Remember when Virginia defeated BYU in a weather-interrupted season opener in 2013?
Remember last year, when Texas A&M blasted South Carolina in a Thursday-night opener, seeming to suggest that it was ready to enjoy a huge season… only to flounder instead?
At the end of a college football regular season, we’re left to recall and identify the results which misled us the most. We thought they meant one thing at the time, but those results gave way to very different realities as the season ran its course.
September football is always a weird creature, far removed from the tone and texture of the season as it stands in November.
Without further ado, here are the 10 most misleading results of the past season, which has just a few particularly meaningful games left:
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10 – CALIFORNIA 45, TEXAS 44 (WEEK THREE)
This game was representative of the two teams in that they were all over the place during the season. However, at the time this game was played, Cal’s ability to win on the road against a name program seemed to suggest that the Golden Bears were headed for bigger and better things — not just a 7-5 year, but a 9-3 year. That did not happen. Texas, for its part, had reason to think that it was going to turn the corner on offense and become a decent — not great, but decent — college football force. That did not happen either. Both teams left this game with hope… and ended the season with very little optimism for the future.
9 – DUKE 34, GEORGIA TECH 20 (WEEK FOUR)
At the time, it was reasonable to think this game would influence the ACC Coastal race at the top of the division. It did nothing of the sort. Duke’s defense against Georgia Tech looked nothing like the defense which collapsed in November. At the time, many thought the Blue Devils had beaten a quality opponent, one which was simply struggling to ease into the rhythms of the season but would eventually figure things out. Georgia Tech never did.
Duke defeated a bad team, and as soon as the Blue Devils started playing better teams, they lost more. This game was a genuine curveball in the ACC.
8 – NORTHWESTERN 16, STANFORD 6
This result was not misleading at all from the Northwestern side; the Wildcats won a bunch of inelegant games with a marvelous resourcefulness which never left them in games decided by no more than 10 points. The Wildcats endured two Murphy’s Law days against Michigan and Iowa but were otherwise golden in close contests.
Stanford, though, played a game which was entirely out of step with the rest of its season. The Cardinal endured a clunker, shrugged it off, and then proceeded to be the team we’ve known for most of the past six years under David Shaw. Body clocks, Wildcats, bad play calls — regardless of the reason, this game misled us about the season.
7 – CALIFORNIA 35, SAN DIEGO STATE 7 (WEEK TWO)
It’s true that the Mountain West was a bad league this season, with no team remaining involved in the national Group of Five picture over the final few weeks of the campaign. That said, San Diego State was lost in a fog in September, and this crisp performance by Cal — even more than the win in Texas — pointed to a resurgence for the Golden Bears, one which never quite materialized. San Diego State plays for the Mountain West title this Saturday against Air Force; the Aztecs are a football organism completely unrecognizable from a September vantage point.
6 – OLE MISS 43, ALABAMA 37 (WEEK THREE)
This play influenced the outcome, but Nick Saban’s failure to start Jacob Coker and the Tide’s complete implosion represented aberrational occurrences as well:
It was reasonable to think Ole Miss had arrived after this game. The Rebels’ brutally bad performances at Florida and Memphis indicated otherwise.
5 – GEORGIA 52, SOUTH CAROLINA 20 (WEEK THREE)
Greyson Lambert was even better than Phil Simms in Super Bowl XXI against the Denver Broncos. As we would quickly find out, this was no awakening for the Bulldogs, but the product of South Carolina’s defense being so conspicuously inadequate.
4 – BOISE STATE 56, VIRGINIA 14 (WEEK FOUR)
Boise State backup quarterback Brett Rypien soared in his first start of the year, suggesting that the Broncos were ready to regain their status as a first-tier Group of Five contender. However, the remainder of the season became a rollercoaster. The Broncos involved themselves in one game after another with a crazy box score and heaps of critical mistakes. Potent but sloppy and erratic, this clean game against Virginia was hardly indicative of the balance of Boise State’s season.
3 – PORTLAND STATE 24, WASHINGTON STATE 17 (WEEK ONE)
You mean to tell me that a team which lost to an FCS school at home then won at Oregon and UCLA and Arizona, while nearly beating Stanford at home and claiming the Pac-12 North?!
2 – UTAH 62, OREGON 20 (WEEK FOUR)
In terms of the score of the winning team and the location of a given result, no game surprised or puzzled more in 2015. If this had been done in Salt Lake City, or if Utah had won, say, by a 38-7 score instead of topping 60, such a result would have been much more understandable. As it was, Utah never again played at the level it displayed in Eugene. The Utes sank into their familiar November pattern and all their bad offensive tendencies — as a coaching staff, and in relationship to Travis Wilson’s inconsistency on the road. Oregon became Oregon a month after this game, offering yet another example of how September versions of teams are often complete foreigners when viewed through an early-December lens.
1 – SOUTH CAROLINA 17, NORTH CAROLINA 13 (WEEK ONE – IN CHARLOTTE)
How fascinating that North Carolina gets to go back to Charlotte to play another team from the state of South Carolina at the other bookend of its regular season. A win over Clemson would certainly compensate for this failure on the opening night of the season… a night when South Carolina’s defense looked good, as hard as that might be to believe.
