Mid-Manifest Destiny: Nevada And Air Force Plummet To Earth

• Down Goes Everybody. So much for those five ranked teams we preened over last week. The two lowest-ranked programs, Nevada and Air Force, both met ignominious ends at Hawaii and San Diego State. Both losses came by margins of less than a touchdown, and the Falcons’ fell despite outgaining the Aztecs, 487-452. The winners have been nicely competitive in 2010, but safe to say nobody saw this coming -- and that, like their BCS-conference brethren, smaller programs are far from immune to the ridiculous upset bug that’s so characterized 2010.

• We’re not out of champions. The top three mid-major teams, for their part, handled their Week 7 opponents with ease: Boise State blanked San Jose State 48-0, TCU topped an increasingly miserable BYU 31-3, and Utah cruised past Wyoming, 30-6.

• Turns out you can’t take the boy out of Southlake Carroll. North Texas’ Todd Dodge is your second I-A coaching casualty of 2010, fired amid a horrorshow of a season that saw an insane run of injuries take out 14 starters, three of them quarterbacks, in rapid succession and one player die in a car accident. Dodge won’t even coach out the season, and is being replaced for the interim by his OC, Mike Canales.

• The Clawfense loses its cover. Without Roberto Lorenzi, does Bowling Green finish with positive all-purpose yards in any game the rest of this season?

• Time once again to play everybody’s favorite game, “What The Hell Do We Do With UTEP?”
God help us; we actually bet real human money on UTEP this weekend, just to see what would happen. The Miners responded by kindly losing to 1-4 UAB, 21-6.

Profiles in ownage.
• East Carolina, knocking off what was by all accounts an all-right NC State team, 33-27 in overtime. A grateful nation that no longer has to grapple with the notion of Tom O’Brien as a decent football coach thanks you, Pirates.
• Arkansas State, who lost to Indiana by a bare two points, 36-34, after coming up on the leading end of a 20-17 fourth-quarter shootout.
• Navy, who rebounded from a scoreless first half to beat SMU, 28-21, and gained valuable momentum heading into a late-season slate that includes Notre Dame and East Carolina.

Not ready for primetime.
• Western Kentucky, who once again came oh-so-close to notching their first win since moving up to I-A, and were once again cruelly denied by virtue of not being any good at football. They led ULM 17-7 at halftime, but a 28-point fourth quarter for the Warhawks put paid to anything productive, and the Hilltoppers went home with a 35-30 loss.
• Army, whose strong start we’ve praised in recent weeks, couldn’t get over on Rutgers in overtime. Nobody, not even a service academy, has business being in an overtime situation against Rutgers.
• Houston, our erstwhile trendy darkhorse pick for a national title combatant, who maybe could’ve survived the loss of one starting quarterback, but not two. They just lost to Rice. RICE. How are the mighty fallen.

Scoreboard.
Not too many chances for Big Six upsets this week, and no opportunities taken. 0-4 on the week, mid-major programs move to 16-76 against BCS conference teams in 2010.

Walking Dead Watch. And then there were three! With a 41-38 overtime win over Ball State, Eastern Michigan gets to sock one in the “W” column for the first time since Nov. 20, 2008. So much for our plan of a four-team winless-only charity playoff in mid-January. The remaining, luckless few: Akron, Western Kentucky, and New Mexico.

Stay Tuned For Week 8.
Two major showdowns loom in Air Force-TCU and Notre Dame-Navy. Also appearing: Houston-SMU, Colorado State-Utah, Eastern Michigan-Virginia, and UAB-Mississippi State.