The upsets have arrived.
Kansas made it two weeks in a row with an unranked team beating a top-10 team, when the Jayhawks knocked No. 6 Oklahoma out of the ranks of the unbeaten Saturday to snap an 18-game losing streak against the Sooners.
OU’s loss comes a week after then-No. 10 North Carolina lost to Virginia at home, and three days before the first College Football Playoff rankings are released. Before the Tar Heels were tripped up, there hadn’t been a top-10 loss to an unranked team since Week 1.
Kansas’ upset wasn’t as stunning of Virginia’s. These are not your older brother’s Jayhawks (6-2). Coach Lance Leipold has Kansas bowl eligible for the second year in a row. That’s only happened one other time in the history of the program.
“It’s time for me to start talking about how far we’ve come,” Leipold said.
In just three seasons in Lawrence, Leipold has turned around what was the worst Power Five program. The Jayhawks won 21 games from 2010-20.
Kansas’ next big win will be convincing Leipold, who won six Division III national titles as coach at Wisconsin-Whitewater and took Buffalo to three bowl games, to stay put. He should expect a call from Michigan State at the very least.
The funny thing is all the Michigan State message board posters fantasizing about the school hiring Urban Meyer should actually be pining for Leipold.
For Oklahoma (7-1), there were signs this could be coming. The Sooners’ defense has been shaky since Red River, but the offense had been good enough to mask the problems.
A sloppy performance opened the door to the upset and threw a twist into the Big 12 race, which now has a four-way tie for first and is the first Power Five conference to have no unbeaten teams left.
“No excuses,” Oklahoma coach Brent Venables said. “We didn’t do the things it takes to win a game — a tough, tight game. But KU did.” Suddenly, the Kansas State -Texas game next week in Austin looks massive. Both the Wildcats and seventh-ranked Longhorns romped Saturday, but Texas’ offense was low-frills against BYU with quarterback Maalik Murphy starting for the injured Quinn Ewers.
It will also be interesting to see where the CFP selection committee ranks Texas relative to Oklahoma. The Sooners beat the Longhorns in a thriller, but it could be argued Texas has been more impressive overall, with that road victory against No. 9 Alabama at the top of the resume.
Texas also blew out Kansas, for whatever that’s worth.
Most of the other highly ranked teams romped Saturday. None more impressively than No. 8 Oregon.
Bo Nix and the Ducks were too much for No. 13 Utah, which has gamely stayed in the Pac-12 race despite been wracked by injuries.
“That’s a tough team, but so are we,” Oregon coach Dan Lanning said.
That’ll be another interesting call for the committee, too. No. 5 Washington beat the Ducks in a classic in Seattle. Still, a case could be made Oregon has been the better team overall.
No. 1 Georgia crushed Florida to begin what it hopes will be a closing stretch that re-asserts the two-time defending national champions’ dominance. The Bulldogs are up to 25 straight victories.
No. 2 Michigan was off, though the Wolverines are never out of the news these days.
No. 3 Ohio State pulled away in the fourth quarter against Wisconsin.
No. 4 Florida State had no issue with Wake Forest.
It wasn’t all easy. No. 5 Washington had its second-straight sloppy performance against a lower-tier Pac-12 and survived on the road against Stanford.
No. 10 Penn State looked hungover from its loss at Ohio State and needed a late TD and safety to hold off Indiana. The Nittany Lions will get a chance to re-write their story against No. 2 Michigan in a couple of weeks, but it’s hard to consider them a playoff contender at this point.
The line for serious playoff contenders for now is drawn at Alabama, which hosts No. 15 LSU next week in a game that could all but decide the SEC West.