Upheaval makes drawing conclusions risky
Trying to determine which four teams would be selected for the national playoff if the selections were made today is a pointless endeavor. In case you have forgotten, Auburn was not even ranked in the Top 25 on this date a year ago, and the Tigers wound up in the national-championship game. And the chaos that college football wrought over the weekend precludes drawing any meaningful conclusions about Heisman Trophy candidates, national-championship contenders or even conference favorites.
Amid the confusion is one element of perfect symmetry: Mississippi and Mississippi State are tied for No. 3 in this week’s Associated Press rankings.
Although the nation seems fixated on the upheaval in the SEC West Division, the Pac-12 is even more confounding, with logic being dismissed over the weekend.
Cal has yielded 164 points in its three conference games, an average of 54.7 points a game — yet the Bears sit alone atop the North Division.
The road team won all five conference games over the weekend.
All four ranked Pac-12 teams lost last week, and two of the upsets (Arizona State over USC and Utah over UCLA) were directed by backup quarterbacks.
Stanford still leads the nation in scoring defense, but had perhaps the most egregious defensive breakdown of the weekend, failing to cover a Notre Dame receiver who scored the winning touchdown on a fourth-down pass with 1:01 left.
Washington State’s Connor Halliday set an FBS record for passing yards in a game (734), breaking the mark set by Houston’s David Klingler in 1990 against Arizona State. Halliday also threw six touchdown passes without an interception and helped his team score 59 points against Cal. Nonetheless, his team still lost by a point when kicker Quentin Breshears missed a 19yard field-goal attempt with 15 seconds to go.
For the third straight week, a Hail Mary worked. Arizona handed Cal its only loss on a 47-yard desperation heave on the game’s final play two weeks ago. USC used an up- for-grabs, 48-yard touchdown pass on the final play of the second quarter to take a 21-10 halftime lead on Oregon State on Sept. 27. Arizona State’s Mike Bercovici launched a 46-yard pass that looked like it would never come down before teammate Jaelen Strong caught it for a touchdown on the last play of the game to beat USC 38-34 on Saturday night. Hint: Bat the thing down!
Preseason Pac-12 favorite Oregon has yielded as many points (62) as it has scored (62) in its two conference games, both against unranked opponents.
In a conference swarming with productive quarterbacks, Arizona, the Pac-12’s only unbeaten team, is using a redshirt freshman, Anu Solomon, who has proved to be a second-half monster. He has completed 57.5 percent of his passes with five touchdowns and four interceptions in the first two quarters this season, and he has completed 69.3 percent with nine TDs and no interceptions in the third and fourth. Not ranked a week ago, Arizona zoomed to No. 10 this week.
The two Pac-12 teams that still seem to have the best chance of getting into the fourteam national championship playoff (UCLA and Oregon) have severe offensive-line problems, yielding a combined total of 38 sacks this season. And they face each other Saturday in Pasadena.