Now Is The Time For Hysteria

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about.

Israel: We had ourselves the hell week of all hell weeks last Saturday. And in the aftermath, the top ranked of the sport is upside down and everyone sounds incoherent; babbling and whining about which teams are good and which are bad in tones you can otherwise only find from Old Testament prophets. Is Florida secretly good? Is Texas truly a tire fire? Is it going to come out that Cooper Manning never even showed Arch a football before college? Why can’t Notre Dame close? Why would Oregon bench Dylan Raiola just to play him in the fourth quarter against his former school? How did we end up with a first-ranked Miami? These are the questions left to us in the wake of some near-unprecedented football mayhem. The two directions left to go from here are either set the universal order right or make shit go even more left. I know what I choose.

Ray: After the pyro-spectacular of last weekend, with all those ranked teams either losing outright or barely escaping defeat, something needed to be done to restore normalcy. And so Maryland fired head coach Mike Locksley on Tuesday. Locksley is most recently noted for having guided the Terps to 12 consecutive conference losses, seven of the last eight by double digits and the most recent coming against Rutgers. The last and decisive one was just a seven-point loss, but it may as well have been 49 when you apply the added “You lost to RUTGERS?” metric.