Week 7 didn’t look like it’d be the most important weekend of the college football season, but you know what that always means: BLOOD WEEK.
Week 7 was college football’s first MAYHEM SATURDAY of 2018
Four top-10 teams lost upsets, and that’s just the start of it.
Photo by Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images
Four top-10 teams lost upsets, other ranked teams lost as well, and it could’ve been way worse than that, as almost every ranked team faced a serious challenge. Just look how close the scores below are, and even some of the ones that don’t look all that close were up for grabs late.
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.
Probably important
Games in which the winning team will likely have a pretty high-quality Week 7 victory by season’s end. Or: really meaningful upsets:
- No. 13 LSU (6-1) 36, No. 2 Georgia (6-1) 16: The Tigers are now in fantastic New Year’s Six shape, and Alabama-LSU suddenly looms way larger than it probably should, but LET US HAVE THIS ANYWAY, Bama. LET US BELIEVE.
- Iowa State (3-3) 30, No. 6 West Virginia (5-1) 14: WVU, YOU GOT AMES’D, and the Big 12 is a complete mess ......... led by Texas, which also has a head-to-head over Oklahoma.
- Michigan State (4-2) 21, No. 8 Penn State (4-2) 17: Down goes a contender.
- No. 17 Oregon (5-1) 30, No. 7 Washington (5-2) 27 in OT: Not to be dramatic, but this might’ve been the Pac-12’s last stand. I don’t think anyone buys the idea of the Ducks or Colorado winning out. The Ducks might be your conference favorites as of right now, though, despite Stanford holding the head-to-head tiebreaker.
- No. 12 Michigan (6-1) 38, No. 15 Wisconsin (4-2) 13: Ohio State and its shaky defense are anointed, but the Wolverines have to be considered a legit Big Ten challenger, no matter how ready we all were to give up on them after the season’s first 60 minutes.
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. 1 Alabama (7-0) 39, Missouri (3-3) 10: Complaints about Bama’s (fine, at this point) strength of schedule will continue, but the Tide covered a huge spread (depending on your oddsmaker) yet again, this time against a pretty good team. More concerning: Tua Tagovailoa suffered a likely minor knee injury.
- No. 3 Ohio State (7-0) 30, Minnesota (3-3) 14: Not as impressive as the score looks ... and the score doesn’t even look impressive!
- No. 5 Notre Dame (7-0) 19, Pitt (3-4) 14: That’s not an impressive W, until you remember Pitt is the master of the BS upset. The Irish survived the scariest thing in all of sports.
- No. 9 Texas (6-1) 23, Baylor (4-3) 17: The polls were quite a bit higher on the Horns this week than the computers were, so expect the committee to come down somewhere in the middle, once its rankings come out.
- No. 14 Florida (6-1) 37, Vanderbilt (3-4) 27: That score looks pretty normal, but it was anything but. Whatever. Counts as a road win against a maybe OK team all the same.
- Virginia (4-2) 16, No. 16 Miami (5-2) 13: The ACC Coastal is kind of a big mess now, just as all right-thinking people prefer it to be.
- USC (4-2) 31, No. 19 Colorado (5-1) 20: Trojans vs. Utes next week is probably your Pac-12 South decider.
- No. 22 Texas A&M (5-2) 26, South Carolina (3-3) 23
- Tennessee (3-3) 30, No. 21 Auburn (4-3) 24: Auburn becomes the year’s first preseason top-10 team to leave the rankings, putting the Tigers in contention for most unpredictable team YET AGAIN, a metric in which they already ranked No. 1 all time by far.
Important for the Group of 5 race
Since the committee’s essentially showed non-power teams aren’t eligible for the Playoff, let’s have a separate section for the race to be the top-ranked mid-major champ. This isn’t necessarily exhaustive, but it’s a good list for this week.
- No. 10 UCF (6-0) 31, Memphis (4-3) 30: Was likely one of only three especially tough tests remaining for UCF, along with USF and a theoretical AAC title game.
- No. 23 USF (6-0) 25, Tulsa (1-5) 24
- No. 25 Cincinnati (6-0): Idle
- Appalachian State (4-1) 35, Arkansas State (3-3) 9: Listed here mainly because S&P+ loves the Mountaineers, who should probably be ranked.
- Fresno State (5-1) 27, Wyoming (2-5) 3
- Houston (5-1) 42, East Carolina (2-4) 20
- San Diego State (5-1) 21, Air Force (2-4) 17
- Utah State (5-1) 59, UNLV (2-4) 28
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