College football wanted a 12-team playoff, but detractors argued it might devalue the regular season.
Guess what?
Not so fast, my friends, to borrow from Lee Corso.
Now, well, now we get de facto college football playoff games cropping up on schedules quite literally from coast to coast.
Alabama follows up its win against Georgia, ascension to No. 1 and seemingly velvet-smooth Nick Saban to Kalen DeBoer transition with ... a loss at Vanderbilt, a Vanderbilt program that previously had been 0-60 in the program's long lifetime against AP Top 5 foes?
Sidenote: Diego Pavia is HIM, per FootballScoop's Zach Barnett, who has been touting Pavia's bona fides since the Commodores upset Virginia Tech to open this magical, wacky 2024 college football season. He wants to initiate a Diego The Dude Award, so any of Pavia's peeps -- family, friends, Diego The Dude himself -- please feel free to email him (Zach@footballscoop.com).
Now, the Tide face struggling South Carolina before visiting ... suddenly vulnerable Tennessee, which was tumbled from the unbeaten ranks with its loss at Arkansas.
Hello, Third Saturday in October rivalry College Football Playoff play-in game.
Yeah, if the Tide and Vols both still enter with just one loss, the loser exits on the very cusp of the CFP bubble and wholly without control of its fate.
Speaking of which, USC's fate continues to be barely above .500 in what now is an impossible-to-ignore sample size. The Trojans's inability to get a final defensive stop in the fourth quarter on the road at a Big Ten foe -- Michigan last month, Minnesota last Saturday -- has left the Trojans in a most precarious position to keep alive CFP hopes.
It also has left that USC program a middling 11-9 across its past 20 games under third-year coach Lincoln Riley, who sees his team host No. 4, unbeaten Penn State this week in a game that absolutely dictates whether the Trojans's season lives on beyond the conclusion of this contest.
USC still has left a trip to Washington, hardly automatic games against Rutgers and Nebraska, as well as an end-of-the-regular-season rivalry contest at home against Notre Dame.
Not struggling? Ohio State. Are the the Buckeyes the class of college football? One FootballScoop podcaster thinks there's a strong case.
All this and more in this week's FootballScoop Weekend Rewind:
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