College Pigskin Round-Up, Week 10

The week in college football

The rankings mentioned below differ somewhat from the ones we have been discussing in previous weeks, because the official rankings came out for the first time this week. A lot of teams came up with very different results. Houston, for example was #17 in the AP poll, but could not crack the official rankings at all. As it turns out, the official rankers were correct, because Houston lost this week to a team with a losing record.)

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Well, there goes our hope that somebody would give Alabama a game. LSU was ranked #3 in the nation, and couldn’t even score a friggin’ field goal against ‘Bama. Final score 29-zip.

LSU’s humbling loss means that Michigan will join the Fantastic Four. Michigan was ranked #5 and they won 42-7 over the 14th-ranked team, so they clearly will advance at least up to #4, possibly even #3, depending on how the voters feel about Notre Dame’s schedule. The Wolverines also have two pretty easy games coming up, so they should be able to hold their place for a while, at least until they have to play OSU in Columbus.

Georgia is still a legitimate contender to make the playoff. They were ranked #6 and beat the #9 team 34-17. I suppose they will move up to the #5 spot.

As I think we all expected, Utah was nowhere near as good as their #15 ranking, and got soundly trounced by unranked ASU.

Once again, there will be plenty of changes at the bottom of the list. The following teams lost: 3, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 25. Next week’s versions of Utah, that is to say the teams that are not as good as their ranking, will include Syracuse, and Cincinnati. (Syracuse was #19, and will probably crack the top 15. Cincinnati defeated Navy 42-0, which is a much worse drubbing than Notre Dame gave the Midshipmen, and they are 8-1, so the Bearcats will probably claw their way back into the rankings. They would love to forget that loss to Temple, which marred their otherwise perfect season.)