College football pick-six: Bama stays Bama, the top four stays fluid and Rutgers stays bad

A weekly journey through the vast landscape of college football, along with a few brief asides.

Cliched storyline of the week

Here’s a little secret for you: The beauty of college football is in its inherent flaws. These are young men perched on the precipice of adulthood, and, therefore, they sometimes do the unthinkable, like lose games to schools whose football programs did not exist a decade ago.

And so one month into yet another season destined to end in muddled arguments based on an irrational sense of regional pride, we have reached the point where virtually every college football team in the country appears to have exposed its potentially soft underbelly. Every team, that is, except for Alabama, which has now reached such a level of elephantine invincibility that Nick Saban is actually begging reporters to point out his team's flaws. (To which I say: Do we have any credible evidence that Tua Tagovailoa can credibly play air drums to the Who's "Baba O'Riley"?)

So yes: It is difficult not to watch Alabama systemically dismantle an at-least-semi-respectable opponent like Texas A&M and wonder how the hell anyone can possibly touch the Tide. But last weekend, which appeared on the surface to be one of the weakest slates of the 2018 season, also taught us something else: Just when you think the status quo is going to prevail, Old Dominion upends Virginia Tech, and Kentucky, Duke and Syracuse are all undefeated and inspiring already-tired March Madness jokes on your friendly neighborhood internets.

Does this mean I think that Louisiana-Lafayette will defeat Alabama in Tuscaloosa on Saturday, thereby blasting every Paul Finebaum caller into an alternate dimension — one where Bear Bryant coached at Auburn and Penn State scored on third down in the 1979 Sugar Bowl?

No. No, I do not. 

But college football seasons often evolve in strange and surprising ways, and given that most of us now possess the attention span of fruit flies, what we’re talking about at the end of September may bear literally zero resemblance to what we’re discussing 30 days from now. It’s college football, after all, which means it’s only teenage wasteland.

Distant playoff watch of the week

If the playoff committee were to decide the season required truncation due to, say, an impending apocalypse, and it was, therefore, forced to gather amid the approaching wall of flames and hail of amphibious creatures to decide the top four teams, it wouldn’t have much of an issue at this point. It would be Alabama, Georgia, Clemson and Ohio State.

But the apocalypse is still pending, and so is the playoff. Just this week come two crucial contests — Ohio State at Penn State and Stanford at Notre Dame — which could serve as de facto pre-playoff elimination games. Stanford survived a road test at Oregon last week thanks in large part to the Ducks’ inability to cling to the spheroid in the clutch, and Notre Dame is playing elite-level defense and may have found a go-to quarterback in its pasting of Wake Forest. Meanwhile, Ohio State is essentially the Gobots to Alabama’s Tranformers, having dispatched its first four opponents with relative ease while Urban Meyer paid the price for his dissembling. And Penn State nearly gacked away its season in Week 1 against Appalachian State but may be the only squad in the Big Ten (other than Michigan, maybe) that could actually match the Buckeyes’ talent level.

Given that the ranks of the unbeaten in the Power Five have already dwindled to 15, it’s possible that any of those four teams could lose this week and work their way back into the playoff picture. But it’d be a lot cooler if they didn’t.

The Clarence “Screaming Buffalo” Swamptown dudes of the week

Perhaps you avoid following Rutgers football the way some people avoid service station bathrooms and airport sushi. In which case, allow me to inform you of this fact: Rutgers is terrible — so terrible, in fact, that the Scarlet Knights did not just lose to a team from Buffalo this weekend, but they lost 42-13.

That team, of course, was not the Buffalo Bills. That team was the Buffalo Bulls, coached by Division III legend Lance Leipold, who leapt to the FBS ranks a few years ago. “I want to be part of building a program of consistency,” Leipold told me shortly after taking the job in 2015, and it appears he may be already there, given that the Bulls are now 4-0.

Here’s the other weird thing about college football in 2018: As good as that top handful of teams are, the lower tier of the FBS is essentially a scrum. In the American Athletic Conference, Central Florida and South Florida are a combined 7-0; in Conference USA, North Texas is 4-0. Any one of those teams would probably be favored over Rutgers, Nebraska or Arkansas by two touchdowns. (North Texas, in fact, already defeated Arkansas, 44-17.)

Is this the year, then, that a Group of Five school finally garners serious playoff consideration if it goes undefeated? Of course not, because the system is rigged against them. But that won’t stop me from complaining about it nonetheless.

The week in weird

At one point on Saturday evening, Oklahoma and Army were tied 21-21 and headed to overtime. This would have been the biggest upset of the season, if not several seasons, and that’s when something strange happened: Those of us troglodytes who still possess actual cable television packages began to realize that this game was not on television.

It was, in fact, being broadcast on pay-per-view through Fox, which is as weird as it sounds because this was not exactly being billed as Mayweather-McGregor. But it was kind of a cool throwback to the era when, as a kid, I used to listen to games on an actual radio. “How do I find this game?” a friend texted at one point, and the only answer I could give was: Use your imagination, bro. If you’ve still got one.

Off-topic recommendations of the week: PSU-OSU rivalry edition

In the 1920s, a young man named Chester Himes was expelled from Ohio State, apparently for playing a fraternity prank. He later went to prison for armed robbery, which is where he started writing. Years later, his books — many set in Harlem — are finally getting their just due. "Cotton Comes to Harlem" seems as good a place as any to start.

Meanwhile, check out the World War-II era spy novels of Alan Furst, who got his Master’s at Penn State in the 1960s. Or if you’re feeling less highbrow, my alma mater can also lay a specious claim to Adam McKay, who attended Penn State for a year and was partially responsible for the best new television show of 2018.

Your weekly dose of historical context

In 1912, the first time Penn State played Ohio State, Penn State thrashed the home team so badly that Ohio State, down 37-0, walked off the field and forfeited the game with nine minutes left to play. That will most likely not occur on Saturday, unless the Buckeyes are somehow literally blinded by the sheer north-of-the-wall whiteness that will engulf Beaver Stadium on Saturday night.