9 winners and 6 losers from college football's Week 12

College football’s regular season ends next weekend. In its penultimate week, the postseason picture continued to clarify a little bit without getting all that clear at all.

As usual, there are hundreds of literal winners and literal losers around college football on any given weekend. Here, we’ll talk about extra special winners and losers.

Winner: Notre Dame

The Irish probably have to go 12-0 to make the Playoff. They’re one win away from that now, after they undressed No. 12 Syracuse in a 36-3 romp at Yankee Stadium. The Orange are nowhere near as good as that ranking said. They entered the weekend No. 39 in S&P+ and should fall out of the top 40 now, and they still haven’t beaten anyone of consequence.

But Notre Dame looked a lot more dominant against Cuse than, say, Clemson did in Week 5. If you were looking for more reasons to believe in the Irish, you found one in the Bronx. The last step for the Irish: beating USC, an underachiever that entered the weekend three spots higher than Syracuse in S&P+ but then lost to UCLA on this same day.

Loser: Syracuse

It’s worth mentioning that Cuse quarterback Eric Dungey left early with an injury. That’s rough, but given the scale of the blowout, it doesn’t change this thought I have:

Every non-Clemson team in the ACC has now proven to be bad or at least fraudulent in telling you it’s good, except for ...

Winner: Pitt

Oh, yeah. The last non-Clemson team standing in this weird conference is the Panthers, who clinched the Coastal division by cranking it up in the second half to beat Wake Forest.

Pitt’s lost four games, but three were to Penn State, UCF, and Notre Dame. Clemson’s already fallen prey to this program’s dark upset magic once, in 2016, before the Deshaun Watson-led Tigers went on to win the national title. I don’t think Pitt’s going to do that again, but the Panthers beating a top-two team would not be anything new.

Loser: Clay Helton

USC has a lot of problems, but there’s no good excuse for one of the most loaded rosters in the country to lose to a 2-8 version of UCLA. The Trojans are going to miss a bowl after Notre Dame trounces them next weekend. Could Helton really survive that?

Loser: West Virginia

The Mountaineers lost a 10-point lead and a shot at the Playoff in the final five minutes at Oklahoma State. Everything went to hell so quickly. With eight minutes left, they were cruising to victory and trolling Texas at the same time, via using the Horns Down hand signal to call a touchdown play for QB Will Grier. Then they stopped being able to play offense or defense, and a last-ditch winning drive attempt just ran out of time.

Winner: Ohio State

The Buckeyes should’ve lost to Maryland, and not just on the game-ending two-point try in overtime. So many things aligned for a team that’s been playing badly to lose an upset. It required a lot of luck for Ohio State not to take a second loss and fall out of the Playoff race just before hosting Michigan next week. But the Buckeyes avoided that fate, and even if they’re the worst one-loss team in the country, they’re a one-loss team. I’m putting them here because no team in the country feels more pure relief this morning.

Loser: Indiana fans’ spirit

Michigan also almost lost, sort of, but the Wolverines overcame a second-half deficit to beat Indiana. The Hoosiers’ list of heartbreaking near misses against ranked Big Ten teams grows again. I really don’t know if there’s a more teased fanbase in the country than IU’s.

Winner: FOX’s ratings

Neither Ohio State nor MIchigan actually lost despite all that danger, and now next week’s game in Columbus is for both the Big Ten East and a Playoff shot in the Big Ten title game. This will be good for FOX, because the whole country will now be glued to it.

Winner: the triple option

The Citadel was tied with Alabama at halftime, 10-10. We’re not going to talk about what happened after that. In the first 30 minutes, the Bulldogs ran for 149 yards and put up a better showing than anyone else has in a first half against the Tide all year. The Citadel pulled it off with the flexbone option, throwing just two passes, completing neither of them, and still holding the ball for almost 20 minutes. Bama got four drives the whole half.

There are so many FBS teams that should be using the triple option but aren’t. This is the second FCS team of the decade to give Bama problems with that scheme, after Georgia Southern did it in 2011 and deeply frustrated Nick Saban.

Are you reading this, Arkansas? (I’m really not kidding.)

Winner: Washington State

I don’t want to say too much about what Wazzu did to Arizona on Saturday night in Pullman, because I don’t think it’s appropriate for a family website.

Loser: Colorado State

The Rams were 3-7 entering the week. Their season isn’t going anywhere anyway. So, why are they here? Because they beat one-loss Utah State on a Hail Mary, then had their touchdown wiped out because the receiver who caught the pass had stepped out of bounds on his own before coming back in to make the play:

There are probably worse ways to lose, but not many.

Winner: Utah

The Utes are the champions of the Pac-12 South, a division that looked as if it might somehow manage to not have a winner, rules be damned. They got there by Arizona State losing to Oregon and the Utes themselves beating Colorado. Speaking of Colorado:

Loser: Mike MacIntyre

Colorado’s coach was in the uncomfortable position of coaching a game days after his athletic director had to deny a report he’d been fired. But the Buffaloes have lost six games in a row now, following a 5-0 start against bad competition. Maybe the season finale at Cal will matter to this discussion (or maybe not), but it’s gotten to the point where a firing seems like at least a 50/50 proposition. And that might be conservative.

Winner: Nebraska’s stock under Scott Frost

Every time I looked at the Huskers’ snowy game against Michigan State, it looked extremely ugly and I turned away as quickly as I could. The Spartans aren’t much good, either, and beating them 9-6 isn’t a transformative moment. But it’s hard not to notice that the Huskers have played a lot better in the second half of the season. Can you find a reason they couldn’t win eight or nine games and the Big Ten West in 2019? I can’t.

Winner: UCF

The team Frost left is still doing more than fine. The Knights had a fun weekend with College GameDay in town and capped it by destroying a briefly ranked Cincinnati in primetime. They should leapfrog Ohio State and be in the top 10 when Tuesday’s Playoff rankings come out. Whether they are or not, 23 wins in a row is a hell of a thing.

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