College Football Ridiculousness

After this past Saturday, we can only draw one solid conclusion: college football is ridiculously well, ridiculous.
Starting with the newly top ranked LSU Tigers making a fourth quarter comeback to take Florida and give the Gators their second loss of the season. While it may be a fair statement to say that Les Miles was given a gold mine after Nick Saban’s departure, you can’t say the new coach hasn’t kept his team from becoming one of the nation’s best. He also is quite gutsy. Faced with being down by 10 in the fourth quarter, common sense says to go for the field goal on one drive and the touchdown on the other. Instead, Miles faced with fourth and short on the first drive goes for the touchdown and gets it, now he’s down by three. Again faced with fourth down, all needs is a field goal to tie, he goes for the touchdown once more, and gets it. Talk about a gamble, if he misses on the first, he doesn’t even give himself a chance on the second one. If he misses the second one, the game is over. Their really must be magic in the air during those night at Baton Rouge.
Then we have that former number one, who became number two who just recently became number ten. Those ultra-talented USC Trojans have fallen to Stanford. That’s right, the Cardinal, the team with the singular nickname. But let’s get one thing straight, this 2007 edition of USC never was or ever will be the best Pete Carroll has produced. They had a lot of talent and lot of young potential but they are nowhere close to the days of Carson Palmer, Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush. So it was little far fetched when Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh called them the greatest team ever in the preseason. Maybe he was nuts or maybe it was just a great example of gamesmanship since his team actually took them down. It seems that giving your team absolutely no expectations actually prepares them to be the giant killer.
The Sooners hooked the Longhorns in the Red River Shootout for the first time since 2004. After the disastarous loss to Colorado in the previous week, Oklahoma has now put themselves back in the national title hunt. They will host undefeated Missouri this Saturday. The Tigers have been a quality team the past few seasons, but have yet to prove they are elite. This is their chance to do just that and even nominate themselves as possible national title contenders.
Elsewhere, around the nation, Boston College, South Florida, South Carolina and Oregon are all in the Top 10 along with Kansas who is undefeated and ranked for the first time in a long time. Meanwhile Norte Dame actually won with their defeat of UCLA. You can almost feel some of the pressure ease in South Bend, or maybe that’s Charlie Weis’ ego.
The USC loss definitely makes LSU the undoubted number one team but playing in the SEC makes that position so volatile. Cal, Oklahoma and USC are probably the only real challengers looking at records and quality as teams that can survive the rest of the season. But of course, someone such as a rebuilding Ohio State or unheralded South Florida could keep the momentum going and find themselves in the BCS National Title game. It’s what makes college football so ridiculous and so great. Forget the playoffs, every game is the playoffs. It’s what makes the games so exciting. One bad play67 can lead to one bad loss and all of sudden the title favorites are totally out of the picture. We always see great competition when the stakes are always so high.