There were college football close calls and a couple of minor overtakings last week, but which five teams should be on upset alert in Week 2.
College football fans were left with many things from the first week of action in the 2018 season. There were plenty of surprises and teams that have already come out of nowhere. Perhaps most fascinatingly, however, there were seemingly a number of ranked teams that came out of the gates in the 2018 campaign completely flat. As such, they were ultimately handed upsets in their first game of the season.
Though it wasn’t a massive upset, the formerly sixth-ranked Washington Huskies experienced this fate. With left tackle Trey Adams out, quarterback Jake Browning never really stood a chance on Saturday afternoon against Auburn as he was under fire essentially all day long. As such, the Huskies were unable to truly compete with the Tigers and suffered a loss to start the year.
Meanwhile, the then-No. 8 ranked Miami Hurricanes entered their Sunday night matchup with the LSU Tigers as heavy favorites. Even with LSU capping off the preseason AP Top 25 poll as the last team to be ranked, no one seemingly gave them much of a chance against the Canes in the first game of the season. That didn’t bother them in the slightest, it would seem, as they went out and whipped up on Malik Rosier and Miami to notch a big win.
Beyond those actual upsets — even of the small variety — we also saw a couple of Big Ten teams experience tremendously close calls in Week 1 as the Penn State Nittany Lions needed overtime to beat Appalachian State and the Michigan State Spartans scored late in the fourth quarter to avoid a loss to Utah State.
All of this is, of course, to say that the river of upsets in college football is already flowing. Will it be dammed up this week, or will that continue is the real question at this point. With the thought that the latter will be the case, we look at five teams that should be on upset alert in Week 2 of the 2018 college football season.
5. Georgia Bulldogs
Rank: 3 | Opponent: No. 24 South Carolina | Start Time: 3:30 p.m. ET
There’s a good chance that the Georgia Bulldogs have the most talented roster from top-to-bottom in all of college football. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are the best team (though they might be), but it does mean that, if everything is clicking, they can be near impossible to beat this season. Of course, we saw nothing but that in their Week 1 matchup against the Austin Peay Governors.
In truth, the opening matchup against Austin Peay looked more like a light walkthrough than anything for the Bulldogs. They came out and the starters played sparingly as they did what they wanted to the Governors on both sides of the ball. The end result was the Governors being handed a 45-0 loss and everyone believing that Georgia is yet again going to be in the College Football Playoff picture.
However, when a team like the Bulldogs plays a game like that, it can be dangerous, especially when it’s followed up by a tough SEC game. That’s the situation that Georgia finds themselves in as they must go on the road to Columbia to face the now-24th-ranked South Carolina Gamecocks on Saturday afternoon.
Jake Bentley, Deebo Samuel and the Gamecocks aren’t going to be mistaken for greats or contenders, but they are no doubt a very good football team. With Georgia perhaps sitting in early-season cruise control and going on the road, the potential for an early season case of letting off the gas is there. If they do that against South Carolina, though, they have enough talent to dole out a shocking loss to Kirby Smart and Co.