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Weekend Recap
Two games reordered the season this weekend, one in Austin and one in Stillwater.
Texas trailed Ohio State 23-3 entering the fourth quarter. Then the Longhorns scored 21 unanswered points to win 24-23, capped by a touchdown with 25 seconds left. Down three scores and out of easy options, Steve Sarkisian’s staff started attacking on fourth down, converting twice from their own territory to keep the comeback alive. On the other sideline, Ryan Day made two more measured calls: a punt from Texas’s 39 while up 20, then a decision not to concede a late Texas touchdown that would have given Ohio State more time to answer. Both were defensible in the moment. Together, they’re the kind of sequence that gets replayed all season if Ohio State’s ceiling doesn’t match its record. One caution worth keeping in mind: it’s tempting to say any single decision cost Ohio State the game, but change one snap and the rest of the game plays out differently too. Everything downstream shifts, the same way one changed moment rewrites the whole future in Back to the Future. The four-point margin matters. Assigning it to one play doesn’t tell the whole story.
Oklahoma State’s story needed its own kind of context. Entering the day as 22.5-point underdogs against No. 6 Oregon, the Cowboys instead won 39-31, outgaining the Ducks 554 to 281. It capped a nearly two-year FBS drought: Oklahoma State snapped a 12-game overall losing streak and a 21-game skid against FBS opponents, a run that stretched back to 2024. According to NCAA.com, no team had previously ended a losing streak of 10 or more games by beating a top-10 opponent. Oregon, meanwhile, needed a late push just to escape Boise State in Week 1. Two weeks in, a team many expected to contend for a national title hasn’t looked like the dominant roster it was built to be.
Michigan’s win fits the same pattern from the other direction. After a shaky Week 1 escape, the Wolverines beat Oklahoma 17-10 behind a defense that held John Mateer to 17 of 33 passing and a run-heavy offensive plan that leaned on Bryce Underwood. It’s an early sign of what Michigan under Kyle Whittingham might look like: tight, physical, and built to win in the trenches rather than the air.
Rankings Talk
Here’s the honest state of the ratings two weeks in: 97 of 138 FBS teams share the exact same rating, 0.0. That’s not a bug. The formula multiplies win percentage by opponent win percentage, and with most teams sitting at 1-1 or 2-0 against similarly thin schedules, there simply isn’t enough separation yet. The raw records tell more of the story right now than the math does.
And the honest state of the season is just as unsettled. Is Oregon actually a mediocre team, or a good one playing two rough weeks? Is the version of Michigan and Oklahoma State we saw in Week 2 the real one, or was Week 1 closer to the truth? Nobody knows yet, and that’s fine. Four of the preseason AP Top 25 have already lost, and notably, all four lost to other ranked or receiving-votes opponents, not outsiders. The chaos so far is coming from the top of the sport beating on itself, not from unranked teams sneaking up on anybody.
Conference ratings, unlike team ratings, do have enough data to mean something. The Big Ten sits at No. 1 despite not having the best raw win percentage in the country. That distinction belongs to the SEC, at 0.875 in FBS games, and yet the SEC sits down at No. 6 in the conference ratings. The gap comes down to strength of schedule: the SEC has simply beaten up on weaker competition so far. It’s a good reminder that a gaudy record and a strong resume aren’t always the same thing this early in the year.
The Rankings
A few things worth pulling out of this week’s numbers:
Duke, quietly, is No. 1. Not in the AP poll, not in anyone’s playoff conversation, but in the numbers. Duke sits atop the internal ratings at 2-0, while Georgia, Miami, Alabama, and a few dozen other teams everyone’s actually talking about are stuck in a massive logjam at 41st. That’s not a knock on the formula. It’s what happens two weeks into a season when strength of schedule hasn’t separated anyone yet. But it’s also a reminder that the teams getting the headlines aren’t necessarily the teams with the resumes, at least not yet.
Oklahoma State went from irrelevant to No. 9 in one Saturday. A week ago the Cowboys were buried near the bottom after losing to Tulsa. One win over Oregon later, they’re inside the top ten. That’s either a sign the ratings are working exactly as designed, rewarding a genuinely great win, or a reminder of how violently the numbers can swing on a single game this early. Probably both.
Oregon’s loss didn’t sink them nearly as far as you’d think. Despite getting outgained by nearly 300 yards in Stillwater, the Ducks are still sitting at 29, not buried near triple digits. A win is still a win in this system, and Oregon’s is over a team that just cracked the top ten. It’s a good early example of how the ratings try to separate a bad loss from a loss to a team that turned out to be good.
Northwestern is 1-0 and ranked dead last. That one sounds like a bug. It isn’t. The Wildcats’ only game so far was a win over South Dakota State, an FCS opponent, followed by a bye in week 2. The ratings formula only counts games against FBS teams, on purpose, so a win over an FCS opponent doesn’t inflate anyone’s number. That leaves Northwestern with zero FBS games played, which means their win percentage isn’t zero. It’s undefined, since there’s nothing to divide. The system has to put that team somewhere, and it drops them to the very bottom, the same spot you’d expect from a team confirmed to be bad. Northwestern hasn’t been proven bad. They just haven’t played anyone the formula can count yet. Once they face Colorado in week 3, they’ll get a real number and move off the floor immediately. Worth remembering any time a team looks buried early in the season: last place doesn’t always mean worst team. Sometimes it just means no data yet.
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Loose Ends
Kentucky and Alabama traded pick-sixes to open scoring. Mi’Quise Humphrey-Grace’s 2-yard return got Kentucky on the board first, and Alabama’s Luke Metz answered with a 34-yard return on the very next possession.
Broadcasters spent the Texas-Ohio State fourth quarter insisting Texas didn’t want to take the lead too soon, and that Ohio State might’ve wanted to let Texas score to get the ball back with time. Both assume a level of command over in-game outcomes that a live fumble in the middle of that exact sequence undercut.
Sam Leavitt threw three interceptions and LSU still won 45-14 over Louisiana Tech.
Iowa beat Iowa State 16-13 on a 42-yard Caden Buhr field goal with 15 seconds left, the Hawkeyes’ first win in the Cy-Hawk series since 2021. Worth noting what Iowa State is working with this year: head coach Matt Campbell left for Penn State in the offseason and took roughly 20 players with him, including starting quarterback Rocco Becht. A nearly rebuilt Cyclones roster under new coach Jimmy Rogers still made this a one-score game that came down to the final seconds.
USC’s Jayden Maiava threw five touchdown passes in a 49-30 win over Louisiana.
James Madison’s special teams put on a show against Wagner: a blocked punt returned for a touchdown, plus two separate punt-return touchdowns in the same game.
Steve Sarkisian capped a live sideline interview by shouting “Texas fight!”
Akron let a season-ticket holder script its opening drive against Robert Morris, following borrowed Nick Saban advice: get the call in early, stay ahead of the sticks, and don’t get cute. The script drove Akron to the Robert Morris 37 before a fumble ended the possession at four plays. Head coach Joe Moorhead publicly took the blame himself, and Akron went on to win 45-10 anyway.
Washington needed a late stop to beat Utah State 16-14, another ranked team that survived rather than made a statement.
North Dakota State is off to a 3-0 start in its debut season in the rebuilt Mountain West, including a win over Air Force for their first conference victory as an FBS program. North Dakota State and USC are the only two teams sitting at 3-0 this early, a game ahead of most of the country.
Georgia’s 70 points against Western Kentucky led the country this week, ahead of Nebraska’s 56 and Notre Dame’s 52.
Four games this weekend were decided by two points or fewer: Ohio’s 29-27 win over Jacksonville State, Marshall’s 28-26 win over Middle Tennessee, Washington’s 16-14 win over Utah State, and Iowa’s 16-13 win over Iowa State.
The rebuilt Pac-12 is off to a combined 3-10 start through two weeks, the worst mark of any conference outside Conference USA and the Mid-American.
Games to Watch — Week 3
LSU (#7) at Ole Miss (#8) — the clear Game of the Week, the only matchup between two ranked teams. LSU has climbed from a preseason #11 on the strength of blowout wins, and it’s worth watching whether Sam Leavitt cleans up the three-interception game from this week against a quality SEC defense, or whether it costs LSU this time.
Houston (#22) at Texas Tech (#13) — Houston has actually posted the bigger scoring margin of the two so far this season, despite sitting lower in the poll than Texas Tech. Worth watching whether that gap shows up on the field.
SMU (#16) at Louisville (#23) — SMU has climbed from a preseason #19 and arrives unbeaten, while Louisville enters 1-1 after already dropping a game despite its own preseason ranking. Another data point in the week’s larger theme: nobody’s resume is settled yet.
Mississippi State (receiving votes) at South Carolina (receiving votes) — both teams came into the season unranked and have forced their way into the conversation at 2-0, with South Carolina actually running up the bigger scoring margin of the two.
One more worth a mention outside the top four: Michigan State is unranked but 2-0 with a real point differential, and they’re headed to Notre Dame. That’s the kind of game that could look very different by Tuesday than it does on paper today.
Look for Friday’s Weekend Viewing Guide, with the top four games in each TV window.
Looking Ahead
It’s worth remembering how differently a result like Oregon’s or Oklahoma’s would have played out just a few years ago. In the four-team playoff era, a Week 2 loss to an unranked team was close to a knockout blow. Surviving that kind of loss and still making the field was a tall order.
The 12-team format changes that math substantially. There’s simply more room now. A one-loss team with a strong resume the rest of the way still has a real path, especially in a conference like the Big Ten or SEC where quality wins are available all season. Oregon and Oklahoma both have time to write a different ending to this story, and neither result from this weekend needs to define their season the way it might have in 2023.
That’s not a reason to wave off what happened. It’s a reason to watch how these two teams respond over the next month, rather than trying to draw a conclusion today. The bigger field was built to allow for exactly this kind of early stumble. Whether it actually changes the outcome for teams like Oregon and Oklahoma is the more interesting question, and one we won’t have an answer to for a while yet.
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Written by Bob Sloop