends when the Gophers held on a third-and-9, and Penn State set up to punt. But Franklin called for the fake, which Penn State ran to perfection, netting 32 yards, extending the drive. Franklin had the Lions go for it twice more on fourth-and-1, and the drive — 12 plays in all — ultimately closed out the game. The only two plays on the drive to gain more than 10 yards came on fourth down.

Was the offense largely listless otherwise? Sure. Was the special teams a disaster that nearly cost Penn State the game? You betcha. Was beating a 6-5 Minnesota team coming off a loss to Rutgers all that impressive? Probably not. But the important takeaway here is Penn State won, Franklin is a beloved football coach who hasn’t sullied his reputation in weeks and the committee will have the Nittany Lions as the No. 3 team in America this week because it likes to see Greg Sankey get really mad.

For much of this season, watching Miami has been like pharmaceutical commercials listing the side effects. Do not take Miami if you have heart disease, high blood pressure or 20/20 vision. Watching Miami may cause heartburn, nausea and the sudden desire to throw your remote at the TV. If you’ve maintained a coherent thought for more than four drives while watching Miami, contact your doctor immediately.

The first half of Saturday’s game against Wake Forest certainly felt like more of the same. The Canes’ D, criticized endlessly this season, had no answers for the Wake offense, save a Mishael Powell pick-six in the red zone. Miami celebrated that score by immediately surrendering a 100-yard kickoff return. And Cam Ward delivered one of his patented “Why throw it away when I can toss a left-handed shovel pass that will either go for a remarkable touchdown or a mind-boggling interception?” plays and this time, it was the latter.

And so the refrain began again: Miami may be 9-1, but the Canes are hardly worthy of a playoff berth.

But in the fourth quarter, we finally got a taste of that sweet, sweet Miami hype we hadn’t had since the USF game.

Miami reeled off 22 points in the final eight minutes, Jordan Lyle ran for 115 yards and a TD, Ward accounted for three touchdowns and Wake managed just 50 yards of offense in the second half as the Canes rolled to a 42-14 win.

So, which Miami will we see next week against 8-3 Syracuse in a game that will decide whether Miami or Clemson goes to the ACC championship game? Might want to have your doctor on speed dial for that one.

SMU clinches ACC title game berth

Kevin Jennings threw for 323 yards and accounted for three touchdowns in a 33-7 win over Virginia on Saturday that officially clinched a spot for SMU in the ACC championship game in the Mustangs’ first year in the league.

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SMU stays undefeated in the ACC with win over Virginia

SMU stays undefeated in the ACC with win over Virginia

SMU’s impressive 10-1 campaign, which includes a 7-0 record in ACC play thus far, should be one of the best stories of the season. Unfortunately, the Mustangs are basically the Jay Gatsby of college football — using their vast fortune to buy their way into high society only to find the old money elites won’t take them seriously and that green light off in the distance is just the committee’s way of signaling Miami will be ranked higher. Eventually, some three-loss SEC team will shoot them and leave them to bleed out in a pool — the second-worst death penalty SMU will have faced.

Dylan Raiola threw for 292 yards and Emmett Johnson rushed for 113 more as Nebraska finally earned bowl eligibility by picking up win No. 6 with a 44-25 victory over Wisconsin.

Nebraska has not played in a bowl game since 2016 — a time when the world was still mourning the loss of our beloved Harambe. Since then, Nebraska football has essentially been the plot of a “Saw” movie, the type of anguish and horror that can only be the product of some diabolically evil scheme dreamt up by a monster. But, at long last, Nebraska football has returned to its rightful place — in the middle of the Big Ten and one of the top 80 programs in the country.

Surely somewhere Matt Rhule is standing shirtless in the rain, relishing this first taste of freedom like Andy from “Shawshank Redemption.” Dana Holgorsen may also be shirtless somewhere but that’s unrelated.

Illinois moved to 8-3 with a 38-31 win over Rutgers that was somehow both utterly ridiculous and, for this Illini team, completely expected.

Trailing by 1 and facing a fourth-and-13 with 14 seconds to play, Luke Altmyer hit Pat Bryant for a 40-yard touchdown, and the Illini went on to win 38-31.

It was a ludicrous finish with four fourth-quarter lead changes and 23 points scored in the final 3:07, but this is old hat for Illinois. It’s the Illini’s fourth win of the season after trailing in the fourth quarter, more than any other team in the country, providing the Big Ten with a much-needed team that has lost to the good teams so the conference’s résumé doesn’t look completely lackluster. Penn State will be sending Bret Bielema a nice ham for Christmas.

Beavers win Pac-12

It has been a rough year for Oregon State, which entered Saturday sporting a 4-6 record. But Saturday was for all the marbles — and in this case, that would be exactly two marbles.

The Beavers hosted Washington State for the Pac-12 championship, which is sort of like being valedictorian of your home school class. Still, they delivered.

Ben Gulbranson threw for 294 yards and two touchdowns and Trent Walker caught eight balls in the 41-38 win. Washington State’s John Mateer was exceptional again — averaging nearly 11 yards per pass — but the Cougars’ defense failed for the second straight week.

A salute to the coaches we’ve lost

No Power 4 school has fired a head coach yet, which is something of a surprise this late in the season, but that doesn’t mean we’ve not said goodbye to some beloved names. There are currently 12 openings for 2025, including six announced in the past week.

Jim McElwain, Central Michigan

McElwain announced this week he planned to retire at season’s end, but before he was done, the Chippewas managed a 16-14 win over rival Western Michigan on Tuesday, thanks to a terrific defensive effort holding WMU to just 184 total yards.

All that remains between McElwain and retirement now is a finale against Northern Illinois. Then, after spending so many years in the frigid winters of Michigan, it’ll be time to set off for sunny shores — some place nice and hot. Maybe he’ll go fishing for some big targets. A shark, perhaps. And, when he does reel in that prized catch, he’ll want to take some celebratory photos. We can only hope that, in his post-football life, he’ll share those photos on the internet.

Anyone coaching Owls

Rice, Florida Atlantic, Kennesaw State and Temple are all looking for new head coaches, meaning all four programs with Owl nicknames fired their guys in the past month.

FAU beat Temple in Week 12 in a game so bad, both teams fired their head coaches afterward.

Temple then faced off against UTSA on Friday, with AD Arthur Johnson attempting to explain the decision in game, only for the team to provide all the evidence necessary.

FAU moved on from Tom Herman, and we can only hope he responded to the decision with a text back to the AD saying, “OK, cool. #HookEm.”

Poggi out, Poggi back

FAU lost its follow-up performance Saturday, 39-27 to Charlotte, which also fired its head coach, Biff Poggi. Charlotte will have to pay Poggi $1.3 million in a buyout, plus raise its shirt sleeve budget significantly for the next guy.

Poggi, meanwhile, pulled a George Costanza and just showed up at work anyway after being fired, hoping nobody would notice.

Frankly, it’s a shame Charlotte’s experiment to hire an investment banker with no on-field experience whose wardrobe can also be used to wax your car and who built a team by recruiting guys from his old high school under the auspices of filming a documentary that would air on Quibi didn’t work. It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Week 13 vibe shifts

This week included some major swings in the playoff landscape, but we also try to keep tabs on some of the more subtle shifts in the college football universe here.

Trending down: Dawgs’ run defense

Since the start of 2020, Georgia has the best record of any team in the country at 58-6. Since the start of 2020, UMass has the worst record of any team in the country at 7-43. On Saturday, they faced off in Athens, Georgia, in a game that could have threatened a 108-year-old record.

As it turned out, the surviving members of the 1916 Cumberland team could pop the champagne they’ve been holding on to since prohibition and toast that their 222-0 record margin of defeat against Georgia Tech remains intact, as the Bulldogs only managed a pedestrian 59-21 win.

In fact, Georgia didn’t exactly look like a dominant team despite the talent mismatch. UMass actually ran for 226 yards in the game — or 29 more than the Minutemen managed against Wagner — and topped 20 points against a Power 4 team for the first time since 2021 (vs. Boston College).

The impressive rushing performance against Georgia now means UMass should crack the committee’s top 15 this week.

Trending down: Texas‘ strength of schedule

Texas beat Kentucky 31-14 on Saturday in a largely uninspiring performance that saw Quinn Ewers toss two touchdowns and Quintrevion Wisner run for 158 yards. Texas was fine. The Horns were never in real danger of losing, but they also didn’t really pull away until late in the fourth quarter. It’s fair to wonder if perhaps the Horns are just bored.

There are currently eight teams with seven or more wins in the SEC, and Texas hasn’t played any of them.

Is it Texas’ fault that the SEC rolled out the red carpet and forgot about strength of schedule in Year 1? Is it Texas’ fault that the Michigan Wolverines, a nonconference foe the Horns steamrolled, is a shell of its 2023 self? Is it Texas’ fault that SEC haters are elated to finally be able to hold the strength of schedule argument against an SEC team?

No. Of course not. But it is Texas’ fault we haven’t seen any of Arch Manning in weeks, and if we’re not going to get Arch in the playoff, then what’s the point of even putting the Horns in?

Trending up: BC miracles

Saturday was the 40th anniversary of Doug Flutie’s Hail Mary throw to beat Miami, a play on the Mount Rushmore of historic college football moments.

And on this Saturday, Boston College delivered another moment for the ages. With 11:20 left in the third quarter, BC rolled out kicker Liam Connor, who booted a 27-yard field goal that gave the Eagles a 20-point lead in a game they’d eventually win 41-21.

Doesn’t sound so miraculous? Consider that was just BC’s second made field goal all season. The Eagles doubled their total for the year and still have less than any other program in the country. BC’s only other field goal came in a win over Michigan State way back on Sept. 21. The Eagles have attempted just three all season. Aside from the 2020 COVID season when teams played abridged schedules, no team has attempted fewer than five field goals in a full season in at least the past 20 years.

Trending up: ACC tradition

On Saturday, Cal and Stanford played yet another edition of The Game, a showdown that has featured ACC legends such as Aaron Rodgers and Andrew Luck, and included perhaps the most memorable moment in ACC history, when the band was on the field as Cal walked off with a win in 1982.

This time around, the Bears and Cardinal etched another memorable moment into the ACC history books.

In a game broadcast on its traditional window at 3:30 Eastern Time on the ACC Network, Stanford jumped out to a 21-7 lead in the second half, but the Bears, knowing how much this moment meant to ACC fans everywhere, refused to cede victory. Fernando Mendoza threw two fourth-quarter touchdowns to Jonathan Brady — a 30-yarder and a 22-yarder — to take a 24-21 lead with 2:40 to go, then ran out the clock with fans presumably chanting “A-C-C, A-C-C” in the waning moments, celebrating winning the traditional ACC rivalry trophy: a framed photo of Tommy Bowden holding a Raycom coffee mug.

Trending down: FSU skeptics

Florida State‘s much-maligned season has finally taken a turn for the better, as the Seminoles marched past a 1-11 FCS opponent, Charleston Southern, 41-7 on Saturday.

This is huge news for FSU for a couple reasons. First, the Noles doubled their season win total. Second, it gives us some additional insight into the school’s long-term plans in its ongoing lawsuit to escape the ACC. It’s clear now that Florida State plans to win its lawsuit, gain its freedom and join the Big South-OVC Association, where next season it’ll finish 8-4 and narrowly edge out Lindenwood for third place.

Heisman five

In the race for the Heisman, we may be ignoring something more compelling. This year’s race is as uniquely fun as any in recent memory.

Consider this: The three-man battle for the award is not about three QBs quietly going to work for the top teams in the country. The SEC and Big Ten don’t have real contenders for the honor. Instead, it’s a magician of a QB for an oft-maligned Miami, an unrelenting tailback for Boise State hoping to become the first Heisman winner from a program outside the major conferences since Ty Detmer in 1990 and a do-it-all superstar playing iron man football for Deion Sanders in the mix. And they’re all doing something historic, all are electric on a weekly basis and all are nearly impossible to compare against each other.

And as we head into the final weekend of the regular season, the race still seems to be completely up in the air.

1. Boise State Broncos RB Ashton Jeanty

He’s bruised and battered and battling injury. He’s facing stacked boxes with defenses putting nine defenders and a rancor from “Star Wars” at the line of scrimmage. And still, no one’s stopping Jeanty. In an otherwise miserable 17-13 win over Wyoming, Jeanty carried 19 times for 169 yards and a touchdown, officially crossing the 2,000-yard threshold on the season. If he hits his season average for rushing next week, he’ll wrap the regular season with the fifth-most rushing yards in FBS history.

2. Colorado WR/CB Travis Hunter

Who’s the best player in the country? It’s hard to make the case that it’s anyone other than Hunter, who continues to do things no one has done before. In Saturday’s loss, he caught eight passes for 125 yards and two touchdowns and made seven tackles with a pass breakup. That the rest of the Buffs couldn’t stop Kansas was hardly his fault. It’s ironic that, if Hunter were at a less polarizing but more successful school such as Georgia or Alabama, he’d likely be getting more attention than he is playing for a school where the head coach will always be the biggest star. But Hunter is arguably one of the most dynamic and talented athletes to play college football since … Lamar Jackson? Bo Jackson? Barry Sanders? Jim Thorpe? Name a great. Hunter measures up.

3. Miami QB Cam Ward

The biggest critique of Ward this season is that he simply believes too much in his own ability to turn water into wine and sacks into touchdowns. Ward was terrific in Miami’s win over Wake Forest on Saturday, but the standard is so high with him, anything less than five touchdowns, 400 yards and sawing a lady in half during an official’s review just to keep the crowd entertained feels like a letdown. That’s the best explanation of how amazing Ward has been. A very good game feels boring.

4. Arizona State RB Cam Skattebo

He ran for 147 yards and three touchdowns on Saturday in a program-defining win over BYU. He’s selling burgers. His name is incredibly fun to say. Change the lyrics to the Pixies’ “Caribou” to “Skattebo” and it fits perfectly. In any other year, he’d be a household name. Regardless, he belongs in the Heisman discussion now.

5. Oregon QB Dillon Gabriel

The Ducks were off this week, which seemed nice.

Under-the-radar play of the week

“OK, guys, here’s the plan. We’re going to shift pre-snap and move the entire O-line out wide. Then we’re going to bring in some wide receivers to block. Then we’re going to have our true freshman QB handle throwing the pass. Should work like a charm.”

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GT gifted a quirky pick-six from botched pitch

NC State tries to run a trick sweep, but the pitch bounces off the running back’s helmet and into the arms of E.J. Lightsey for the 21-yard touchdown.

NC State‘s play design on this pick-six that ultimately cost the Wolfpack the game in a 30-29 loss to Georgia Tech is why some offensive coordinators should be kept away from the Red Bull.

Under-the-radar game of the week

South Dakota rallied from an 11-point deficit in the final four minutes Saturday to knock off FCS No. 1 North Dakota State, 29-28.

Aidan Bouman connected with Javion Phelps with just 12 seconds to go for a 25-yard, go-ahead touchdown to secure the win.

Bauman finished with 272 yards and two touchdowns — 120 yards and both scores coming in the final 3:40 of the game — and the Coyotes ran for 272 yards in the win.

With the victory, South Dakota claims a share of the Missouri Valley championship.

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