College football pick-six: Chaos reigns, Alabama is a slight favorite over everyone, and Nebraska eats bugs

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

Cliched storyline of the week

Every year, a midseason, upset-laden Saturday in college football crashes ashore without warning and appears to tear the existing infrastructure asunder. Such was Week 7, 2018, in which four top-10 teams succumbed to seemingly inferior opponents, and another three top-10 teams eked out victories over seemingly less potent competition. The irony of such moments is that they often, at least temporarily, tend to allow us to assume that the chaff has been cleared away and the postseason picture now makes more sense.

But does it?

Here we are again, at roughly the halfway point of yet another season, and our instincts tell us to presume that the way is clear for the four remaining undefeated Power Five teams (less N.C. State, the inevitable outlier that if it somehow defeats Clemson this weekend will suddenly require us to take the Wolfpack seriously for the first since…well, pretty much ever…), and that, you know, all Alabama, Clemson, Notre Dame and Ohio State have to do is win out and the College Football Playoff committee can wrap its work over the course of single catered lunch.

But that is almost certainly not going to happen. And it’s not going to happen because it pretty much never does.

Chaos begets chaos, and it certainly feels like the chaos of this season has just begun to take hold.

As this column has mentioned before, only one team has gone undefeated over the course of a season in the playoff era, and that team was Central Florida a year ago. The season is too long, the parity is too great, and the weaknesses become overly apparent. If not for an absurdly terrible spot early in the game, it’s possible Ohio State might have succumbed to Minnesota last weekend, and if not for a few key plays down the stretch, Notre Dame would have lost to Pitt and Clemson would have fallen to Syracuse a few weekends ago.

Maybe Alabama continues to rise above all of this chaos. But whether it does or doesn’t, it feels like, as the ranks of the undefeated continue to dwindle, we’re headed for one of those seasons when much of what we presumed in October looks pretty silly by December.

Distant playoff watch of the week

We know by now how the Playoff Committee games things out, and we know that strength of schedule is weighed heavily from week to week. This is why it’s very possible that when the first CFP rankings are released on Oct. 30, LSU — which has played one of the heaviest schedules in the country up to this point — could leap as high as No. 2 ahead of its matchup against Alabama.

It’s also possible that Central Florida, despite squeezing out a last-minute win over a decent Memphis team this weekend, will find itself in some distant netherworld — its schedule is backloaded with South Florida and Cincinnati, two teams that are also undefeated to date. And we won’t know until later on whether the reason for this is because the committee continues to view non-Power Five teams as a nuisance better off rewarded with a consolation major bowl prize or whether it's finally ready to take UCF seriously.             

But in the meantime, here’s a stab at the tiers of the still-contending:             

Tier 1: Alabama

Tier 2: Ohio State, Clemson, LSU, Notre Dame

Tier 3: Texas, Oklahoma, Michigan, UCF

Tier 4: Georgia, Florida, Oregon, Kentucky, N.C. State, Washington State

Tier 5 (or Hey, Doofus, What About My Alma Mater, Which Should Still Theoretically Be Mentioned Even If I’m Not Really Sure I Believe In Them Myself At This Point?): West Virginia, Iowa, Cincinnati, South Florida               

The “Thornton Melon” dudes of the week

As usual, the overarching outline of the Heisman race has already demarcated, and it’s the same as it ever was: Let’s just find a few quarterbacks on really good teams and shove the hype in their direction. So yes, it’s still Alabama’s Tua Tagovailoa (presuming he remains healthy and shatters all records), or Ohio State’s Dwayne Haskins or Oklahoma’s Kyler Murray. But let’s throw some adoration to a few prolific dudes who have gotten lost in the Tua kerfuffle:

— Did you know, for instance, that Memphis running back Darrell Henderson, who ran for 199 yards in that 31-30 loss to UCF, is averaging 10.3 yards per carry on 110 rushes this year? And no other running back with over 43 carries this season is within a yard of that pace? 

— Or did you know that Hawaii receiver John Ursua (who had nine catches for 89 yards in Hawaii’s loss to BYU last Saturday) leads the nation in both receiving yards (890) and touchdown catches (13)? 

— Or did you know that Washington’s Ben Burr-Kirven (who had 19 tackles in Washington’s 30-27 loss to Oregon) has 93 tackles through seven games this year, which puts him at a Luke Kuechly kind of pace this season?

And since the object of this column is to zig where others zag, allow me to nominate for Heisman consideration the entirety of the defense at Colgate University, which in going 6-0 has allowed 23 points all season and six in its last five games.

The week in weird

In a fit of boredom amid Alabama’s overarching dominance of yet another opponent last Saturday, I posed this question on Twitter:

Alabama plays an All-Star team made up of players from every other FBS school. The All-Stars have one month to prepare. The game is in Tuscaloosa. What's the spread? (The All-Stars are coached by Washington’s Chris Petersen.)

Cumulative average among those who answered: Alabama -2 (I will, of course, update this line with additional prognostications in the comments section as they arise.)

Off-topic recommendations of the week: The how do you get to Pullman edition

Since ESPN’s GameDay will forge a path to Washington State University for the first time ever to celebrate the 5-1 Cougars game against 5-1 Oregon, let us embrace the Pacific Northwest spirit with a couple of recommendations: Oregon native Ken Kesey’s "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest," an example of the rare case of a great book yielding an equally great film; and Netflix's "Wild, Wild Country," a six-part documentary about an Indian cult guru in rural Oregon that keeps getting weirder and more mind-blowing as it goes along and is almost certainly the best work of nonfiction your streaming dollar has ever helped produce.

Your weekly dose of historical context

Nebraska dropping to 0-6 for the first time in school history with an epic collapse at Northwestern led me to this Wikipedia entry about the 1899 Nebraska Bugeaters, who went 1-7-1 with a 6-0 exhibition win over Lincoln High School. Seems worth noting that Lincoln High is 6-2 this year (go Links!). Time for a rematch?