If in mid-September you had forecast that Florida State would spend part of mid-October in the wee hours at Stanford frantically trying to avoid going 3-4 overall and 0-4 in the ACC while lunging toward the goal line on a final play that the referee then carefully reviewed for half an eternity, well, sure, you could have made a bloody fortune, but that wouldn’t have made you any less loopy. The truth around college football, after all, has gone loopy lately, even for college football.

Another one of those berserk weekends met its end after four top-10 teams lost and the Seminoles, 17.5-point favorites, fell, 20-13, to a program in a rebuilding decade. The drawn-out ending of Florida State-Stanford played like some slow-warping alternate universe as the game kept seeming to conclude but then not doing so as Stanford students in the stands mocked Florida State with tomahawk chops. Florida State Coach Mike Norvell wound up looking glum and puzzled again, his sixth Seminoles team appearing as if lost among the redwoods with a dead flashlight, still roaming the country without any ACC win since September 2024, across nine yawning losses.

And a final score from Tallahassee on Aug. 30, 2025 – Florida State 31, Alabama 17 – continued to mutate into some inexplicable oddity in the rearview.

Maybe somebody should just go ahead and delete it.

The Seminoles, who danced at the end of that 31-17 win to Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” as quarterback Thomas Castellanos fretted maybe they should temper the braggadocio, the team from the empire resuscitated, have now lost to Virginia, Miami, Pittsburgh and Stanford. Its good coach’s job teeters. Meanwhile, the Alabama team and its second-year coach presumed doomed and soft for a loud September week just reached 6-1 with a fourth straight win over a ranked SEC opponent, this time Tennessee by 37-20. Alabama looks like Alabama. It has beaten even Vanderbilt. “They’ve got an edge to them still and haven’t lost it since the beginning there, since Week 1,” Kalen DeBoer said of his players to reporters in Tuscaloosa. “That’s hard to do. That’s really hard to do.”

All around the land, a sport historically long on oligarchy has taken to dabbling in anarchy. Miami looks ironclad – no, wait. It lost Friday night to Louisville on a diving interception that doubled as one of the best catches ever by a linebacker, making Louisville quarterback Miller Moss say, “Holy s—,” and making the interceptor, Miami native T.J. Capers, say, “You know, I’d say it was surreal.” James Franklin looks gone – no, wait. There he sat as an ex-Penn State coach on the set of ESPN’s “College GameDay,” saying, “We’re just going to go win the national championship somewhere else now.” Two-loss Texas looks healed – no, wait. It got outgained 395-179 on Saturday night at struggling Kentucky, got out-first-downed 26-8, got out-possessed 39:23-20:37 and tussled into a 13-13 overtime, where it needed a touchdown-saving tackle by Jaylon Guilbeau, a goal-line stand and a 45-yard field goal to smile going home. “You know,” Coach Steve Sarkisian told reporters in Lexington, “once a year, you have a culture win, where the game’s not pretty but the team, because the team is so close, finds a way to win the game.”

USC returns – no, wait. Michigan sinks – no, wait. The only frigates sailing calmly above the fray seem to be Ohio State and Indiana, but the latter case feels refreshingly upside-down. UAB fired its coach last Sunday, then upended 21½-point favorite Memphis on Saturday. BYU dipped into deep trouble Oct. 11 at Arizona, wriggled out of that in double overtime and then bested loathed rival Utah, 24-21, on Saturday to reach 7-0 with the help of a ricocheting 22-yard touchdown run by a quarterback wearing No. 47 and named Bear (Bachmeier), all while Jason Benetti of Fox Sports called from the booth, “There’s a Bear on the loose in Provo!”

It’s a season in which Vanderbilt sits a legit 6-1 as lionhearted quarterback Diego Pavia helps beat No. 10 LSU, 31-24, with a fourth-down play in the third quarter on which a defensive end appears squarely in his windshield and Pavia buys himself two seconds with some sort of unteachable 360 move out of the ether before throwing. He also throws a touchdown pass to a blocking tight end, Cole Spence, who later chirpily notes it’s his first news conference and says, eventually: “Yeah, we’re not hiding it. We’re trying to go win a national championship. This is a big win, another step on the road, but if we end this season with six wins, we’re going to be pissed.”

In how many seasons do Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech stream toward the top 10 while ranked Virginia sits 6-1 after that nutty rarity, a game-winning safety, all while Texas Tech gets upset?

In one, pretty much. Assumptions keep croaking, so when you assume, you make – you know. An epitome of croaked assumptions occurred in that fresh harbor of fervor, Tempe.

You might know the populous Arizona State student body as having a bit of a reputation for appreciating that the campus is not, you know, dry. But as the newfangled college football with its 12-team playoff and its player mobility seems to allow more college towns a chance at non-delusional hoping, those Sun Devil students helped create one hell of a field-storming scene after a 26-22 upset of No. 7 Texas Tech. At one point, it appeared their grand blob of humanity engulfed a 6-foot-5, 295-pound lineman with an 82-inch wingspan, Champ Westbrooks from Los Angeles, except you can’t engulf somebody like that, so Westbrooks appeared to just grin amid the love.

Amid all the fine senselessness, both Texas Tech and Arizona State had visited Salt Lake City this year, the former whacking Utah, 34-10, and the latter getting whacked, 42-10, just last week. “I still don’t want to think about it,” Arizona State Coach Kenny Dillingham said, “because I’m so embarrassed by it.” So, of course, assumptions crumbled again.

“You’ve got to find solutions to problems,” said Dillingham, the 35-year-old native Arizonan who has returned the electricity to his alma mater. “[Losing 42-10] beat me up. It beat me up a lot. But I sat down. … I called two coaches that I knew that I had a lot of respect for and I said: ‘Hey, this is the situation we’re in. We’ve got some guys dinged up. … We’re not as physical as we were. We’re a veteran team. I’ve never been in this situation. Help?’”

Well, the embarrassed rise again in 2025, maybe even after some pad-popping practices, and so the Sun Devils led 19-7, trailed 22-19 with two minutes left and won on a 75-yard drive led by quarterback Sam Leavitt, including a hairy fourth and two when he darted toward the line but then flipped a pass to Jordyn Tyson along the sideline, leading to 33 yards of relieved roaring. Besides, everyone wants a quarterback who sobs when the leaves fall and he’s hurt and he can’t play, as happened at Utah.

“I remember we were driving on the bus on the way to the [Utah] game,” Leavitt told reporters in Tempe, “and obviously, we’re [based] in Arizona, so it doesn’t really get fall weather around here. So we get [to Salt Lake City] and leaves are falling and it feels like real football. So we’re on our way to the stadium, I’ve got my headphones on, and I just started bawling.”

In 2025, you can bawl one week and enthrall the next – or, of course, the other way around.