College football fans, pundits and scribes spend spring and summer analyzing teams and players, trying to forecast how the season will unfold. Then the games start.
One month, two injured Heisman winners and about a dozen so-called upsets later, and it’s still hard to tell where this season is headed.
The Big Story
Tim Tebow spent Saturday night in a Kentucky hospital with a concussion. Two weeks before top-ranked Florida plays at No. 4 LSU, probably the Gators’ toughest test of the regular season, coach Urban Meyer can’t be sure if the 2007 Heisman Trophy winner will play at Death Valley.
And still the Gators did not have the worst weekend among top-10 teams.
At least Florida won, beating Kentucky 41-7. Mississippi, California, Miami and Penn State weren’t so lucky. They joined Southern California, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Oklahoma State and Virginia Tech as teams that came into the season getting hyped as national championship contenders, then took their first loss before most of the country broke out the fall jackets.
ise. It’s just more of the same. In 2007, the national champion lost two games for the first time. Last year, the only undefeated team in the country didn’t even play for the national title. It’s not quite NFL-style parity, but it is the new normal in college football.
If you don’t like the way the poll looks in September, just wait a week. It’ll change – drastically.
Oregon can’t complete a pass against Boise State, then makes Cal look like a bad Sun Belt team. Miami is back. Or not. It takes one conference game for the great expectations at Ole Miss to turn into massive disappointment for the Rebels.
Being an AP poll voter has become one of the toughest jobs in sports.
“It seems to get more difficult each week,” voter Tommie Hart from CBS College Sports Network said in an e-mail Sunday. “Last week it was a challenge to sort out spots 11-25 with the abundance of good one-loss teams. This week the range expanded all the way up to the (No.)4 spot.”
After four weeks of football, it seems safe to say that Florida is very good when Tebow plays, Texas looks like the title contender it was billed as and No. 3 Alabama appears to be even better than last year, when the Tide won its first 12 games.
Beyond that, who knows?
d 8-4?
The injuries to Tebow and Bradford, the last two Heisman Trophy winners, insert even more uncertainty.
What if the affects of the shot Tebow took to the head Saturday night in Lexington linger?
No offense to back-up quarterback John Brantley, but even with all its depth and talent, a third national title in four years for Florida is probably a long shot if Tebow misses important games.
Bradford hasn’t played since the end of the first half in Oklahoma’s opening loss to BYU because of sprained right shoulder. Will he be back in time for Saturday’s game at Miami? Will it matter, considering the way the Hurricanes played in a 31-7 loss at Virginia Tech?
And what will Braford’s status be by Oct. 17 when OU and Texas get together? If he’s still smarting, that hurdle becomes a lot easier to clear for the Longhorns.
Four weeks of football have provided far more questions than answers.
Heisman watch
With two of the three favorites hurting, here’s some players who should to be catching the attention of Heisman voters:
Houston quarterback Case Keenum.
Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen.
Cincinnati quarterback Tony Pike.
Tennessee safety Eric Berry, who has no shot to win the award but is on the shortest of short lists of best players in the country.
In case you missed it
cord by becoming the 12th player to return two kickoffs for touchdowns in a game. The 5-foot-7, 155-pound receiver had a 93-yard TD return in the first quarter in the 49-7 victory against Tennessee Tech and a 92-yarder in the second half.
The last player to do it was UCLA’s Brandon Breazell against Northwestern in 2005.
Two-minute drill
-Big East loves its big Thursday night games and is on target for another when South Florida plays at No. 10 Cincinnati on Oct. 15. Both should be 5-0.
-Juice Williams and Illinois have regressed. The Illini are looking like the type of undisciplined team coach Ron Zook had at Florida – just not as talented.
M is 3-0 and the fourth highest scoring team in nation, though the Aggies have been fattening up on weaklings. Coach Mike Sherman’s team faces Arkansas this week at Dallas Cowboys Stadium in what should be another high-scoring affair.
Looking ahead
The two big games, USC at Cal and Oklahoma at Miami, aren’t quite as sexy now that all four have lost. However, they might be even more important now because of it.
One loss shouldn’t knock any team out of the national title chase – though Cal’s 42-3 effort makes a good argument for just that – but two almost always does, so consider these elimination games.
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Ralph D. Russo covers college football for The Associated Press. Write to him at rrusso(at)ap.org.
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