After a historically wild Week 7, the undefeated Power Four teams' ranks have been reduced to No. 1 Miami, No. 2 BYU, No. 8 Texas Tech, No. 9 UCLA and No. 10 Utah. That number is guaranteed to drop to four on Nov. 7th when BYU travels to Utah. With only five teams left, it felt time to assess who's real and who may still be a pretender even without a loss midway through the season.
We got CBS Sports' resident College Football Playoff experts Brad Crawford and John Talty together to answer a few questions about this undefeated group. Miami's banged up in the secondary, and Darian Mensah showed he was human in the win over Florida State, but I'll stick with my preseason No. 1 and national championship pick as the title favorite from this group. Coming into the campaign, I thought the Hurricanes' personnel losses from last season's team were a bit overblown and fully expected the return of Malachi Toney, Ahmad Moten and others to carry the load.
Through the first half, Miami's defense is actually better statistically than last season's group, allowing fewer yards, points and explosive plays per game. Miami is the only team, I think, that will finish unblemished. Does that mean the Hurricanes win it all?
They'll have to figure that out in January. Going through the regular season relatively untested, aside from a trip to Notre Dame, may not help. Miami lost a lot from last year's title runner-up team, but has shown midway through the 2026 season it has more than enough firepower to hoist the CFP trophy in January.
Darian Mensah looks like the best quarterback in the country and has posted huge stats (18 touchdowns to 1 interception) through six games. It helps, of course, to have one of the best receivers in the country in Malachi Toney. The lack of challenging games scares me slightly -- Florida State, though, gave the Hurricanes all it could handle -- but I'll be even more bullish on this team if it can find a way to beat Notre Dame on Nov. 7.
As Brad noted, Miami is on pace right now for the No. 1 overall seed and a first-round bye. With the rest of the Week 7 schedule pretty much cleared out, I watched the entirety of Utah's 27-24 win over Colorado last weekend and was not impressed with one of the Big 12's three remaining unbeatens. The one-two punch of Devon Dampier and Wayshawn Parker is an admirable offensive tandem, but this team hasn't faced any adversity against a quality opponent yet.
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