Week 8 of the college football season picked up right where Week 7 left it. Four of the top 11 teams in the AP Top 25 lost on Saturday, throwing another layer of chaos into the playoff picture. This season is starting to have a 2007-like feel to it, where no team is immune to an upset.
My playoff picture after Week 8 is as follows:
- P4 Champions: Miami, Georgia, Ohio State, Utah
- G6 Leader: Boise State
- At-Larges: Indiana, Notre Dame, UCLA, BYU, Kentucky, Alabama, Texas
- Outside Looking In: Ole Miss, Texas Tech, Wake Forest, LSU, Tennessee
Some notes from Week 8:
- James Madison has almost completely eliminated itself from the G6 race with a loss to Appalachian State. Boise State is clearly in the driver’s seat as the only G6 team in the AP poll. New Mexico received 41 votes, so do not count out the Lobos. But Boise State controls its fate for the G6 berth.
- Kentucky may be the biggest beneficiary of the Week 8 chaos, as the Wildcats jumped three spots after defeating Vanderbilt. Road games against Tennessee and Missouri, as well as a home game against Florida, remain on the team’s SEC schedule, but Kentucky has two weeks to get ready for it with a Halloween bye week.
- The Big Ten is a complete mess. The two remaining teams without a loss in conference play are UCLA and Ohio State, and both of them are on their backup quarterbacks. Indiana has offensive concerns and a banged up Josh Hoover, but the remaining schedule is very favorable.
- BYU lost a lot of breathing room with its 39-31 road loss to UCF, but that win over Notre Dame is still in their back pocket. The Cougars face Arizona State on Saturday, but the Holy War feels more like a must-win game for BYU than it did a week ago.
- Do not count out Wake Forest, who is quietly 6-1 with its only loss coming to Miami. The Demon Deacons have Virginia and Merrimack at home the next two weeks, but a key road game against SMU looms on November 14. There is a non-zero possibility we are talking about Wake Forest as an at-large team at Thanksgiving.
- The highest-ranked team with two losses that is not from the SEC is Houston (No. 18). Six of the seven two-loss SEC teams are higher than No. 18. The bias toward the conference is as large as ever. If you are Texas Tech, Wake Forest, SMU, Northwestern, BYU, or even unbeaten Utah and UCLA, you want to see those two-loss teams become three-loss teams as soon as possible. You need to keep winning, but it is clear that just having fewer losses than this logjam of SEC teams will not be sufficient.