College football pick-six: Four-loss teams are the new market efficiency, Bama is the Death Star, and let the rivalry games commence

Cliched storyline of the week

In general, it is safe to assume that college football will defy common sense. This is the charm of the sport; this is what sets it apart from the professional ranks, where playoff status is clearly delineated and success is measured in hard and objective terms. In college football, teams rise and fall, often with little warning; in college football, bowl berths and playoff berths are often based on arbitrary criteria and subject to wild conspiracy theories.

But this season is blossoming into a fascinating dichotomy: While everything has remained relatively stolid at the top, under the surface there is rampant chaos.

How else do you explain a week in which the top 10 remained almost entirely unchanged — part of a season that might be described, if viewed from the top, as kind of boring to date— and yet one four-loss team (Northwestern…wait, what?) clinched a berth in the Big Ten Championship game, and another four-loss team edged ever closer (Pitt..wait, how?) to the ACC Championship game? How else do you explain UAB — a team that shuttered its football program altogether a mere four years ago — now standing at 9-1?

The beauty of all this is that we’re not done yet. According to the peerless math nerds at Five Thirty Eight, there are currently three teams with a better than 50 percent chance to make the Playoff, and there are six other teams with at least a 14 percent chance. Which means that perhaps the bottom of the deck just happened to get shuffled in advance of the top half. Which means that there’s still reason to believe that what we think is a straightforward Playoff path could still devolve into chaos and conspiracy.

So: Let us parse.

Steadily encroaching Playoff watch of the week

Tier 1: Alabama. Perhaps you thought, midway through this season, that a soft spot in the Crimson Tide’s defense would actually prove its thermal exhaust port. But over the past two weeks, Alabama has not allowed a single point to LSU or Mississippi State. And in last Saturday’s win over MSU, Bama allowed 169 yards in total, and the Bulldogs were a combined 1-of-15 on third- and fourth-down conversions.

It seems increasingly clear that something will have to go wrong internally for Alabama to fall off. Tua Tagovailoa’s knee injury remains the foremost concern, but given that the Tide squeezed Citadel into their schedule this Saturday, he’ll likely get two weeks to rest before the Auburn game.

Tier 2: Clemson. A prime-time road game against a dangerous Boston College team didn’t faze the Tigers at all, in large part because their defensive front remains the most frightening force in the sport outside of Tuscaloosa. BC gained 113 total yards and nine —yes, nine — on the ground Saturday night. The Tigers have two regular-season games remaining, against Duke and South Carolina, that could prove tricky. But both are at home.

Tier 3: Notre Dame, Michigan, Georgia, West Virginia. No changes here, as Notre Dame, Georgia and WVU had no trouble in potential trip-wire games, and Michigan survived a bye week against Rutgers in which Jim Harbaugh managed to conjure an imaginary friend. Who has the most treacherous path remaining? That would be WVU, which travels to Stillwater this weekend before hosting Oklahoma on the Friday after Thanksgiving. But Notre Dame also has to get by a rather good Syracuse squad before traveling to USC, where coach Clay Helton is among the hottest of hot-seat dwellers but could potentially salvage another year by spoiling the Irish’s season. And Michigan has Indiana Saturday and then (presumably) a one-game season against Ohio State.

Tier 4: Central Florida, Washington State, Oklahoma, Ohio State. UCF beat Navy, but I imagine the Knights will slip in the Playoff rankings because they gave up too many rushing yards. Ironically mustachioed Washington State continues to drink the Pac-12’s milkshake, Oklahoma survived yet another pornographic display of Big 12 offense to defeat Oklahoma State in the Bedlam game and Ohio State sleepwalked through yet another Big Ten victory, over Michigan State.

Tier 5: Utah State, Cincinnati, UAB, Buffalo. These are all one-loss teams with decent resumes, and I see no reason why, if they remain one-loss teams, they shouldn’t receive major-bowl consideration. Hell, I’d be fine with them playing for the ACC and/or Big Ten Championships instead of Northwestern and Pitt at this point.

The Chef Curry dudes of the week

Props to little ole Davidson College, which up to this weekend was best known as the school that (both literally and figuratively) launched a million three-pointers. But no more! Now Davidson is known as a rushing factory because last Saturday, the Wildcats’ football team plodded for a Division I record 789 yards — and somehow still lost the game. That’s the same Davidson team that won a game by a score of 91-61 earlier this season — which is 13.1 more points than Davidson’s basketball team averaged during its Elite Eight run in 2008.

The week in WTF

Arkansas is a bad football team. There is no shame in this (yet), given that first-year coach Chad Morris inherited his current roster from Grimace. But every so often you come across a play that encompasses the overarching ineptitude of every struggling, underachieving team in the country, and the Razorbacks provided us with that this weekend. Somebody set this one on a loop to Yakety Sax: