On a weekend of college football in which the casuals said would be boring, it ended up boring the most exciting and craziest weekend of college football in a long time. 5 of the top eleven teams went down and 4 of them went down to unranked teams. We almost had 6 go down if Miami was not able to make a miraculous comeback led by Cam Ward on the road at Cal. Let’s jump into the upsets.
Vanderbilt beat Alabama on Saturday. Yes you heard that right. Vanderbilt beat Number 1 Alabama in Nashville on Saturday. Going into this game, it was expected for Alabama to come out a little sluggish especially after such an emotional win against Georgia last weekend. I don’t think anyone expected Bama to lose though. Props to Clark Lea and his Vanderbilt team because that man has gotten Vanderbilt slightly better each season he has been there. Against bad circumstances to because it hard to recruit for Vanderbilt. Their NIL is not like other teams in the SEC and they also have to worry about the academic requirements when trying to recruit as well. They have put to together a solid team this year and I am interested to see if they are able to build off of this or if this is just a one off.
This Bama team has some serious holes on its team. Their secondary is really bad this year. Their defensive front which is the strength of this did not get much push against Vanderbilt and allowed them to run on them as well. Kalen DeBoer is about to learn the hard way about what happens when you lose a game in the SEC as a head coach. It had been all rainbows and butterflies for him so far since he took over. He built up a lot of points with the fanbase after beating Georgia, but I think this loss trumps that win big time and he is already starting to lose favor with a portion of that fanbase. Alabama should never lose to Vanderbilt no matter what. To put things in perspective, Nick Saban only allowed 13 total against Vanderbilt in all the games he played against them combined. DeBoer gave up 40 his first go-around against Vandy. Alabama better start doing some soul-searching on the defensive end because they are going to be facing better offenses than the one the saw on Saturday down the road.
Tennessee lost on the road at Arkansas on Saturday. The worst part about the loss was how bad the play calling was and how bad Nico Iamaleava looked on Saturday. Yes, the playcalling was very conservative from Josh Heupel. It kind of had to be though when Nico was not performing to his standard. He seemed very timid in the pocket and hesitated on a lot of his dropbacks. On the second to last play of the game, on the All-22 you were able to see that Iamaleava had his running back wide open in the flat that would have been a walk-in touchdown if the ball had been delivered to him. Instead, he stared down a receiver over the middle the whole way and the pass got broken up. He’s young, and he will learn. He better learn quickly though because the Vols host Alabama in two weeks and still have to play Florida, Kentucky, and Georgia.
I am going to just lump the last three teams together because they have just proved that they were frauds. Missouri, Michigan, and USC all lost on the road Saturday. All three teams were inside the top 11 of the AP Poll. Going into the game most people realized that all three of those teams are solid teams but not great teams and Saturday proved it. All three belong in the top-15 to 20 range but none of them belong in the top-10 whatsoever. The one bright side for Missouri is that yes they suffered a really bad loss, but their schedule is super easy the rest of the way. The only tough game Mizzou has left on their schedule is against Alabama. Michigan still has to play Ohio St, Illinois, Oregon, and Indiana. Michigan needs to find a quarterback in the portal because they are going to struggle if they cannot have decent quarterback play at least. USC just Penn St and Notre Dame remaining but they are going to struggle in the Big 10 if they do not improve the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball. In their two losses to Michigan and Minnesota, they just bullied USC at the line of scrimmage and it will probably happen this week as well against Penn St.
This was a crazy week of college football and I hope this upcoming week has something big planned because it is going to be hard to top the weekend we just had.
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