Lmaooo Kentucky and Wazzu are still in the Playoff race

The Top Whatever is a weekly ranking of only the college football things that absolutely must be ranked at this time.

1. UCF. Had a bye this week, but took that bye week to the woodshed and gave it the thrashing it deserved. Recovery naps? Dominated. Massages? Took them like pros. Downtime Fortnite sessions? SLAMMED IT. The Knights are waiting on the Battle Bus for Temple this week, rested, ready, and so well-hydrated they’re basically individual vegetable misters.

2. Georgia. Beat Florida 36-17. The impressive things about Georgia coming back after a loss to LSU and slapping a rival into the St. John’s River:

• Ran the ball 41 times for 189 yards on a good Florida defense and opened up the passing game for Jake Fromm. Georgia works a lot better when they remember they have two good running backs and a quarterback who needs play action!
• Stifled Florida’s budding offensive renaissance and took advantage of three turnovers.
• Killed the Gators on third down with pinpoint passing by Fromm, who came alive in the second half. He preyed in particular on Florida cornerback C.J. McWilliams, who had what we’ll call “a learning experience.”
• There are many kinds of “learning experiences.” This was the “don’t drink Gatorade with tequila” or “maybe living off five credit cards for all of 2014 was a bad idea” kind.
• It’s boring work, but they hit their kicks and punted Florida into horrible field position, eventually generating turnovers and points for Georgia.

Those are all really simple things. Most football teams can’t do a lot of really simple things at once, though, and that’s why Georgia remains alive for pretty much anything they want to win in 2018.

Oh! They also overcame an occasionally insane offensive coordinator who runs doomed sweeps on third-and-one. The Jim Chaney Experience is a Category One drug like that sometimes.

3. UAB. 19-0 over UTEP. This changes nothing in the national picture, ensures no playoff slots, and doesn’t calculate things differently for a major bowl. It’s really just to point out that UAB didn’t even exist in 2015 and 2016 due to Alabamian political intrigue, came back in 2017, and is now somehow 7-1 and sitting atop the Conference USA standings.

Taking a few years off somehow made them better. This might work for a few major programs, actually. For example: Florida State? Consider it seriously for a minute. Let it marinate before you dismiss it completely.

4. Clemson. 59-10 over Florida State. Clemson is playing football so well, they’re raising reading rates across the entire ACC.

There’s nothing like a patently unfair score to send you into the arms of a good book. For some teams — like say, Florida this week— that might be something that would take a week or so to read.

Florida State fans might need something more substantial to pass the time until the pain stops. The Tale of the Heike is a blood-soaked 900 pages of medieval Japanese warfare and treachery. It’s brutal, gory, and at times incomprehensible, and that still sounds a lot better than watching this.

5. Washington State. Defeated Stanford 41-38. Excuse us for a moment, but:

Ahahahaahahahahhhahahahahahhhahahahahhahaaaaaa Mike Leach is piloting the Pac-12’s last real shot at a playoff team, and everyone’s gonna die.

The Cougs are extremely Coug-y, and for people who need explanations, here’s one. Wazzu gave up 38 points to a Stanford team not even that fond of the concept of points. Their QB is an East Carolina transfer who dresses like Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. He wears a headband. That’s how you know Gardner Minshew will be nails in the fourth quarter.

Their defense is somehow both hard-hitting and negligent. Their kicker actually gets used, which is one more example of a Wazzu team refusing to be 100 percent predictable even about ingrained weirdnesses like “doesn’t really like using a field goal kicker.” They have a brilliant receiver in Dezmon Patmon. Their coach is the most predictable part of this team, actually, which is, again: weird.

They face Cal, Colorado, Arizona, and Washington down the stretch. They could win all four of these games. They could lose all four of these games. No one is saying it is a good idea to place any hopes on Wazzu. No one’s even saying it’s not a terrible idea, but terrible ideas can also be very fun. That should be engraved in bronze over the door to the Washington State football facilities: A terrible idea that is also very fun.

6. Kentucky. A felony theft of a football game in winning 15-14 over Mizzou. Seriously, just an absolute masterpiece of football atrocity. No one should ever watch this game again, and all rights to this game should revert to the CIA, who will blackbox it in a vault somewhere in Greenland for the protection of humanity.

What you do need to know is the following:

• Kentucky, the No. 12 team in the country before this game, was a seven-point underdog going in
• Kentucky had just three points going into the fourth quarter
• Kentucky scored the winning TD on an untimed down after a sketchy pass interference call
• Kentucky absolutely stole this entire game despite looking like hot garbage for at least 50 minutes out of 60
• STEALING GAMES IS LEGAL, DO IT WHENEVER POSSIBLE, THERE ARE NO FOOTBALL COPS, NO ONE IS WATCHING, AND NO ONE WILL STOP YOU IF YOU DO IT
• Mark Stoops then had to crowdsurf to Sheck Wes and break the ceiling of Mizzou’s visitors locker room

There, we told you the important parts so you don’t have to watch it, and can instead fast-forward to the real comedy: a top-10 matchup between Georgia and Kentucky with real playoff implications coming up this week.

See? 2018 is kind of fantastic if you look hard enough.

7. Notre Dame. 44-22 over Navy. The Midshipmen were 2-5, but a win is a win, especially one gained against a pesky triple-option team. (It’s always funny UNTIL IT HAPPENS TO YOU. Signed, any Louisville or Virginia Tech fan in 2018.)

Notre Dame has these teams standing between them and an undefeated season: Northwestern, Syracuse, Florida State, and USC. Better still for the Irish: only one is a true road game, coming at USC on November 24th. And QB Ian Book shows few signs of regressing.

It is time to prepare yourselves for a full-bore Playoff crisis involving Notre Dame, is what we are saying. It might also be time to prepare yourself for “Syracuse is a quality loss” as an argument, because the Notre Dame defense will give up serious yardage at times. This is also saying that Syracuse is the last, best hope between the world and Notre Dame getting housed by Alabama for the second time in a decade.

TL;DR: We’re doomed.

8. Oklahoma. 51-14 over Kansas State and my goodness, Brendan “Bookie” Radley-Hiles is not to be messed with in the open field.

9. Alabama. Also had a bye week. Tua threw three TDs. Don’t ask how, he just did. The long one probably came against Bye Week Ohio State’s defense, if we’re playing the numbers here.

10. Michigan. Bye week spent conditioning Chase Winovich’s magnificent hair. Between Winovich, Porter Gustin at USC, Zachariah Hoyt at Virginia Tech, and Breckyn Hager at Texas, 2018 might be the best year since like 1992 for Giant White Dudes With Majestic Viking Manes.