Who are the biggest winners and losers from the release of the Week 5 college football rankings?
The 2016 college football season has been full of surprises thus far. The college football rankings have shuffled plenty over the past few weeks and teams like Notre Dame, which began the year No. 10, and Oklahoma, which began No. 3, are both in danger of being completely ineligible for the College Football Playoff.
Well, 99.9 percent of America would agree that Notre Dame no longer has a shot at the playoff — the other 0.1 percent resides in South Bend. After a loss to Duke on Saturday afternoon, the Fighting Irish have dropped to 1-3 on the season.
As for Oklahoma, though, it had a bye in Week 4 after a tough home loss at the hands of Ohio State, dropping the Sooners to 1-2 on the year and No. 25 in the AP Poll.
Week 5 is approaching and the newest edition of the AP Poll has been released on Sunday afternoon. Plenty of teams saw change in their rankings, such as Michigan State in a negative way and Wisconsin in a positive one, but there are some major winners and losers from the new poll.
Sure, these rankings don’t mean much until the first College Football Playoff rankings come out on Tuesday, Nov. 1, but it still has some bearing on what those rankings will actually look like.
No first loss at this point of the year is going to eliminate a team completely, but second and third defeats certainly will. Let’s take a look at the winners and losers from the release of the Week 5 AP Poll.
Loser: Michigan State Spartans (No. 8 down to No. 17)
If you’re Michigan State, you have no one to blame for a Week 4 loss but yourselves. Everything looked to be working in the Spartans’ favor going into the game, playing at home against a banged-up Wisconsin team, but Michigan State took the home contest for granted.
Michigan State probably expected to take down the No. 11 Badgers in East Lansing quite easily, as did many people, but Wisconsin came to play and the Spartans laid an egg.
Senior quarterback Tyler O’Connor had his worst performance in four starts, passing for 224 yards and zero touchdowns with three interceptions and a completion rate of just over 47 percent. He looked like a freshman in his first career start, but that happened to be Alex Hornibrook for the Badgers who had a great game.
The Spartan defense hasn’t gotten much pressure on opposing quarterbacks this season and guys like Malik McDowell and Raequan Williams aren’t getting into the backfield because of constant double-teams.
Playoff hopes are still alive, but if the Spartans don’t figure out the quarterback or secondary situation quickly, it will be a long season in East Lansing.