9 big winners and 9 big losers from college football’s Week 9

With college football’s Week 9 in the books, so are almost all of this sport’s October games. November is the month that makes champions. This weekend gave us a slightly better idea of who those champions might be and a really good idea that some teams are terrible.

Dozens and dozens of teams are literal winners and losers every week. But here is a list of some extra special winners and losers after a long, busy football weekend.

The bye week that followed the Dawgs’ stomping at the hands of LSU apparently did them some good. Jake Fromm responded to widespread calls for his benching (including here) by completing 17 of 24 passes for 240 yards, three scores, and no picks or fumbles — all against a defense that entered ranked No. 9 in Passing S&P+.

Also, as a practical and obvious matter, the Dawgs are now the overwhelming favorite to win the SEC East. Florida’s been dispatched as a threat, leaving only ...

Winners at Missouri, thanks to a fringy pass interference call and a clutch final play on the untimed down that call brought up. The Wildcats might be in the top 10 for a game against the Dawgs next week. Kentucky! A participant in an all-top-10 game! In Week 10!

Mark Stoops clearly wasn’t prepared to be crowd-surfing afterward, and Kentucky literally broke a ceiling tile with his body ...

... but he is, all in all, a victor.

I don’t think Kentucky will beat Georgia, but the game’s in Lexington. It’s conceivable, despite how great the Dawgs looked in beating UF and despite Kentucky’s win against Mizzou looking so ugly.

The Cougars came back from 28-14 down to win at Stanford. They remain the Pac-12’s sole Playoff hope, and it kind of feels like they’re a TEAM OF DESTINY these days. I think this is the year they’re going to beat Washington in the Apple Cup.

Because the Wildcats beat Wisconsin and Iowa lost at Penn State, Northwestern’s now the sole leader of the Big Ten West, in absolute control of its own destiny in the league. NU would be a light snack for either Ohio State or Michigan in a Big Ten Championship Game, but who cares?

It’s Week 10 now, and Northwestern’s leading a Power 5 division. They should be holding a parade all through downtown Evanston. This is all uncharted territory.

On Thursday, Georgia Southern hosted hated rival Appalachian State, which had just broken into the AP Top 25 for the first time ever, at No. 25. Georgia Southern’s history is definitive: the program is usually good when it runs the triple option and usually bad when it doesn’t. Well, they ran the triple against App State and ran over App State in a 34-14 romp that will keep the Eagles’ archrivals out of the top 25 for the foreseeable future.

The same night, Paul Johnson — the former Southern coach and longtime triple-option scion — took his Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets to play Virginia Tech. The Jackets beat the hell out of the Hokies without even completing a pass. It was one of the uglier losses Virginia Tech’s ever taken, delivered over the course of 78 rushing plays by GT.

Also on Saturday, nearby FCS Kennesaw State, which runs the Johnson flexbone, beat Charleston Southern, 38-10.

Author Gillian Flynn’s book found its way back into the spotlight when a shirtless Florida State fan read it during his team’s blowout loss to Clemson and got meme’d.

South Carolina beat Tennessee, moving him to 7-0 all-time against the Vols.

WHO IS YOUR GOD NOW, TENNESSEE?

The same guy as before: Will Muschamp.

Herm Edwards, who entered the season as a punchline, just led the Sun Devils to a road win over conference blueblood USC. Meanwhile, Kevin Sumlin’s Wildcats started poorly but are now 4-5 after giving Oregon one of its, like, five worst trips to Tucson in the last 12 years.

The Tigers were supposed to handle Florida State with relative ease, as 18-point favorites. They looked way better than that in a 59-10 romp. Trevor Lawrence and Tee Higgins are just unfathomably good together, and Clemson will be the firm No. 2 in the Playoff ranking that comes out Tuesday. This team can play with Alabama in the rematch everyone sees coming.

The Longhorns visited an Oklahoma State team that was already out of the Big 12 race in primetime. They made a bunch of mistakes all night, starting with kicker Cameron Dicker taking a late-hit penalty on the opening kickoff to help set up an OSU touchdown and ending with a flurry of unsportsmanlike penalties as the game was being iced.

They let Pokes QB Taylor Cornelius have the most impressive passing start of his career, and they let him beat them with his legs twice in key late situations, despite Cornelius not being a running QB and having a torso made up almost entirely of shoulder pads. (One of those runs went for what went down as the game-winning touchdown on third-and-goal from the 10. The other was a game-sealing keeper on a third-and-6.)

UT’s still in a strong Big 12 position, but the Horns are out of the Playoff hunt ahead of two more really hard-looking games against West Virginia and at Texas Tech.

There’s a non-zero chance Petrino’s already won his last game as Louisville’s coach, despite a buyout that should settle around $14 million.

Louisville’s been bad all year. But there is bad, and then there’s “give up 56 points in the first three quarters of a loss to the team that had been No. 113 in the country in yards per play” bad. Louisville is now that second kind of bad, after Wake Forest destroyed the Cardinals in their own house. It was embarrassing, but the bigger problem is what’s left on the schedule. If you were betting on Louisville’s final record, 2-10 might not be a bad choice.

The Badgers, a trendy dark-horse Playoff pick in the preseason, are underachievers for a change. Not having quarterback Alex Hornibrook hurt them, but a two-touchdown loss to a Northwestern that almost lost to Rutgers the week before is still hard to explain away. Wisconsin’s not even going to play in a New Year’s Six bowl and will probably lose four or five games, with tough ones still to come at Penn State and Purdue.

The Hawkeyes, a surprisingly legitimate Playoff contender up until now, are now out of that race because they came out on the wrong side of that slop-fest in State College.

It’s been clear for a month that this conference is Clemson and a bunch of goop. But NC State losing at Syracuse a week after not even pretending to compete with the Tigers, combined with Virginia now being the Coastal division’s solo leader, makes it extra clear that this conference has exactly one good team. Quick! Can you say who the second best team in the ACC is? If you answered Syracuse, Boston College, or Clemson’s scout team, you might be right.

The Trojans didn’t have JT Daniels. Redshirt freshman Jack Sears started in his place. Whatever. This team is way too mediocre for USC. A boring home loss to Arizona State only reinforces the idea that Clay Helton might not be up to winning anything serious.

The Buffaloes lost a 28-point second-half lead to winless-in-conference Oregon State. It somehow wasn’t even Colorado’s worst blown lead of the last decade. But it did set up the Buffs, who started 5-0 against pretty exclusively bad teams, to finish something like 6-6 (or maybe 5-7), depending on how they do in a few tossup games.

The Frogs lost to Kansas via a butt fumble. That says everything you need to know about the state of the program, but another thought I have: Gary Patterson is 58, and he’s in dead-last in the Big 12 on a tiebreaker with these same Jayhawks. What are the chances Patterson ever gets TCU into serious Big 12 contention again, now that Texas is competitive? It feels unlikely, as tremendous a run as he’s had. (But we’ve all said that before, right?)

The Buckeyes’ schedule strength doesn’t matter for the Playoff race. They have one loss, and if they don’t lose again, they’ll make the top four. If they do lose again, they won’t.

But they look weaker now than they did Friday, even though they were on a bye. That’s because TCU was, at one point, supposed to be OSU’s marquee non-conference win. It’s now clear that the Frogs are bad, and so the only impressive thing the Buckeyes have done is narrowly pull out a win against a Penn State team that almost took its third loss on Saturday.

For that and numerous other reasons, it’s hard to feel great about how this is going.