Week 3 Rundown

Week 3 was quite interesting.  While there were no matchups between ranked teams, plenty of results were intriguing.  It looks like the September national champion Maryland won't end up making the Playoff after all.  In typical fashion they have a terrible letdown after a blazing start to the season.  They are still sitting atop the Jacknife standings though.  That's how big their opening two weeks were.  In other weird result Kansas snapped a 48 road game losing streak to Power 5 opponents.  Maybe we should have known something was going to happen since it was Friday the 13th.  And it wasn't some lucky result either.  They pounded Boston College in that game.  In fact, it was a pretty good weekend for the Big XII outside of Texas Tech.  Kansas State went on the road and beat Mississippi State.  Oklahoma, Texas, TCU, West Virginia, and Oklahoma State all won big.  Iowa State lost to Iowa in a weird game, but that's always a weird game.

Clemson is just going to stroll through the ACC this season.  Syracuse was supposed to be their stiffest conference opponent and it wasn't even close.  Then you have Georgia Tech losing to The Citadel.  Virginia Tech struggled with Furman.  Florida State might have be the worst second half team of all time.  This is purely a gut feel with no actual historical data to back it up, but that had another horrible showing in the second half against Virginia this year.  So far after halftime in their games they have given up 17 points in a loss to Boise State, 37 (!) points in an OT win against LA-Monroe that the Warhawks missed a PAT in OT, and then 21 points (all in the 4th quarter) to Virginia in a loss.  Pittsburgh had horrible late game management in a 7 point loss to Penn State.  It's not looking good in that conference right now.

Ohio State destroyed Indiana on the road.  That might not seem like a big deal, but the Buckeyes tend to struggle in these games before pulling away in the 4th quarter.  There was no such drama this time.  Michigan State is doing Michigan State things which is no offense and a late game too-many-men-on-the-field penalty to negate a game tying field goal.  Nebraska bounced back from their disheartening loss to Colorado by taking it to Northern Illinois in a revenge spot.  With Michigan looking shaky, it might be all Ohio State again this season in the Big 10.

In the PAC 12 USC lost in overtime to BYU.  The game is probably a precursor to what their season will look like with a true freshman at quarterback.  One drive they look like a well-oiled machine that can score at will.  Then they will go stretches where getting a first down is a struggle.  That's the just the nature of the game with a true freshman quarterback.  Stanford got hammered by UCF which is no surprise this day and age.  That just goes to show how much respect UCF has built up over the past few years.  Cal barely hung on against North Texas.  Colorado lost in OT to Air Force.  They weren't able to sustain the momentum from the big comeback against Nebraska.  And everyone else that was supposed to win took care of business.

In the SEC the big boys won like they were supposed to.  Tennessee finally got in the win column by beating Chattanooga.  Not sure if there is anything to be proud of there.  The most entertaining game was between Florida and Kentucky.   Kentucky was playing with their backup since their starter went down for the year the previous week.  They jumped out to a 21-10 lead after 3 quarters.  Then Florida lost their starting quarterback to a devastating injury, and it looked like Kentucky would have back-to-back wins against Florida for the first time in forever.  But the backup QB for Florida wasn't too bad.  Kentucky went for it on 4th down early in the 4th quarter to try to put the game away, and the Florida defense stopped them.  That was a springboard to 19 unanswered 4th-quarter points for Florida as they came back to win 29-20.

The majority of the non-conference match ups have wrapped up.  Week 4 will start to see a lot more conference matchups.  Hopefully for a lot of teams in the Jacknife leagues, they will see their Group of 5 teams start to do better now that they are done for the most part getting beat up by the Power 5 schools.