We are witnessing an unprecedentedly wild and unpredictable college football season. In the past three weeks alone, four teams ranked top two in the AP Top 25 poll have fallen for the first time in 19 years, leaving only three undefeated FBS teams -- Miami, UCLA and Utah. That's the lowest count of unbeatens at this point in a season since 1977.
Whatever you do, at least realize college football isn't what it was a few years ago. A weekend expected to be quiet and ordinary instead fell apart -- again. Four of the eight top 12 teams who played Saturday lost.
The week prior, five of the top seven teams lost for the first time ever. Teams are thin and they're tired. It is easy to attribute this widespread inconsistency to NIL and the transfer portal, which have diluted traditional powerhouses and redistributed top-tier talent across college football.
That's accurate, but measuring its precise impact game by game in a spreadsheet is hard, and fully explaining it in a Sunday morning column is difficult. But as these upsets and letdowns keep piling up, the trend is now undeniable eight weeks into the season (and two years into the revenue-sharing era). Seven teams have fallen one week after knocking off a top-10 opponent.
Three of them joined that list on Saturday: Auburn, BYU and Tennessee. Remarkably, six of those seven teams belong to the SEC (more on that later). BYU suffered the week's most shocking loss, a 39-31 double-overtime thriller at UCF.
"That's the weirdest ending to a game I've ever seen," UCF coach Scott Frost said afterward. If any figure encapsulates this era of unpredictable chaos, it's Frost. He lost 17 straight against ranked opponents, dating back to his disastrous tenure at Nebraska.
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