College Football Week 3: Texas Storms to No. 1, Oregon Craters, LSU-Ole Miss Looms

Arch Manning at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium (file photo). Texas’ stadium was exactly where he authored this week’s biggest comeback. Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

College football’s early season has exactly one job: convince you that whatever you watched last Saturday is permanent. It never is. A week after half the country had its playoff bracket set in pen, we’re already erasing most of it.

Texas is your new No. 1. Ohio State fell all the way to No. 6. Georgia, Notre Dame, Indiana, and Miami round out the top five, LSU and Ole Miss sit at seven and eight heading into the game of the year so far, and Oregon, the preseason No. 2 team in the country, is all the way down at No. 21. Welcome to September, a month college football insists on taking far too seriously and rewriting completely by October anyway.

Down 20 points in the third quarter at home against the No. 1 team in the country, with the kind of body language that suggested Texas already knew how this one was going to read in the papers, the Longhorns scored 21 unanswered points in the fourth quarter and beat Ohio State 24-23 on a Hollywood Smothers touchdown run with 25 seconds left. Arch Manning wasn’t sharp for three quarters (23 of 37 for 196 yards and an interception that wasn’t really on him) and then was exactly what Texas needed for one. The defense, which had let Ohio State hang a 20-point run on it, woke up right when it had to and helped close the door. Texas is the No. 1 team in the country this morning. Ohio State is still, in my opinion, a great football team, one I’d still pick for a bye in the playoff if the bracket got decided today. Losing on the road to a top-five team in September is not the same thing as getting exposed. Good luck telling anybody in Columbus that this week, though.

Now for the true wreck of the week. Oregon, a team a lot of people, myself included, had pegged for the playoff, sits at No. 21 after getting outscored 39-31 by an Oklahoma State team that won a single game a year ago. This isn’t Oregon losing a fluke game. This is back-to-back stinkers: a defense that can’t get off the field, and an offense that hasn’t come close to the vintage 60-point performances we’re used to seeing against teams this overmatched. Something is off in Eugene, and I don’t think a bye week fixes it.

Michigan’s turnaround took exactly one week, which tells you everything about how thin the margins are right now. Bryce Underwood looked lost in the season opener against Western Michigan, saved only by a fluke second put back on the clock for a game-winning Hail Mary. Against a ranked Oklahoma team on Saturday, he looked like a completely different quarterback, running for a 38-yard score and making the throws he needed to make in a 17-10 win. Michigan is back in the poll at No. 19. Good win. Whether it means anything longer term probably depends on which Underwood shows up first the next time it matters.

Washington is the quieter cautionary tale. The Huskies needed a fourth-quarter interception in the end zone just to survive Utah State 16-14, with an offensive line that was supposed to be the strength of the team getting bullied by an Aggies squad that had lost to FCS Idaho State the week before. Washington dropped clean out of the poll after that one. Two wins, zero style points, and a set of red flags that are going to get exposed the moment the schedule gets real.

The game of the week, by a mile, is No. 7 LSU at No. 8 Ole Miss on Saturday night, and it’s barely about the football, even though both teams are 2-0 and the football should be excellent. Lane Kiffin left Oxford for Baton Rouge in November, two days after Ole Miss finished the best regular season in program history, and he’s walking back into Vaught-Hemingway Stadium for the first time since. Ole Miss fans sent him off at the airport with a one-finger salute. His old defensive coordinator, Pete Golding, is now the head coach standing across from him. Kiffin’s line on the whole thing has been some version of “Pete’s not going to tackle anybody, I’m not going to throw any touchdowns,” which is the correct thing to say and also something nobody actually believes he means. This is going to be loud, it’s going to be personal, and I genuinely don’t know how either fan base handles watching him on that visiting sideline.

A few other games worth clearing your Saturday for. Houston travels to Texas Tech in a game that’ll say more about the Red Raiders than the Cougars. SMU and Louisville is a measuring-stick matchup for two teams that both looked good enough in September to matter in November. Florida State is a 20-point underdog at Alabama, which tells you plenty about where both programs currently sit. Michigan State heads to Notre Dame to renew the Megaphone Trophy rivalry for the first time in almost a decade. And West Virginia goes to Virginia, where the Cavaliers are sitting at No. 25, a spot I think is honestly a little low. This is a genuinely good Virginia team, and the Mountaineers, scrappy as they’ve been all year, are walking into a tougher spot than the seeding suggests.

So here’s where we are two weeks in: the No. 1 team almost lost by 20, the preseason playoff favorite has back-to-back losses on its resume, and the biggest game of the week has nothing to do with either of them. That’s September for you. Ask me again after Saturday and I’ll probably be wrong about half of this too.