Rivalry Week’s timing is a hoot. We spend Thanksgiving with those we love the most. We spend the next two days with those we hate. Confucius would be proud.
For yin or for yang, Rivalry Week brings out the vibes. So. As the weekend fades, a sampling, from the worst to the best:
Oregon State
No, the worst vibes this week do not belong to Ohio State, bad though those vibes may be. The worst vibes belong to Oregon State, who lost handily to their biggest rival Friday night immediately after learning their coach was leaving to coach an average–at–best Big Ten program most notable for its frequent involvement in sex crimes. Oregon State went from the bargaining stage of grief, thinking about ruling the Mountain West and getting automatic 12-team playoff bids, to wondering if their football program is about to become their basketball program in pads. Worse still, six days earlier they still had realistic hopes of crushing Washington’s soul. Oregon State had one of the worst seven-day stretches a college football community can have. Oregon State is the “them” in that Christmas song about how it doesn’t snow in Africa. ‘Tonight, thank God it’s (Oregon State), instead of you!!!!!’
Ohio State
Ohio State’s vibes are pretty bad too, of course. They lost to their biggest rival for the third straight year, they might have won had their 56–7 head coach not let terror dictate his decision-making, and they’re about to get rope-a-doped by the College Football Playoff committee, who feels destined to rank them third only to pull the rug out from under them when Oregon and Florida State both win their conference championships. Ohio State is in for a very bad week, a very boring Orange Bowl obliteration of humble Louisville, and then a very grumpy eleven months while waiting for another shot at Michigan, who may or may not still be coached at that point by Jim Harbaugh.
Auburn
*that meme with the girl and the guy in the field* (I’m told this is a Star Wars meme featuring Anakin and Padme)
Guy: We lost in the last minute to Alabama.
Girl: So we played a great game, right?
Guy: (stares)
Girl: So we played a great game…right?
It is very hard to completely and utterly choke when you are a 14-point underdog.
Florida
Losing to one’s most hated rival while that rival rolls with their 3-star backup quarterback is not fun. Less fun is turning on the TV the rest of the weekend and hearing how someone beating you by nine points is proof that this someone is trash. There is an implication in every piece of FSU slander that Florida is a horrible football team, unworthy of respect or love. That was a lose–lose for the Gators.
UNC
NC State was 4–3 entering the final weekend of October and had only managed a field goal against Duke. NC State is 9–3 exiting November and just hung 39 on UNC, a UNC that went 4–4 after their fanbase’s death threat campaign against the NCAA ended with Tez Walker’s reinstatement.
I would assume North Carolina will now decline their invitation to the Meineke Car Care Bowl.
Texas A&M
Texas A&M ultimately landed in a good place, hiring Mike Elko, the most reasonable candidate for its open head coaching position. To get there, though, they spent Saturday doing the following:
- Building a 24–14 second-half lead in Baton Rouge against LSU.
- Blowing a 24–14 second-half lead to lose by twelve against LSU.
- Instigating a mild online riot within their fanbase by leaking that not only was their booster ecosystem violently divided over their imminent head coaching hire, but that this division was going to end with the hiring of Mark Stoops.
Why is A&M not in worse vibe territory than UNC and Florida, given all of this? The same reason A&M is everywhere A&M is. Texas A&M is full of delusion.
UCLA
I’m not sure UCLA cares about football, but if they do, yikes. Cal whooped them. A lot of 5–6 teams won in dramatic and unexpected ways this weekend, but UCLA let Cal win in only an unexpected way. No drama necessary. Cal kicked UCLA’s ass.
I don’t know if Chip Kelly is fired or not. It’s an any-minute deal right now, and I’m not going to make myself try to time the Twitter search with clicking “publish” on this guy. Right now, Chip Kelly is Schrödinger’s Coach. I also don’t know, though, if Chip Kelly is the wrong guy for UCLA? I would personally love to attend UCLA, but I feel like it’s a tough sell for a good recruit. Even though you beat USC this year, USC is still right across town, and nobody comes to your games in Pasadena. It’s believable that what worked for Kelly ten years ago might not work anymore, but it’s also believable that UCLA’s a bad recipe these days. Good luck next November in Lincoln.
Nebraska
Speaking of Lincoln…yikes! That was bad. That was really bad. Friday on its own was bad and that’s been kind of lost in the shuffle of how bad, overall, things went for the Huskers these last four weeks. Did you hear they lost to Michigan State? Because they lost to Michigan State. Thought we should maybe go over that again.
The saving grace for Nebraska is that you can write off most things in college football when your coach is in his first year at your school. The downside is that it’s going to be a long winter of wondering whether Matt Rhule isn’t the guy, and then wondering whether Matt Rhule is the guy and whether that’s enough to be the playoff-contending program Nebraska people are resigning themselves to wanting to be.
(One side note: Iowa does not appear on this list because I’m not sure Iowa has any vibes left to give.)
Washington State
I think, if you’re Washington State, that you can play the moral victory card. You’ve won one Apple Cup in the last decade. It’s not like you’re used to winning this thing. You went in, you did your best, and your administration’s spent so much energy saying the world’s out to leave you behind that I’m starting to think you kind of want that. People are supposed to go to places like Seattle in the winter if they want to be depressed. I’m starting to think you’re more Seattle than you let on.
San Jose State
So this sucks. San Jose State won on Saturday, on the road against league-leader UNLV, and it wasn’t enough to jump Boise State in the four arbitrarily chosen “computer rankings” the Mountain West uses for its tiebreakers. This wasn’t known going in, either. It had to be learned the next morning, as each of the four systems slowly updated online. The last of the four wasn’t even publicly updated at the time the Mountain West made its announcement. San Jose State fans were presumably refreshing the Anderson & Hester website right up until the time their friends texted them the Mountain West hype graphic for Boise vs. UNLV.
Adding insult to injury, Anderson & Hester’s is a bad website. It brags about being part of the BCS for 16 years despite being part of the reason the BCS rankings got the ax. It bills its rankings as having “the most accurate strength of schedule ratings” and “the most accurate conference ratings” without providing any statistical evidence to this effect (or even explaining what that subjective claim means). Its owner didn’t even spring for the security measures which turn a website from http to https. You take on a risk of malware if you’re trying to look at the Anderson & Hester rankings, and I think that’s good, but that did not make for a fun morning yesterday for fans of the San Jose State Spartans. I mean, look at this thing. Is this what you want to repeatedly refresh as you wait to see if your team can win its conference?
Texas
Texas won this week, by a lot of points, against a rival. Texas also knowns deep down that it needs unexpected help to make the playoff, largely because it hasn’t been as good since September as Oregon has been. Texas’s argument for playoff inclusion isn’t that the Longhorns would beat Michigan or Georgia or Oregon or an Alabama capable of upsetting the Dawgs. The Longhorn argument is that they deserve it. They did the thing everyone asked them to do, and they want the reward they were promised, and they might not get it. Not a great vibe.
New Mexico State
New Mexico State is into the Conference USA championship just three months after they opened their season by losing to UMass. They didn’t even need a technicality to make it! They beat Jacksonville State, fair and square. New Mexico State might win ten games, something that hasn’t been done by anyone in Las Cruces since the undefeated 1960 Sun Bowl champs.
The bad part of this is that New Mexico State is New Mexico State, and while Jerry Kill might well end up retiring there, a refrain echoes through every self-aware mind in Las Cruces softly calling them back to earth like an Ash Wednesday pastor putting on ashes: “Remember that you are New Mexico State. To New Mexico State you shall return.”
Old Dominion
If you’re not aware how Old Dominion won on Saturday, they nearly recovered an unconventional onside kick. That was what started it. They nearly recovered it, but they didn’t, but the receiving team (Georgia State) was offsides. They kicked again, but this time they squibbed it deep (an oxymoron, I know), pinning Georgia State at its own 10-yard-line. There was a minute and a half left, and Old Dominion trailed by seven, and Old Dominion only had two timeouts in its pockets. Georgia State could kneel three times and punt with 40 seconds on the clock, or Georgia State could kneel three times and run out the back of the endzone with 40 seconds on the clock, or Georgia State could eat a six-yard loss and then botch a snap and give Old Dominion the ball back with a lot of time left and one timeout still remaining.
Georgia State chose that last option.
Two plays later, after a clock-milking run behind the line of scrimmage and a bad snap which turned into a safety, Old Dominion was trailing by only five points, lining up to receive a kick which they returned into Georgia State territory. On the next play from scrimmage, Reymello Murphy broke away across the middle and got them to the 6. ODU ran the clock down to two seconds, failing to score on their first three plays inside the 10. On fourth down, facing goal–to–go from the 3, quarterback Grant Wilson ran it in as time expired, pulling the Monarchs to 6–6 and bowl eligibility.
Few parties compare to a good party in Norfolk.
Virginia Tech, Iowa State, Wisconsin, Arizona, Kentucky, Georgia Tech, Mississippi, Missouri, James Madison
Varying situations, same vibe: Nice end to the season. Things are getting better. There is hope for a still brighter tomorrow.
Northwestern
Slightly higher version of the last thing. Northwestern finished 7–5. Northwestern isn’t just stealing wins. Northwestern is beating teams. We thought Northwestern might not make a bowl for twenty years. They’re going to finish with a winning record.
SMU
Higher version still. SMU is smoking teams, and now they get Tulane on the road with a Cotton Bowl trip potentially on the line. Then, they get to join the ACC. And the ACC is terrible! Trevor Lawrence talked about this yesterday. “I want teams in [my] division to be as bad as possible,” he said. He was talking about the AFC South, but we can assume he learned it from his time playing all the Southeastern states’ B and C-teams.
Oklahoma State
The question with Oklahoma State is whether its people understands how badly it just played and how well Texas just played and what that should mean for this coming weekend. If Oklahoma State is who I hope they are, they do not understand.
North Dakota State
If anyone in Fargo listens to Drake (and if I know The Whites, plenty of people in Fargo listen to Drake), we’ve got a lot of “I had someone tell me I fell off, ooh I needed that” locked and loaded for next weekend in Bozeman. Will it get used? I don’t know. But at least right now, the Bison have their swagger back.
Washington
I’m guessing Washington knows what it is and knows what’s probably about to happen to it. I don’t get the sense Washington fans are the most unhinged sort. They don’t care enough for that. That makes it even sweeter how good Kalen DeBoer managed to make near-disaster feel, with his ballsy fourth down misdirection call (from inside Washington’s own territory) leading the Huskies to win the Apple Cup in regulation and stay undefeated. Roll the credits now, Washington. We don’t need to see the epilogue.
Oregon
There was a commercial when I was a child where a tank burst through the wall of a teddy bear’s house, ultimately running the teddy bear down after lighting it on fire. I hated this commercial. It made me scared and sad. I think it had this effect on me even before my favorite stuffed bunny was stolen as part of a car robbery in Kansas City, but I just went back and watched it, and boy, do I want to go hug my dog now.
Anyway, that commercial is kind of what Oregon did to Oregon State on Friday. And what Oregon plans to do to Washington. And maybe it’s what Georgia would then do to Oregon, but we don’t need to dwell on that. We’ve talked enough about the commercial.
Michigan
They did it. Three years after pronouncing the program dead and speculating galore about Jim Harbaugh’s potential replacement, Michigan beat Ohio State for the third time in a row. Amazingly, they’ve already turned the situation from very fun in 2021 (snow was involved, to be fair) to entirely annoying in 2023. Zak Zinter suffered a terrible leg injury and all I could think was, “Great, they’re going to milk this like they’ve milked the Harbaugh thing.” I thought that about a 22-year-old man breaking multiple bones in his leg. And while I didn’t know he’d broken multiple bones in his leg, I did think he’d torn multiple knee ligaments. Or suffered a compound fracture. Or severed an artery. And I like Jim Harbaugh!
Now, Michigan gets to play Iowa. Which is probably safe? It would be so funny if it wasn’t safe. It would be so funny if Iowa won 14–13 on a pair of pick-sixes.
