The Top Whatever: Things just happen again and again
The Top Whatever is a weekly ranking of only the college football things that must be ranked right now.
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And hey, let’s say this is still going for at least a few hours today:
1. When it is happening again, by Spencer
It's like watching someone drive the same car into the same lake over and over. Down 31-24 to the Tennessee Volunteers, South Carolina had the ball on the Vols’ 28-yard line with 3:16 left. The Gamecocks needed a touchdown to tie, with a down and distance of fourth and 12.
Will Muschamp elected to kick the 45-yard field goal. This reduced the lead to four points. The sequence of events required to get South Carolina to victory then became:
Defend a kick return and/or get a touchback
Keep Tennessee — who, to be fair, had been awful on third down all night — from earning a first down and running the clock out
Successfully field a punt and/or return it
Score a touchdown
This meant counting on South Carolina doing several moderately difficult things successfully.
Going for it instead of kicking would’ve meant attempting one pretty hard thing, with the risk of giving the ball to Tennessee — on what would likely have been the 28-yard line — with the same amount of time left on the clock.
Well, the Gamecocks’ post-field goal kickoff went for a touchback. The Vols took over on their own 25-yard line. I can tell you in retrospect what that looks like. It looks like South Carolina traded a chance to tie the game and take it to OT for three yards of field position.
I can also tell you what it feels like, since I’ve watched so much Muschamp-coached football, I nearly got PTSD watching it happen again for the millionth time. Being able to bet on a four-stage plan ended the instant Tennessee’s game-winning punt went BOINK off the leg of a South Carolina defender who didn’t even know the ball was there.
Muschamp explained the field goal by saying South Carolina had three timeouts, and that he felt good about their defense. This is fine, it really is. It’s perfectly defensible on paper.
It just feels like crashing in the same car, over and over, never seeing the lake right in front of you.
Travis Bell, University of South Carolina
2. Offenses that have, like, two plays, by Alex
Like any offense, the air raid has plenty of intricacies. But the system Hal Mumme and Mike Leach developed at Iowa Wesleyan College in the late ‘80s really only has two staple plays: four verts (where four guys go deep) and Y-cross (where a tight end or slot receiver runs across the field and everyone basically goes to open grass). A true air raid only takes a few days to learn. It then takes many more days for QBs and receivers to perfect their timing. (You should read The Perfect Pass, which Mumme once recommended to me.)
I thought Mississippi State would be a mess this fall, because there is no way to get good at a new thing without repping approximately a million times. This offseason featured less practice than any in the sport’s modern history. COVID-19 got spring ball canceled. QB K.J. Costello arrived in Starkville from Stanford in June, meaning he wasn’t even learning Leach’s offense on Zoom until well into the summer. How could this offense not have tons of problems?
Well. Costello became the first SEC QB to ever throw for 600 yards in a game. He beat defending national champion LSU on the road in his first start ever. It helped that LSU cornerback Derek Stingley Jr. wasn’t playing, as his friends in LSU’s DB room got roasted deep time and again. But Mississippi State was operating at a high level, with none of the messiness I was sure would appear.
Plenty of new 2020 coaches have presided over slopfests with much more varied spread offenses than Leach’s air raid. Sometimes, simplicity is king.
3. Auburn’s humongous freshman tight end, by Jason
Watch big #89 go in motion and lead block:
Does it matter that Pegues only somewhat affected Kentucky’s 180-pound #3 on this play? No. It’s about sending a message: Auburn has a huge-fast (or at least huge-nimble) guy who will probably only become huger and faster for several years to come. He is my favorite 2020 college football player.
4. Willie Taggart, undefeated in 2020, unlike Florida State, by Alex
FSU fired Taggart part of the way through his second season. He didn’t do a very good job there.
Also, white coaches don’t get fired that quickly unless they’re literally 0 for conference play over multiple years. Also, FSU’s roster issues weren’t close to all being Taggart’s fault. That has remained apparent in FSU’s 0-2 start, which now features a 52-10 loss at Miami.
Taggart’s record in 2020? Still 0-0, thanks to ongoing schedule adjustments. Taggart’s bank account in 2020? Likely adding eight figures onto whatever it was in 2019, thanks in part to a buyout paid in full by the Florida State Seminoles.
5. 3-0 UTSA vs 3-0 CAJUNS national championship, by Richard
These are the Playoff combatants we need in this spectacularly dumb college football season. I’m not sure which 3-0 start I’m more surprised about, but here they are, with records washed as white as snow.
UTSA, which had won between three and six games for six straight seasons, even blew a 17-point lead in regulation to Texas State, giving up what should have been a go-ahead 91-yard kick return only to somehow luck out by the Bobcats missing the extra point. The Roadrunners then won in double overtime, because college football. They further upped the ante by holding on against possibly the worst team in FBS when they beat Middle Tennessee by stopping a late two-point conversion attempt. Meep meep.
As for Louisiana (yeah I said Louisiana), the Cajuns are 3-0 after:
Blowing out Iowa State on the road
Squeaking past Georgia State in overtime
Beating Georgia Southern on a buzzer-beating 53-yard field goal
Eat your heart out, LSU. Guess who runs the state now?
6. Kyles, by Spencer
All day, all downs, all situations. Somehow the gods blessed Florida — a team that has been a quart low on blessings for the better part of a decade — with two gifts at once. Kyle One is Kyle Trask, a low-stakes, high-yield quarterback who barely started games in high school. He’s about a foot bigger in real life than he looks on television. He throws what we’ll call an accurate but “eminently catchable” ball, one with the ability to float there for a minute. A 100% certified Philip Rivers FLOATBALL, if you will.
Trask looks like the most interceptable quarterback in the world, except then he throws for 416 yards and six TDs.
Kyle Two is Kyle Pitts. Pitts is a tight end with shoulders as wide as a barn door. He can run what appears to be a 4.3, and apparently has developed the upper body strength of an Icelandic powerlifter. Ole Miss tried to cover him one on one. The man covering him burst into flames after four plays. Then Ole Miss tried to double cover him. Two men burst into flame.
Pitts had 170 yards receiving and four TD catches against Ole Miss in Florida’s 51-35 win in Oxford. When he wasn’t catching the ball, he opened up man coverage for literally everyone else on the Florida roster with two hands. Proof: Trask threw to 10 other receivers. That’s one more than Mississippi State threw to during their upset of LSU, and the whole point of MSU’s new air raid game is get the ball to as many different threats as possible.
In short, the Kyles made it look like Dan Mullen is an air raid coach, like Mississippi State hired Leach because they wanted to get back to throwing the ball. That’s not an accurate interpretation, but that’s how good Kyles One and Two could be. They have the power to distort defensive coverages AND recent football history.
7. Tennessee’s punter, by Spencer
Tennessee’s punter Paxton Brooks is a transformer. His first mode is punter.
Unfortunately for Paxton, the snap hits low and wide to the left, bouncing about a foot in front of him. As Anatoly Dyatlov would say: Not great, but not terrible, either. This kickstarts growth into the next stage in the Paxton Brooks single-play life cycle.
Our man is now a RUNNER. He is NOT HAPPY about it, most likely because LARGE ANGRY MEN are headed his way. This is true on most plays, sure. But on most plays, Brooks has a wall of other LARGE ANGRY MEN to protect him. He is now a baby antelope on the savannah, unshielded from packs of hyenas.
This jumpstarts the final phase of Brooks’ transformation. He is now a PASSER.
The most thrilling stage of all! Despite not being a quarterback, Brooks now must perform one of the most complex tasks on the field in a matter of seconds, or risk an even more massive loss of yardage. Is it maximum Tennessee-South Carolina that in this moment, Keveon Mullins of the Gamecocks nearly face-masks Brooks? Yes, yes it is.
This beautiful metamorphosis ends with Brooks flipping the ball forward to Tennessee long snapper Will Albright. Did you know you can’t snap it and catch it on the same play? The officials knew that, which is why Brooks’ beautiful solution to an impossible situation earned a penalty.
All worth it, in my opinion. Tennessee ended up winning when Brooks booted a punt that bounced off the leg of a South Carolina special teamer. Why? Because nature makes no mistakes, and even in a bad moment, Brooks is a majestic butterfly in the football forest.
8. Attempting to return a punt out of your own end zone, by Alex
The grainy quality of this video does not diminish the excitement I felt when watching Texas A&M’s Ainias Smith catch a punt deep inside his own end zone and run it out to his own 9, only for a blindside block in the end zone to result in a safety for Vanderbilt and a 7-5 score line:
That’s the kind of preparation you can only get for $75 million guaranteed.
9. Oklahoma’s annual “we’re better than you and somehow still lost” game, by Richard
In this house, we still stan young Oklahoma QB Spencer Rattler, even though he delivered mixed results in his first game against a team with a pulse. In Kansas State’s second straight appearance as Oklahoma’s surprise conqueror, Rattler didn’t get much help from the running game, and got even less in key spots from his defense …
… and special teams:
He is not blameless in this defeat. Two of his three interceptions were legitimately on him (including a back-breaker late in the game). But offense is rarely the main problem during OU’s annual meltdown against an overmatched opponent.
Last: CVS, by Alex
Two weeks ago, Texas Tech nearly lost at home to FCS Houston Baptist. As long-time readers of The Top Whatever recall, HBU’s stadium has bleachers on one side and a CVS on the other:
This week, the CVS-defeating Red Raiders saw an upset bid fail in overtime against Texas. The #9 Longhorns now have a narrow transitive win over a drug store parking lot, which should be a big boost as Tom Herman attempts to build on his early success.
This asks the question, "What would be the best chain store to have on one side of your football stadium?"
The best part about the blindside block in the endzone was that should the returner have been tackled, it would have just been a touchback, ball on the 20.