If cold weather made you better at football, Nick Saban would’ve invested in it

This is the Top Whatever, Spencer Hall’s weekly ranking of only the college football teams that need to be ranked at this time.

1. ALABAMA

Beat the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga by [SCORE WHATEVER IT DOESN’T MATTER]. You know what we should talk about here? How underrated Chattanooga is as a city. The hometown of Samuel L. Jackson has so much to offer: a great kids’ museum, beautiful parks, Rock City, and the majesty of Lookout Mountain, a natural marvel providing beautiful views of the surrounding area. All that, and it’s home to a burgeoning restaurant and nightlife scene I definitely didn’t just make up to see if you would fact check me or notice that the Chattanooga Tourism Council paid me $500 to write about what a great destination it is.

Alabama is the best team in the nation, and Chattanooga is the Scenic City that’s just missing one thing: you. Take a visit today, and discover Chattanooga.*

*Would I rather write fake copy for Chattanooga tourism than review the useless transactions of Alabama’s useless November scrimmage week game? Nick Saban’s mad.

Ooh, everyone, look, Saban’s mad, that never happens, wow. Visit the International Towing & Recovery Museum, located only in beautiful Chattanooga, Tennessee.

2. OHIO STATE

Won a bitter, mean game over Michigan State, 17-16.

Oh, you mean 3-8 Michigan State?

Don’t ever underestimate the rage of a miserable team met late in the season. The 2-8 Iowa State came into a game versus Texas Tech and took out every ounce of frustration on the Red Raiders, 66-10. Kansas — that was 1-9 Kansas — beat Texas in overtime for the first time since the Great Depression. Oregon had three wins going into its game against Utah. The Ducks left with four wins, avenging a 62-20 blowout in Autzen a year ago and decimating the Utes’ hopes of playing for a Pac-12 Championship.

The point is that in crap weather, with nothing to lose, and with a stingy game plan on a stingy day, the Spartans are dangerous as hell. How much good football did they have to play? Around 58 minutes’ worth. When did they run out of good football? After about 58:30, when Tyler O’Connor threw a ghastly interception to end the game, reminding everyone that Michigan State is a bad team that had almost one entire good game in it.

P.S: J.T. Barrett still has these weird games where he doesn’t throw for more than 100 yards and nothing in the passing game really works. Is this different from any other week with Ohio State? No. Is this a point of concern? I have no idea because Ohio State has won games in a lot of different ways this year and doesn’t always need Barrett to be anything beyond serviceable through the air, especially on a brutal day like this.

3. CLEMSON

35-13 over Wake Forest. Fine, just fine. Deshaun Watson didn’t get hurt and threw no picks, and Clemson prevented Wake from making it weird.

That’s a real thing, because as Louisville found out last week, Wake Forest is more than capable of giving you at least three quarters of weird.

Most importantly, Wayne Gallman ran for real yardage, something Clemson needs if it wants to avoid maxing out the warranty on Watson. Watson threw 70 times last week against Pitt. This sounds cool, but you definitely don’t want it to happen because that cool-sounding thing ended up with Clemson losing to Pitt.

4. MICHIGAN

20-10 over Indiana.

WHOA. BUDDY. Jim Harbaugh, you’re gonna need some Bactine for those scratches. We told you about Indiana football: It goes for the eyes and tender bits first, and it doesn’t stop until it gets tired. Fortunately, it’s gonna get tired and give you a chance to pull it off your face and throw it into a river.

The chosen Chaos Team of the Big Ten tore up Michigan for a while, but Michigan’s defense and run game broke the Hoosiers. This is all fine in a game when the Wolverines were missing their starting QB, Wilton Speight, and playing an Indiana team with a pesky defense and a propensity for keeping games close. (Winning them, no; keeping them close, yes.)

However, this takes us all back to square one with what this Wolverines team is: one-dimensional offensively, fearsome defensively, and sometimes able to do Jabrill Peppers things. They might not have Speight against Ohio State and might have to start John O’Korn again. O’Korn passed for 59 yards against Indiana and looked very much like someone making his first start of the season.

This is, to put it mildly, a suboptimal situation. Michigan should hope for snow, freezing rain, or another of those horrendous weather situations Big Ten fans are fond of thinking about while stroking themselves sensually in front of the bathroom mirror, wearing nothing but a balaclava and three pairs of socks.

The answer to that question is: I’d have to wear socks for that. And fuck socks, if we’re being honest about socks. They’re little knit coffins for the feet.

Cold weather doesn’t make you any smarter or tougher. If it made you smarter, Minnesota would be the smartest team on the planet. If you’ve seen the Gophers manage the clock at the end of a game, you know THIS IS DEEPLY UNTRUE.

If cold weather made you any tougher, Saban would have his team sitting in a cryo tank for three hours a day. He would have a staff of 15 coaches devoted to cold-weather conditioning. Six of them would be former head coaches or FBS school coordinators. None of this would be listed on Alabama’s roster; neither would the actual Yeti employed as a strength and conditioning coach. Only one part of this paragraph would be fiction if cold weather had anything to do with toughness.

If Michigan beats Alabama in the Playoff, Alabama will actually do all of this, right down to the coaching Yeti.

Bad weather does, however, improve your chances of winning with a run game alone. Helps to have a touchdown-hoarding fullback who posts pictures of himself making snow angels, too. Pray for misery at kickoff with Ohio State, Michigan.

5. WASHINGTON

Still on track for a Pac-12 title shot after a 44-18 win over Arizona State. All they have to do now is beat Washington State in the Apple Cup and then beat either Colorado or USC in the Pac-12 title game.

Washington will need to win out to make the Playoff and avoid being caught in a pack of two-loss teams trying to butt their heads in the door.

This being the Pac-12, Washington will undoubtedly lose, everyone will finish with two or three losses, and everyone not directly involved will find it hilarious. Reminder: It’s tragedy when I cut my finger, and it’s comedy when everyone in the Pac-12 falls into a sewer and ends up in the Sun Bowl at once.

TWO-LOSS TEAMS THAT, I DUNNO, MAYBE THEY GET IN? CRAZIER THINGS HAVE HAPPENED. IT’S A BIG WORLD, AND I LIKE TO IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES SOMETIMES

Penn State. Victors, 39-0, over Rutgers, but who isn’t?

PSU holds a tiebreaker over Ohio State in the Big Ten title scrum, something it earned by blocking a field goal for a TD on a night when Ohio State dominated in every major statistical category. Football is the worst game in the world sometimes.

Oklahoma. Got all over West Virginia early in a steady snowfall and emerged with a 56-28 blowout.

There might be other two-loss conference champions with more quality on their resumes, i.e., wins in conference championship games. It would require granting the Playoff committee some imagination and charity to put a two-loss Big 12 team into the Playoff. Committees on the whole don’t have a whole lot of imagination or charity.

Oh, and they have to beat Oklahoma State first, which won’t be easy.

Oklahoma State. Yawning while pawing away a desperate TCU in a 31-6 win.

Please stop saying you only have one loss, Oklahoma State. There are so many things to give you credit for: yet another nine-win season (Mike Gundy’s seventh in Stillwater), letting Gundy grow his boss-ass mullet out ...

Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images

... and keeping it all together despite the coach and the school’s biggest booster openly disliking each other.

The loss in question came to Central Michigan, and it came on the final play, a play that should not have by rule happened at all, a play that got an officiating crew suspended and let the Chippewas throw a game-winning TD. That sucks immensely, Oklahoma State, but remember that you were in a game-ending situation with a middling MAC team. DON’T EVER BE IN THAT SITUATION IF YOU’RE A TEAM THAT MIGHT LATER DECIDE YOU HAVE A CASE FOR A PLAYOFF.

You also lost to a six-win Baylor, and you also have to beat Oklahoma in Bedlam, something Oklahoma State doesn’t tend to do very often. The Cowboys have beaten OU just twice since 2002, which feels wrong, but seems right, because Bedlam is the most inaccurately named rivalry outside of Stanford-Cal. Big Game is, like, a Medium Game at best in terms of rivalries.

Florida. Outlasted LSU in a 16-10 win that ended with a heroic and desperate goal-line stand. Would have to beat Florida State and Alabama in consecutive weeks. This seems statistically improbable, and when have statistics or predictions been wrong in 2016 ahahhaahhahaaaaaa nope not happening nope next NOPE NOPE WE’RE NOT DISCUSSING IT

Colorado. Triumphed over Washington State, 38-24. Colorado’s odds are long to get into the Playoff. However, the Buffs have quarterback Sefo Liufau, and after watching him play over the last two years, I would follow him into hell wearing only asbestos underwear.

USC. Another super-outside shot kind of conversation, but they did just beat UCLA, 36-14, are a completely different team than they were at the start of the season, and who knows? I have Colorado here, and before the season started, you would not have considered that to be even possible.

ROW THE BOAT

Western Michigan. Undefeated, beat Buffalo 38-0, row the boat. Won’t get into the Playoff and shouldn’t, given its strength of schedule, but still: Boats, you should row them.