Now is the time to start getting hot if you’re a college football team. The preseason rust should be gone and the contenders are beginning to separate themselves from the rest of the pack. Losses in Week 5 or later will come back to bite you and prevent title chases from forming.
That won’t be the case, at least for now, with these big winners from the weekend. The future could be bright if momentum is carried onwards. Let’s take a closer look at who should be proud but still focused on the greater prize.
The SEC
The entire conference got a massive vote of confidence with the latest AP Top 25 rankings. Nine members were included, and two that suffered serious losses didn’t drop much. In fact, one voter decided that Mississippi State, who got blown out at home by Alabama 56-23, deserved to rise from No. 18 to No. 10. Whether or not you feel that’s insane, it just goes to show the state of things surrounding the conference.
Clearly the SEC can do no wrong, and it may be an overreaction to the Big Ten winning each of the last three national titles. The conference is practically in a vicious cycle of cannibalizing itself — Ole Miss beat LSU, then Florida beat Ole Miss, then Missouri beat Florida — and the voters are rewarding the teams for it. By that logic, the more this happens, the more likely it is that a three-loss SEC team qualifies for the 12-team College Football Playoff based on new strength of schedule metrics.
USC Trojans
After a 41-27 loss to Oregon that almost felt deserved after how the team handled a brutal hit to Ducks QB Dante Moore, the Trojans managed to avoid back-to-back weeks of embarrassment. They held on to a 25-21 comeback victory over Washington at home, which probably bought head coach Lincoln Riley more time before the angry hordes truly call for his dismissal. At 5-1, that surely feels premature, but Trojans fans have been expecting a College Football Playoff appearance — let alone a championship — out of Riley since he took the helm in late 2021.
USC’s remaining schedule is anything but easy. The team could not afford a second consecutive loss with winnable (yet trap game-qualifying) games against Penn State and Wisconsin up next. The Trojans need to use the Washington victory as a jumping-off point to build momentum as season-defining contests against Ohio State and Indiana quickly approach. They won’t be favored in either, but another beatdown like the one suffered against Oregon will spell doom for Riley’s tenure.
Baylor Bears
Everyone wrote off quarterback DJ Lagway after a brutal one-point loss to Auburn in Week 1. He got his turnaround game against Arizona State, dropping 306 yards and four touchdowns on the battered Sun Devil secondary. As the ESPN broadcast noted on Saturday, it was exactly the kind of confidence-building performance Lagway needed to reignite the elite pedigree he was initially recruited to Florida for.
Combined with Baylor’s suffocating defense (99 rushing yards allowed, 19 points surrendered), Lagway is probably leading the Big 12’s dark horse title candidate. The Bears have now strung together four consecutive victories and remain undefeated in conference play. A very winnable stretch of TCU, Kansas, UCF and Iowa State approaches before back-to-back defining matchups with No. 8 BYU and No. 11 Texas Tech hit. This is exactly the kind of runway Baylor needs to build momentum into possibly stealing one of those two games.
Minnesota Golden Gophers
Don’t look now, but Minnesota sits in fourth place in the Big Ten and it’s already October. After a gritty rivalry victory over Michigan, essentially banishing the Wolverines from any conference title race and College Football Playoff talk this season, the Golden Gophers now enter the most critical stretch of their schedule. Beating the Wolverines is a massive momentum boost. Take care of Purdue in Week 6, and head coach PJ Fleck will have his boys aiming for more than just bowl eligiblity.
Three consecutive contests against No. 20 Iowa, No. 7 Indiana and No. 21 UCLA should be intimidating, but Fleck’s team is more than capable of stealing two out of the three and giving itself a sneaky good resume heading into November. A 10-2 regular season record is entirely doable and, while it may not be enough to be one of the top 12 teams in the country, it’ll earn the program national respect it hasn’t had in decades. Be prepared to point to this Week 5 win as the start of potentially something very special in Minneapolis.
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