College football schedule, updates, and fun stuff for Week 9

Virginia Tech has made a bowl game every year since 1993; they will likely do so again this year. You might assume that such a streak provides a certain emotional stability in times of strife. Times like losing to Miami by 24 points on a Thursday night at home. But our friends at The Key Play would challenge that assumption.

It is, but it probably hurts recruiting.

The first College Football Playoff rankings were released Tuesday evening, setting the official pecking order for this year’s national title race. The top two were expected, but after that there were a few surprises. Since we’re all adjusting to a new format and how weekly rankings will shape up, let’s consider what we learned from the committee’s first top 25.

One of the surprises in the first rankings is Auburn coming in at No. 3. Had the Tigers been ranked as high as No. 4, it would have been expected, but compared to the AP Top 25 and Coaches Poll voters, the committee is giving Gus Malzahn’s team more credit.

The College Football Playoff announced its top 25 teams today, and not surprisingly, the four teams at the top -- Mississippi State, Florida State, Auburn and Ole Miss -- were from the South, including three from the SEC. Another team, Alabama, just missed out at sixth.

The Playoff will be played in Pasadena, New Orleans, and Arlington, but here’s the map of where the current teams are located, from ESPN’s Chris Hassel.

The College Football Playoff announced its first preliminary rankings Tuesday night. This means we got our first glimpse at what the selection committee is thinking, after years of speculating about what the committee will value and decades of demanding a playoff system in the first place.

The 12-member committee has met every week and spent the last two days discussing its initial top 25 over the course of 12 hours. It will release a weekly ranking from now until the last week of the season, with that last ranking deciding the matchups in the Playoff and the four other New Year’s Six bowls. This week’s technically means nothing, but it does show which teams have the inside tracks and which have ground to make up.

We tend to toss the phrase “dumpster fire” around a lot. Honestly, it’s overused. Have a bad inning? Dumpster fire. A cold shooting half? Dumpster fire. Here’s what should qualify as a dumpster fire: A sparsely attended homecoming concert featuring a band popular when current freshmen were toddlers, followed by walking into a stadium and immediately watching your team lose four fumbles in its first six plays, finding themselves down 28-0 before most of the tailgating alumni have taken their seats.

This isn’t just bad. It’s watching a car crash into a storefront, shift into reverse, and crash into the store behind it. It’s watching a tall man walk repeatedly into a low door frame. I come to you today to say “Yes. I was there. I experienced those three hours. Let’s walk into this door frame together, shall we?”

F/+ projections have been pretty good at determining win probabilities this year. Through nine weeks, teams given a 90-percent or better chance of winning a game are 95-5, right on track. But those teams are 0-2 against North Carolina, which has now won two games in a row and is threatening to pull a second-half rally just like it did last year.

The UNC defense was an absolute nightmare over the first seven weeks of the season, which was a direct cause for the Heels being given a 7.9 percent chance of beating Georgia Tech in Week 8 and an 8.9 percent chance of beating Virginia in Week 9. The odds of winning both of those games, then, were 0.7 percent, but they did so. They’re now 4-4 overall and 2-2 in conference, and they’re single-handedly keeping alive the dream of a seven-way 4-4 tie in the ACC Coastal.

3. If there is any consolation, Henderson gets back up to get slung off Robinson a second time in yet another instance of the universe punishing and humiliating those who try. Khalid Henderson, I want to hug you.

5. After end-running the entire width of the field, Robinson is finally tackled by linebackers No. 2 Bud Dupree and McWilson, last seen being shrugged off on Robinson’s first contact with the Kentucky defense.

Just two Top 25 teams lost in Week 9, but one of them was a big one: Ole Miss, previously ranked No. 3 in the AP, fell to LSU, opening a top-four spot for the taking. Alabama has snatched that spot in both polls, with Mississippi State hanging on to the top.

Below, we’ve combined the two big human polls with two well-known computer rankings to produce a composite. It might be the best guess out there as to how the selection committee is thinking, heading into its first rankings release at 7:30 p.m. ET Tuesday night, with one exception: there’s almost no way the committee will declare four SEC teams to be the country’s best. The real best guess, then, might be drop a few of those top SEC teams. Expect Mississippi State and Florida State to be the committee’s top two, with Michigan State, Oregon, TCU, and several SEC teams among the next bunch.

Jake Waters will never have to pay for a beer in Council Bluffs, Iowa. At least not in the northeast part of this city of 60,000 people, where the sounds of his Manziel-like highlights play every Saturday, booming into the Loess Hills.

At Iowa Western Community College, Waters is an icon. The current star quarterback for No. 11 Kansas State and town native won the Reivers* their first national championship in 2012, their mere fourth year of existence, and if you make it out to a game, you’ll surely hear about that a couple of times.

The 7-1 Rebels are still firmly in playoff contention, but will need a strong performance this week against a very tough Auburn offense to stay that way. If they pass that test, a season-ending Egg Bowl meeting with No. 1 Mississippi State could be a play-in game for the NCAA playoff.

Forget 15 or 20 percent, Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte raised the bar on high tipping over the weekend by leaving a whopping 94 percent tip for “bottle service” when he went to see Penn State take on Ohio State.

Note to LeSean McCoy: This is how you become a man of the people. Lochte’s $400 tip is the equivalent of 8,000 McCoy tips.

On Saturday, TCU beat Texas Tech, 82-27, running out of stadium fireworks in the process.

Via @FrogsOWar

A week of close calls amongst the Underdogs makes for a nerve-wracking race to the finish line.

Overall, most of the poll is the same, a rarity around these parts. But while seven of the top 10 checked back in at the same spots, the difference between those top four shrunk, drastically. ECU has been on top of this poll since Week 7, and had been lapping at the heels of BYU for weeks before that. However, a week after a less-than-ideal performance against South Florida, the Pirates played it a little too cool in a 10-point win over a bad UConn team.

The transitive property had already been shot, buried, dug up, and buried again by South Carolina, Missouri, and Indiana earlier this season. And granted, we’ve known since the beginning that it was never as useful as we wish it would be in figuring out who’s better among Team A, Team B, and Team C.

But in case you still wanted to find value in all things transitive, some important SEC games tried as hard as they could to knock that out of your brain.

Former NFL Vice President of Officiating and current Fox Sports analyst wrote a scathing piece Sunday accusing SEC officials of misusing their communications system in two games this season: Saturday’s Alabama-Tennessee game and Mississippi State’s win over Auburn two weeks ago.

Pereira alleges officiating crews received information from a mystery figure while discussing penalty calls in the two games. In the first game, the call in question was an intentional grounding penalty called against Dak Prescott. Pereira says officials were seen listening to instructions before making the correct call and waving off the penalty. Saturday, the call in question concerned a personal foul penalty called on a Tennessee first quarter punt.

Every Ole Miss fan handles a loss to LSU differently. This one cried a lot and smashed a milk jug:

That milk really took a beating:

Remember when Alabama’s rematch against LSU in 2011 contributed to the death of the BCS and the formation of the College Football Playoff? And then Alabama’s 2012 loss to Texas A&M meant the Tide were totally out of the BCS race, except they were back to No. 2 just 14 days later? And how it took the most amazing moment in college football history to put away Bama last year?

That same zombie elephant figure is once again on the horizon.

Down 21-17 with just over two minutes left in the game, Utah needed a pair of defensive stops on third-and-two from their own 28 to have any chance to beat USC. The excellent Utes defensive unit came through in another key situation, forcing an incomplete pass from Cody Kessler and stuffing Nelson Agholor before the first down line.

Utah and quarterback Travis Wilson took over at their own 27 with 2:08 left on the clock, needing a touchdown to knock off the visiting Trojans. Thanks to these three big plays, they were able to do exactly that.

TCU’s not used to having a high-scoring offense. The Horned Frogs have primarily been a defensive team under head coach Gary Patterson, but suddenly find themselves with the top scoring offense in the nation after scoring 82 points Saturday against Texas Tech, the most in an FBS conference game since 2010.

The offensive explosion was so unexpected, in fact, that TCU ran out of their fireworks allotment for the entire season, according to Assistant Athletics Director for Marketing and Licensing Drew Martin.