Broken Coverage for Week 5: Cheers to October and College Football Chaos
What’s not to love about October? Temperatures drop, restaurants and markets offer an abundance of treats generously defined as pumpkin-flavored1, and it marks Halloween season.
Halloween has been one of my favorite holidays since childhood and remained so into adulthood for ever-changing reasons. But as my interest in Halloween evolved from a love of trick-or-treating and decorating, to party-hopping as an undergraduate, and now experiencing the vicarious joy of my own kids, a constant remains my enjoyment of horror movies.
Of course, I could and do watch such films year-round, but as the kids say, it just hits different during Halloween season.
Among the chief qualities that separate a great horror movie from the multitude of awful entries into the genre is a characteristic shared with college football in the month of October, and another reason I love the month: The audience is taken on an unpredictable thrill-ride.
Now, a grating tendency of college football media is a collective tendency to be know-it-alls: They know more than the coaches about strategizing, they know more than the players about what to execute when, and they definitely know which teams are going to win what games.
Reality is that they quite frankly know jack squat. And that’s a good thing.
A college football season that followed the preseason template would be horribly dull. Film studios ran into this issue in the 1980s when, the slasher sub-genre that gained popularity early in the decade, was oversaturating the market in the latter half.
Studios tried over and over again to manufacture the thrills that groundbreaking work like Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street delivered, but it couldn’t be forced. The diminishing returns remind me of the the Alabama-Clemson Playoff series2.
Great art has to be organic, and the best college football seasons similarly deviate way off script.
We’re all of one Saturday in October — more than half the season remains! — and so many of the templates the sport’s primary influencers laid out for the season have gone by the wayside.
Preseason SEC darlings Florida and Texas A&M have combined for four losses, the most recent of which were partially the result of a blocked kick…
…and a safety.
Clemson, which we’ve all come to be as conditioned to pencil in for the Playoff as moviegoers were to preparing for yet another Friday the 13th in the ‘80s, only escaped a 2-3 start thanks to a botched Boston College snap in the red zone.
Stanford’s overtime win over Oregon saw the Cardinal pulling a Michael Myers when it turned this…
…into this.
Friendly reminder that ESPN’s in-game win probability gimmick is as useless as Crazy Ralph from the first couple Friday the 13ths.
Oregon left Stanford as wounded as a Haddonfield resident on Oct. 31, losing CJ Verdell to injury and having Kayvon Thibodeaux DQ’d by a targeting penalty after finally showing up healthy, and with offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead out due to illness.
I suspect the Ducks’ championship aspirations have as much life as The Shape; don’t bury Oregon just yet.
A HELPFUL PRIMER ON PLAYOFF ELIMINATION
Oregon’s loss after an untimed-down touchdown forced overtime, and with several key players missing, prompted this stupid tweet:
I do not intend to single out r/CFB on this, despite r/CFB often being worthy of singling out for its commitment to stinking out loud. This is a rather common reaction in almost every season from a variety of sources.
Do people never learn? (Rhetorical question)
To address this recurring phenomenon of stupidity, here’s a handy guide to help you determine if a team is in fact eliminated from College Football Playoff contention:
Are you in a Power Five conference? If you answered Yes, proceed to Question 2. If you answered No, proceed to Question 4.
Do you have more than one loss? If you answered Yes, proceed to Question 3. If you answered No, congratulations! You are still in the hunt for the College Football Playoff.
Were your losses to teams ranked in the Top 25? If you answered Yes, it will be a tough climb but you are not yet eliminated from the Playoff. If you answered No, we regret to inform you that you’ve been eliminated from the Playoff.
Are you undefeated? If you answered Yes, proceed to Question 5. If you answered No, you have regrettably been eliminated from the Playoff.
Do you have a win over a Top 25 team and/or Power Five opponent with a record above .500? If you answered Yes, congratulations! You are still in the hunt for the Playoff — but need help. If you answered No, you are not yet eliminated but you better hope a member of your conference climbs into the Top 25 *and* most of the Power Five contenders have multiple losses.
No one-loss Power Five conference team with 12 wins at the end of the regular season has ever been passed for the Playoff, a precedent that includes the last Pac-12 team to reach the final four, Washington in 2016. While the Pac-12 was not nearly as nationally maligned then as it is now, the ‘16 Huskies lost later in the season, at home, and didn’t have a signature win approaching the significance of Oregon’s at Ohio State.
So, no, Oregon is not yet out of Playoff contention and it’s silly to make such sweeping statements when the season is sure to take us through several more plot twists.
The Tommy Tuberville Era was Truly Awful
Any earnest Playoff talk at this phase in the season is premature, but it’s fair to say that Cincinnati took an unprecedented step toward Group of Five inclusion with its dominant win at a Top 10-ranked Notre Dame.
The Bearcats’ win in South Bend marked a new milestone in what has been a mostly steady progression of the program since the late 2000s when Brian Kelly, the coach Cincinnati beat today, elevated UC to new heights.
Back-to-back Big East championships in 2008 and 2009 landed Cincinnati in BCS bowls, with the latter positioning the Bearcats for some modest but not undeserved national championship talk.
Few programs suffered quite as profoundly from the death of Big East football as Cincinnati, which was on the cusp of title inclusion at a time when it played in an automatic-qualifier league. The Big East dissolving and the American sprouting in its place set UC back — but perhaps not as much as the disastrous Tommy Tuberville hire.
Kelly left Cincinnati for Notre Dame after winning two conference titles; successor Butch Jones won a share of the Big East crown in 2012 before taking the Tennessee job.
Jones’ exit left another vacancy that Cincinnati brass filled with the peculiar hire of Tommy Tuberville, fresh off his third year in a thoroughly unimpressive 20-17 tenure at Texas Tech.
Tuberville’s departure from Lubbock is the stuff of college football legend, the coach reportedly abandoning recruits at a dinner. As atrocious as the manner in which he entered Cincinnati was, the train wreck that was his time coaching the Bearcats flies under the radar.
Tuberville went 9-4 in his first two seasons at UC — a respectable mark in a vacuum, but a record built without any wins of real consequence and with some horrendous losses. His first defeat with the Bearcats was a four-touchdown blowout against a four-win Illinois team, and his second was to a USF bunch that went 2-103.
The 2015 Bearcats finished 7-6, went 4-4 in the American, and concluded an 0-3 run for Tuberville’s UC teams in bowl games on the wrong end of a 42-7 laugher against San Diego State.
The 2016 season was the nadir at 4-8 and Tuberville shouting at fans.
Given how well Brian Kelly and Butch Jones before him, and Luke Fickell after have fared at the same program, Tuberville’s time at Cincinnati looks even worse.
SOME SPOOOOOOKY GAMES TO USHER IN OCTOBER
A quick rundown of some appropriately spooktacular contests on this, the first week of October:
- The Wake Forest Demon Deacons improved to 5-0, outlasting Louisville in a 37-34 shootout. In light of Clemson’s issues, a program that once had this sinister logo may well be the team to beat in the ACC Atlantic.
I’m not certain, but I believe this logo was one of the items in The Cabin in the Woods basement that unlocked some unearthly evil on the unwitting inhabitants.
- Newcomer to the FCS Top 25, Incarnate Word, solidified its place in the rankings with a 38-27 defeat of Northwestern State. UIW — a Catholic university nicknamed the Cardinals — successfully exorcised an opponent nicknamed the Demons in an unintentional homage to The Exorcist.
- Eastern Washington capped the loaded week in FCS with a24-point fourth quarter to beat Montana, 34-28, at the scene of the original horror story, The Inferno.
The red turf in Cheney at night makes it look like teams are playing on a cartoonish sea of blood, more of a nod to Sam Raimi than to Dante. In any regard, Eastern Washington rallying fit in the theme of the day for many of the top FCS teams that all survived spooky Saturday
No. 1 Sam Houston needed two touchdowns in the final minutes, including one with a two-point conversion, two overcome a two-touchdown deficit against rival Stephen F. Austin
No. 3 James Madison gave up touchdowns on a 92-yard scoop-and-score and a pick-six, had the PAT on its go-ahead blocked and thus only led by two points when New Hampshire went on its final drive. Diamonte Tucker-Dorsey played the hero with a game-ending interception.
No. 5 North Dakota State scored what appeared to be the win-sealing touchdown with just 1:13 left against No. 10 North Dakota, but the Fighting Hawks made a field goal a minute that gave it an onside-kick opportunity.
No. 12 UC Davis needed a trick play to complete its rally against Idaho — but what a trick play it was:
- The Oregon State Beavers won their fourth straight game, and Jonathan Smith knocked off the program he helped reach the College Football Playoff as offensive coordinator, Washington. The Beavers now sit atop the Pac-12 North in a wholly unexpected development, which might be spooky for the conference’s Playoff hopes — but Oregon State is more deserving inclusion here because it brandishes a damn Turnover Chainsaw.
A team that wears orange-and-black and takes sideline swag inspiration from Leatherface should be the official program of October.
Oh, also, there’s a movie called Zombeavers.
Halloween Movie Recommendations
Every week in October on Broken Coverage, I’ll offer up some movie recs to get you into the season. Let’s start this off with a few set the spirit of the season:
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019): An excellent film that was badly mismanaged by its studio — always a big-brain genius move to release a horror movie set on Halloween in mid-August and begin streaming it in November! — it’s understandable if you missed this gem. Guillermo del Toro produced, not directed, but his influence is evident in this well-done weaving together of several tales from the book series. If you read the books, as I did growing up, you’ll love the film — but it’s not necessary to do have done so.
Poltergeist (1982): If it’s been awhile since you’ve watched this classic — or, if you’ve never seen it at all — make time to visit the Steven Spielberg-written, Tobe Hooper-directed masterpiece. As with many Hooper-helmed horror films, Poltergeist is visually stunning in a way that holds up. The atmosphere is relentlessly tense and the climax is iconic.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): The film that launched New Line Cinema into the stratosphere is still one of the most nerve-racking, creepy and genuinely scary horror films ever made. Wes Craven’s genre-changing classic dropped right at the height of the slasher craze and completely flipped the script. Not all of the visual effects hold up, but most remain far more impressive even today than even the most state-of-the-art CGI, and Robert Englund gives a true scene-stealing performance — but Heather Langenkamp is the real soul of the movie. That she’s central to what are far-and-away the three best installments in the Nightmare franchise — the original, Dream Warriors and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is no coincidence.
To be clear, nothing marketed as pumpkin actually is, but that makes it no less delicious.
Alabama and Clemson meeting in each Playoff from 2015 through 2018 played out in a trajectory reminiscent of a specific horror franchise: The first two are instant classics, among the best of their genre (Alien & Aliens); the third, in the 2018 Sugar Bowl, was a dreary and uninteresting slog akin to Alien 3; and the fourth in the 2018 season’s College Football Playoff Championship Game was a nonsensical mess that wouldn’t qualify as good in any traditional sense, but was at least entertaining, making it Alien Resurrection.
The 2013 USF Bulls lost their season opener to FCS program McNeese, 53-21.