10 winners and 7 losers (so far) from college football’s Championship Saturday

College football’s Selection Sunday has arrived. The composition of the top four is less certain heading into its unveiling than usual, though Championship Saturday gave us a decent sense of what the field will look like.

The disclaimer that goes in this post every week is that there are tons of winners and losers all across the sport. Think of this as a list of extra notable winners and losers. On Championship Weekend, that’s a larger percentage of the country than normal.

They got fresh material from Alabama. The Tide will be the Playoff’s No. 1 seed, because Jalen Hurts came off the bench when Tua Tagovailoa got hurt and made magic. The Tide aren’t some kind of underdog story, obviously, but if you aren’t at least a little happy for Hurts, you’re either a Georgia fan or a person without a soul.

A QB who was 26-2 as a starter got benched for a better, younger QB, was by every account a great teammate, and then seized his chance and saved his team in a key moment. Some have co-opted Hurts as a mascot for why players sitting on the bench should be there for their teammates and never transfer. That’s dumb and wrong, even if Hurts surprises the rest of college football and doesn’t go somewhere else after this season.

But Hurts made Nick Saban almost cry:

That’s how good a story Hurts’ year is.

Despite Kirby Smart and Saban agreeing the Tide don’t want the Dawgs again and that UGA should be in the field, it’s likely Smart’s team won’t make it. I can buy the argument that Georgia was already ranked No. 4 and that even coming close against Bama is better than, say, struggling for a while with Texas before winning. But the committee will more likely think of the Dawgs’ other loss, a blowout against three-loss LSU, and not be so charitable.

The Sooners were actually fine on defense for a change and won their rematch against Texas. Their likeliest fate is to jump from No. 5 to No. 4, passing up UGA. A Bama-OU semifinal would merit Dream Matchup status. It might also include 120 total points.

Tagovailoa looked for two and a half months like he’d run away with that trophy. And more than a few careless voters submitted their ballots prior to Saturday. But those who didn’t will be voting after they saw these two Saturday lines:

Tagovailoa’s backup also stole the show, and that’ll influence some voters against him. (I think that’s wrong, because football’s always been a team game. But it will happen.) Their cases had been getting closer in recent weeks and haven’t been closer than they are now.

The Buckeyes were No. 6 entering the day. Only one team ranked ahead of them lost. On top of that, they didn’t score many style points in struggling with Northwestern before pulling away late. This was a much different Big Ten Championship than the 59-0 drubbing they put on Wisconsin in 2014, before they leapfrogged TCU on Selection Sunday.

A one-loss solo Power 5 champion has never missed the Playoff before. But with Notre Dame taking up a spot this year and the outside possibility of Georgia getting in with two losses, a lot’s working against the Buckeyes. It’ll take a surprise for them to make it.

This game was the trash-talking national championship, and Texas lost it. The Longhorns then had to watch Oklahoma’s players and fans throw up the Horns Down hand sign.

On Friday, Washington beat Utah in an awful conference title game in an empty NFL stadium. This part was already known, but the Pac-12 missed the Playoff for the second time in a row and the third time in five years. Earlier in the week, The Oregonian published a detailed report that laid out myriad reasons the conference is lagging behind its other peers in the Power 5. But the simplest case is just the tape of the conference title game.

The Tigers beat unranked Pitt, becoming the first top-three team in five tries against unranked Pitt to avoid falling victim to one of the upsets of the year.

The Knights ran their win streak to 25 games, and on Sunday, they’re going to achieve the highest Selection Sunday Playoff ranking ever for a Group of 5 team. They won’t make the field, but they can beat Florida or whoever in the Peach Bowl and then spend the entire offseason claiming another national championship. Watching them mount a comeback to stay unbeaten with backup QB Darriel Mack Jr., in front of a raucous crowd, was so cool.

Memphis, though: woof. The Tigers have a good program, but this makes three times in one calendar year that they’ve had a great shot at the kings of the AAC and missed. This time, they had a 31-14 lead in the second quarter and got outscored 42-10 after that.

The Bulldogs won the Mountain West by beating Boise State in overtime, in Boise, 19-16. They scored a walk-off touchdown on a really creative toss read out of a heavy formation toward the near sideline (a somewhat rare setup in college football).

The play almost busted when a Boise State defensive tackle shot through the line right after the snap, leaving one more unblocked defender than there was supposed to be. But QB Marcus McMaryion made a perfect pitch to RB Ronnie Rivers, who made a guy miss and found the edge for the win. Jeff Tedford’s won 21 games in two seasons in Fresno.

For a while, the Mountain West game looked like this on TV:

In December 2014, the program got shut down. In December 2018, it won the Conference USA Championship. It took some creative roster-building, aided by an NCAA exemption, to get UAB back to being competitive after missing two seasons and one entire recruiting class. But getting to 10 wins, two more than in any other year in program history, and winning a conference title game on the road in its second year back? That’s wild. It’s fitting that Bill Clark’s team had to come back from 10 down in the first quarter to do it.

The Blue Raiders were on the losing end of that game, and they’re included here because the thing that clinched their loss was this horrible 12-men-on-the-field penalty:

There are worse ways to lose a conference championship, but they don’t immediately jump to mind. If it’s any solace, MTSU would’ve had a long field to go (even for a winning field goal) and no timeouts, so there’s a fair chance it wouldn’t have won anyway. Still, though.

The Mountaineers won the Sun Belt’s first title game ever. But let’s step back and talk about what a great team this is: App State almost beat Penn State in Week 1 and probably would’ve pulled it off, too, if not for some clock mismanagement at the end of regulation and an unnecessary throw to the end zone in overtime that wound up intercepted. Running back Jalin Moore was lost for the season in Week 7. Moore’s injury didn’t help two weeks later, when an offensive dud helped the Eers lose to rival Georgia Southern.

What I’m getting at here is that App State wasn’t far at all from being an unbeaten team this year, despite scheduling one of the better programs in the country for its opener. And that’s in the first year after a longtime starting QB, Taylor Lamb, graduated. Few coaches anywhere did a better job this season than Scott Satterfield. App State’s got something special.

The Hokies won a hastily scheduled game against Marshall to get to six wins and bowl eligibility, stretching what’s now the country’s longest active bowl streak to 26 years. Various weather-related cancelations earlier in the year led to there being a bunch of non-championship games played on this Championship Saturday.

The Cyclones came extremely close to losing at home to Drake. That’s a school, not a rapper. Drake plays in the FCS Pioneer League, where they don’t give out scholarships for football. The 41-point underdogs lost by 3. It’s possible that could have a downstream effect on Oklahoma, but the main thing is that Iowa State almost lost to Drake.