College Football

5 top-14 teams lost in Week 6, but it wasn’t really a MAYHEM SATURDAY

Keeping track of all the ranked games, Playoff committee-style.

Updated Oct 7, 2018, 5:28 AM UTC

NCAA Football: Louisiana State at Florida

Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

We’re now in the same month as 2018’s first College Football Playoff rankings reveal. And October started off with — technically — some big rankings shakeups, but it was more about unmasking a few pretenders than any real BLOOD WEEK CHAOS CARNAGE. I’ll explain each below.

Below, we’re keeping track of each top-25 game’s impact, both before and after final scores, mostly paying attention to CFB committee stuff, not highlights or fun plays.

Remember the things the committee has mostly demonstrated it rewards: wins over final top-25 teams, wins over bowl teams, road wins, dominant wins, weirdly excusable losses, being Alabama, and not being a mid-major. It does not care what your opponent’s AP ranking was at kickoff.

All rankings AP, for now. All days Saturday, and all times p.m. ET. Final scores in bold.

Probably important

Games in which the winning team will likely have a pretty high-quality Week 6 victory by season’s end.

No. 22 Florida (5-1) 27, No. 5 LSU (5-1) 19: “Florida’s a Georgia upset and one more Kentucky loss away from the Playoff inside track” isn’t a thing anyone expected to say about this game, but here we are. This sort of looked like a big upset, but the Gators were only 3-point home underdogs.
No. 6 Notre Dame (6-0) 45, No. 24 Virginia Tech (3-2) 23: That road trip really might’ve been Notre Dame’s biggest remaining Playoff roadblock. No, really.
No. 19 Texas (5-1), No. 7 Oklahoma (5-1) 45: Everyone bailed on Texas after Week 1, and yet the Longhorns are currently the, um, Big 12 regular season favorite. (Both UT and WVU are unbeaten within the conference, but WVU has zero wins over Oklahoma.) Again, this wasn’t exactly a BONKERS upset, because Texas almost always plays OU tough, and Tom Herman has an obscenely good record as an underdog.
Texas A&M (4-2) 20, No. 13 Kentucky (5-1) 14: The Aggies should definitely be ranked. Not an upset at all, because they were home favorites.

Maybe important

Games in which the winner will probably have beaten a decent bowl team. I’m being somewhat generous to a few of these unranked teams, as far as chances of making a bowl go.

No. 2 Georgia (6-0) 41, Vanderbilt (3-3) 13
No. 3 Ohio State (6-0) 49, Indiana (4-2) 26
No. 4 Clemson (6-0) 63, Wake Forest (3-3) 3: A road obliteration. Remember when we were all super worried about Clemson’s QB situation?
Mississippi State (4-2) 23, No. 8 Auburn (4-2) 9: We can probably go ahead and consider Auburn a likely disappointment on the year, but MSU could still goof around reach a New Year’s Six game. MSU was only a 3.5-point home underdog.
No. 12 UCF (5-0) 48, SMU (2-4) 20: UCF is the obvious New Year’s Six favorite at this point (even more so, now that Boise State’s lost again), but hoping for middling teams like SMU to make bowls is still on the agenda.
Utah (3-2) 40, No. 14 Stanford (4-2) 21: Yet another deceptive upset. Stanford was only favored by 4 and was missing Bryce Love. The main takeaway: this puts the Pac-12’s Playoff hopes on really thin ice.
No. 15 Michigan (5-1) 42, Maryland (3-2) 21
No. 17 Miami (5-1) 28, Florida State (3-3) 27: Not the prettiest result against a team that might not bowl, but it’s way prettier than a loss.
Northwestern (2-3) 29, No. 20 Michigan State (3-2) 19: MSU was a pretty tenuously ranked team, but now it’ll be unranked anyway, so all is well.
No. 21 Colorado (5-0) 28, Arizona State (3-3) 21: [clears throat as loudly as possible] This might’ve been the Pac-12 South championship game. [faints]
No. 23 NC State (5-0) 28, Boston College (4-2) 23: NC State really might make the New Year’s Six.
Iowa State (2-3) 48, No. 25 Oklahoma State (4-2) 42: Spots opening at the bottom of the rankings, for anybody who wants ‘em!
Cincinnati (6-0) 37, Tulane (2-4) 21: The unranked Bearcats will appear in here as long as they remain undefeated.
San Diego State (4-1) 19, Boise State (3-2) 13: The Broncos were also going to appear here until they lost again, so this will likely be their last appearance.

Probably not important

The committee doesn’t really care about wins vs. FCS teams, teams with final losing records, and so forth. Some of these underdogs could still bowl, of course.