Be careful touting signature wins too early during college football season. Paper champions loading up on early victories can easily be extinguished by midseason when inflated schedules come to a grinding halt during conference play. We've seen it happen across the SEC, Big Ten and now Big 12, following the league's wildest weekend yet.
There's the flip side too -- teams can get hot and find their footing after the opening month, strengthening an opponent's resume thanks to a prior result. The current AP Top 25 rankings give us a snapshot of which wins have aged well and which are depreciating assets ahead of the first College Football Playoff poll on Nov. 3. Beating a top-10 team in September that later disappears from the rankings doesn't preserve a ranked victory on that résumé.
With the postseason picture taking shape, it's time to revisit some of the memorable results from earlier this fall. These are the squads who banked something meaningful and those in search of more approaching the final month of the campaign. The Crimson Tide handled the SEC's current leader its only loss this season by four touchdowns and did so despite multiple first-half turnovers and a halftime deficit.
Alabama outscored Kentucky 32-0 in the second half, and guess what? The Wildcats haven't lost since. That's one of the most insane rebounds in SEC history for a first-year coaching staff.
The victory was Alabama's ninth straight over Kentucky and marks the Crimson Tide's lone win over a team currently ranked in the top 25. If Texas finds itself in the middle of the SEC's nine-win pack a few weeks from now, the Longhorns will have something others do not -- one of the best nonconference victories of the season. Everyone knew that the 20-point comeback win over Ohio State would carry significant weight, and the Buckeyes are one of only two unbeaten teams in Big Ten play.
The Buckeyes' season could torpedo from here without Julian Sayin given what's left on the schedule, but that's not the expectation. Ohio State is confident in its quarterback room behind Sayin and has a Heisman candidate who can bail this offense out of difficult spots when the ball's thrown in his direction. Cougars coach Willie Fritz put it succinctly after his team's narrow loss in Lubbock in mid-September, where a failed two-point conversion in the final moments proved the difference.
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