College football is better when we're wrong about everybody

I knew who belonged among college football’s best when I woke up Saturday morning. By Saturday night, I wasn't nearly as sure. And I think that's exactly how the sport of college football is supposed to feel.

Think about what Saturday did to all the certainty we'd built up over three weeks. We were past the farce of the preseason rankings, and we knew exactly who was thumping their chests and who was tucking their tail. 

Or did we?

No. 4 Ole Miss went into Gainesville and got hammered 52-28 by the Gators. No. 13 Penn State led Wisconsin 17-0 and lost 24-20 after the Badgers scored twice in the final 3:31. No. 16 Louisville lost at home to Wake Forest. No. 18 Michigan lost to Iowa on the final play. No. 19 Missouri lost at Mississippi State.

We spend all week trying to figure college football out, and then Saturday reminds us that figuring it out would ruin half the fun.

How many of us had Penn State penciled in as a Big Ten contender? Ole Miss had the world convinced they were in the SEC driver’s seat after taking down LSU. There was an entire narrative going that Louisville was Miami’s biggest threat in the ACC.

And now? Well, those could all still be accurate, but seem much less so after Saturday’s results. And that, my friends, is the joy of college football: less parity, less metered results, and more bloody chaos.

We hilariously spend six days trying to make college football make sense

Power rankings. Playoff projections. Conference pecking orders. “Contenders.” “Pretenders.” Strength of schedule. Resumés. We're constantly trying to turn a sport played by 18-to-23-year-olds into something orderly.

Then they actually play.

Saturday had six ranked-vs-ranked games, the most on one day since December 2023, yet some of the day's biggest moments came from teams like Wisconsin and Wake Forest that weren't supposed to matter nearly as much

That kind of unpredictability is pure joy. Being wrong is part of being a college football fan. There's almost a relief in having your assumptions destroyed.

You don't have to defend the preseason rankings.
You don't have to explain why Team X's rankings resumé is superior.
You don't have to know who's making the College Football Playoff on September 27.

You can simply watch Wisconsin erase a 17-point deficit in Beaver Stadium in front of a crazed Penn State crowd and think, “What the hell is happening? This is awesome!” 

You can drop your pizza in your lap when Wake Forest stands toe-to-toe with Louisville, trading scores like heavyweight haymakers until they finish off the upset and think, "Nobody saw that one coming!"

That's unhinged. That's astonishing. That's college football.

And the Wisconsin fan reaction is almost perfect evidence of that feeling. After the upset, Badger fans were expressing variations of “I forgot what this felt like after a long stretch without that kind of signature win”.

When a fanbase releases what seems like eons of pent-up frustration because of a single win that may or may not make any difference at the end of the season, you have the core of what college football means. Being wrong equals fun.

Maybe we shouldn't be in such a hurry to figure this season out

College football is such a beautiful sport, even amidst all the changes. But do we really enjoy it the way we should? We're so desperate to identify contenders that we're robbing ourselves of the uncertainty that makes September great. 

We're four weeks into this thing. We don't need to know exactly what Penn State is yet. We don't need to decide what Ole Miss' loss means for December. We don't need to determine whether Florida is “back” five minutes after the clock hits zero in an upset conference win.

Sometimes the fun is simply realizing, “Hoo boy, I was completely wrong about that team". And that's where we are, and it’s exactly where we should be. There's no shame in being wrong; it's the being wrong that makes a Saturday infinitely more fun than all the favorites winning with ease. Go into each Saturday with a sense of "What havoc will the college football gods bring us today?"

The gods will deliver. They always do.

I woke up Saturday thinking I understood the 2026 college football season a little better than I had the week before, then I went to bed considerably less certain.

Good.

We've got three months to figure out who's actually good, who's in the 12-team field, and which coaches are on the way out. There's no reason to ruin the fun by pretending we already know. Let's enjoy the fun of not being right.

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