CFB Review: Top 10 Turmoil
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by Suckatsports
College football review talks about the week that was in college football, about the good teams that won, and the good teams that lost. Look for it to wrap up the college football preview, and to gloat upon picking correct outcomes.
It was a tough day to be a top 10 team in college football on Saturday. There will certainly be some unlikely and surprising finds come Sunday afternoon when the AP casts their ballot, but that's not to say it's not well deserved. Not necessarily well deserved by the teams up there now, but the void created by the losers has to be filled with someone. This was "Gut Check" Saturday, but that's only because ESPN ran out of alliteration adjectives.
Obviously, a monumental upset at the Colosseum this past weekend, and that's the only place to start. Upstart, and worst team in the Pac 10 Stanford came in and dealt a crushing blow to colossal 40 point favorite USC. The invincible aura of the Trojans has been slowly peeled away, as major assistants and top ranked players have fled and graduated. And now, are things so symbolic that Pete Carroll would lose to Stanford in both his first and last year at USC? Now that would be a fitting end to one of the most dominant 6 year runs in college football history. More importantly, where does this upset rank in the hall of great upsets? I say, it's got to be in the top five. We've already had the greatest upset of all time earlier this year, but this isn't the overrated and underachieving Michigan, this is a team that brought back the entire defense. This is a team that was playing at home, where they haven't lost in a million years, and this team has been the model of efficiency that entire time. When an unranked team beats a ranked team, it's one thing. When they beat a team ranked in the top 2, on the road it's unheard of. Add to that, the fact that Jim Harbaugh was shooting his mouth off before the game, it was going to be truely, a massacre. This is surprising and stunning, and this may be the turning point for both USC and Carroll.
Best of the rest
LSU came back from a 10 point deficit twice to hand Florida its second consecutive loss. If Urban Meyer doesn't like to lose in general, I can't imagine he was too pleasant to deal with afterwards. Using multiple fourth-down conversions and a couple of quarterbacks, Les Miles got his first gritty win. This was truly a heavyweight battle to watch.
Wisconsin was living on the edge, and finally fell off. They met reality in the name of Rashard Mendenhall, Juice Williams, and Arrelious "Rejis" Benn. It's hard to win without playing a smidge of defense, and Wisconsin learned this. Be weary of these Illini, they've got talent, and Ron Zook finds it easier to win the Big 10 than the SEC.
Oklahoma sent Texas reeling, but set themselves straight. A week after both suffering striking upsets of their own, Texas showed that they were true to form, and it wasn't an upset at all. Oklahoma on the other hand, rushed and passed to victory, and a likely Big 12 title.
Kentucky proved to us, they're still a basketball school. After jumping on the bandwagon, it clearly couldn't handle the weight, when the Wildcats choked at a defensive minded South Carolina team. I bought into the hype.
In the battle of Big 10 heavyweights, one proved to be a contender, and one a pretender. Boasting the best offense in the conference, Purdue only got on the board against scrubs, with under a minute in the game. On the other hand, OSU worked with precision and purpose, and even through 3 turnovers completely dominated their counterpart.
Missouri, a team I've not seen play but once is the best kept secret in the Big 12. While everyone (including myself) is in love with Oklahoma, Chase Daniels is running the sweetest passing game in the conference. They're clearly the class of the Big 12 North, but no one expected them to thrash Nebraska so thoroughly.
I swore I wouldn't write about Rutgers until they played a real team. As it turns out, Cincinnati for real, and showed it on Saturday. After being down 17-7 early, they regrouped to put the game away with 3 touchdowns in the third quarter. This team is for real, and should be in the Top 10.
To recap - three more Top 10 teams lost, to add to the five from last week. It would have been three different from last week, if Super Tebow could pull the upset in Death Valley. By all rational though, the unthinkable loss at Michigan to start the year should have put all favorites on alert, thus preventing upsets at all. I'm surprised that every coach doesn't show a clip of stunned fans or final score to their players when they're favored by 40 to get 100% effort. That's just mind boggling.
Uh, USC did not beat Stanford by 200 [Fanhouse]
This post was cross-published from We Suck at Sports.
