2013 College Football Pool – Week 8 Results

The first BCS standings are out, and with it we find some familiar, and some not-so-familiar, names at the top. No one expected the first BCS top ten to include Missouri, Miami, Baylor, and Texas Tech – none of them were even ranked in the preseason! Missouri’s case is especially incredible, as the Tigers have used back-to-back wins over Georgia and Florida to make a meteoric rise from “also receiving votes” in week 7’s USA Today coaches poll to 5th in the initial BCS standings. Even more amazing, Mizzou didn’t even earn a single point in the preseason poll.

So, how about that SEC weekend, huh? Every SEC game except for Alabama-Arkansas ended in an upset in one of the wildest Saturdays that I can recall. Auburn and Texas A&M combined for 1,217 yards and 86 points – and a defensive stand won the football game. Tennessee literally won their game against South Carolina on the last play. Ole Miss nearly blew a big lead against LSU before winning on a last-minute field goal a week after losing to Texas A&M in much the same fashion. Vanderbilt used a fake field goal for a touchdown at one point to reel off 17 straight points and beat Georgia. SEC aficionados like to say that the conference schedule is a season-long grind, and anyone can beat anyone on any given Saturday. Speaking as an SEC fan: normally, that argument doesn’t seem to hold water. The top six teams in the league were 30-0 last year against the bottom eight. This week bucked the trend – hard – and this year has given us a Missouri team already discussed above and an Auburn team that at 6-1 and 3-1 in conference play, is in control of their own destiny in a year that they were expected to maybe win eight games. Now, it’s looking like ten is a distinct possibility – and Auburn fans aren’t exactly giving up on that 11th win in the Iron Bowl, either…

Four more teams fell from the ranks of the unbeaten this past week, in wildly different fashions. Clemson got ambushed by Florida State at Death Valley in a 51-14 loss. UCLA lost a Pac-12 defensive slugfest (that phrase just feels strange to type) against Stanford, 24-10. Houston lost a shootout to BYU 47-46 as the Cougars in blue rang up 681 yards of offense and 41 first downs on 115 plays (a new I-A record) on the Cougars in red, who picked up “only” 483 themselves. Perhaps the most heartbreaking loss belonged to Louisville, who needed an impressive victory on Homecoming against Central Florida to make an impact on pollsters. Instead, the Cardinals wound up on the wrong side of a 38-35 score when their defense, who had come into the game giving up a nation-leading 7.3 points per game, couldn’t stop the Knights from driving the field in the final two minutes for the game-winning touchdown.

So now we are down to ten unbeaten teams, and thanks to the aforementioned Louisville loss to UCF, one of the more interesting sub-plots of this year has just become “which (if any) non-AQ school crashes the party?” Both Fresno State and Northern Illinois currently have no losses. The rules of the BCS standings specify that two non-AQ teams can’t earn automatic berths (via either being ranked in the top 12 or in the top 16, but higher than an automatic-qualifying conference champion). Before, Louisville was ranked too highly for this to be much of a concern. Now, however, UCF has the inside track to the American Athletic Conference championship, but they are currently ranked behind both Fresno and NIU in the BCS standings. Now for the Bulldogs and the Huskies, style matters. To make a twist on the old joke, they have to outrun each other, but they have to outrun the bear too!

In small-school news, Divison II #2 Northwest Missouri State beat #7 Pittsburg State (KS) 24-15 in their big rivalry game called the Fall Classic at Arrowhead. Held at the Kansas City Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium each year, the game is annually one of the highest-attended in all of Division II. Over 17,600 people came to the game (for perspective, that’s about 3,000 more than the combined seating capacities of both universities’ home stadiums). It’s a pretty big deal for D-2: Northwest has gone to seven national championship games (winning three) since 1994, while Pittsburg State has four titles of its own and has won more games than any other program in Division II history.

Congratulations to War Ralphie, who wins week 8 (their second weekly win of the year) with 171 points! AUBrian was second with 169 points, and Pachyderm was third with 163 points.

Standings after week 8 (dropping two worst weeks):

There is another big slate of 20 games this week. Lots of points are on the line, so you don’t want to forget to pick any games! This week’s first games are on Saturday, October 26 @ Noon ET, so make sure to get your picks in by then!