In College Football, it’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Season

We’ve just wrapped up week 4 of the college football season. And it’s been four weeks of sheer, unmitigated insanity.

In only four weeks, ten different teams have lost while ranked in the AP top 10—that’s more that two top ten teams losing per week. What’s more, five of those teams lost while ranked in the top 5.

Insanity.

This 2009 college football season is officially threatening to unseat 2007—the “Year of the Upset”—as the craziest college football season ever.

Only three of the preseason top 10 teams are still ranked in the top ten, and by elimination they now fill the top three spots—#1 Florida, #2 Texas, and #3 Alabama. Even the untouchable, walks-occasionally-on-water Tim Tebow got hauled off the field on a motorized cart on Saturday, and thousands of people saw him puke his guts out into a bag.

Of the ten top 10 teams that have lost—Oklahoma, USC, Ohio State, Virginia Tech, Mississippi, Oklahoma State, Penn State, BYU, Cal, and Miami—only Ohio State, losing then-#3 USC, and VT, losing to then-#5 Alabama, are excusable.

Three of those teams made appearances in the top 10 since the season began, only to turn around and fall right back out—BYU was first, and now Miami and Cal.

In 2007, teams lost games while ranked in the top 5 a record thirteen times. The second-ranked team also lost seven times, which is certainly a record—and also somewhat frightening.

To top it all off, there were three separate occasions where both the #1 and #2 teams lost in the same week (#1 LSU/#2 Cal, #1 LSU/#2 Kansas, and #1 Missouri/#2 West Virginia). That hadn’t happened once in 11 years before that, and had only occurred six times since 1980—then it happened three times just in the 2007 season.

This 2009 season has at least stopped short of that. Even with Sam Bradford and the Oklahoma Sooners crashing and burning against BYU, Florida and Texas have stood as stalwarts. They began the season at #1 and #2, and still hold those spots.

While we’ve just discovered that Tebow is actually mortal, at least his Gators are holding steady.

Alabama holds its ranking at #3, being the only other unbeaten preseason top 10 team. After that, the rankings get pretty sticky—to quote ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit, “After the top 3, it’s a guessing game!”

The other frightening trend this season is let-down losses—big wins over big teams, followed by startling losses to less-equipped opponents.

Take Oklahoma State hammering out a big 24-10 win over Georgia to start the season. The Cowboys rode high for exactly one week, then fell to Houston the next Saturday, 45-35.

Or there’s Florida State toppling BYU. They came into Provo and put the smack down on the Cougars, 54-28. The next Saturday, however, they hosted South Florida in Tallahassee and got bottled up on their home field, losing 17-7.

Or how about USC scraping out an 18-15 win over then-#8 Ohio State, only to lose to Washington the following week by the same margin, 16-13? Then Washington, fresh off that big win, getting shellacked by Stanford this past Saturday 34-14?

It’s disturbing. Better put Iowa, Oregon, and South Florida on watch—they locked down big upset wins this week, so if the precedent holds they’ll find themselves on the chopping block this weekend.

While the 2007 season saved its biggest drama for the final weeks, with big upsets changing the BCS landscape when it mattered most, 2009—minus one marquee win—has gotten off to an arguably more explosive start.

2007 began with #5 Michigan famously collapsing in the Big House and losing to FCS challenger Appalachian State, 34-32. The Mountaineers blocked what would have been the game-winning field goal, and that game is etched in college football history as one of the greatest upsets of all time. Right next to Boise State beating Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl.

The 2009 season can’t boast that kind of history-changing, tell-your-kids-you-saw-it upset. But if you compare progress in the seasons straight across, that was the only top 5 upset of 2007′s first four weeks (compared to five so far in 2009).

It can be argued, and probably correctly so, that this flurry of upsets has really just been weeding out the teams that didn’t deserve to be ranked so high. Once the real top teams fill the top spots in the rankings, then everything will settle down and games will have normal, expectable outcomes for the rest of the season.

But if not?

We’re in for a wild ride.