September is always a dizzying college football experience. After the world's longest offseason, we are desperate to overreact to everything we see. We careen from wild finish to wild finish and from breathless Saturday to breathless Saturday. And then, as the calendar flips to October ... we realize not a lot has changed in terms of the big picture.
The final Saturday of September gave us another round of thrills and once again made it really hard for me to contain the My 10 Favorite Games list at the bottom of this column. Georgia pulled off its greatest comeback in school history in the biggest game of the week, only to lose anyway. Miami "lost" via a last-second Hail Mary but won anyway. Oklahoma rose from the dead. Long field goals and awful field goals decided countless games.
And yet, as we head into October, we see that the top nine teams in the preseason AP poll are a combined 36-4, with two of four losses coming to other top-nine teams. Ohio State is an even bigger Big Ten favorite than it was a month ago. Bama and Georgia are both still likely to make the College Football Playoff.
As fun as the first five weeks of the season have been -- and good lord, they've been awesome -- has anything really changed?
Yes, actually! You just have to know where to look. Here are some of 2024's most interesting plot twists.
Jump to a section:
Georgia, Michigan slip | Miami rises
Big 12 intrigue | Navy, Army are legit
Auburn's anguish | Flags are flying
Week's biggest surprises
Heisman of week | 10 favorite games
Recent national champs have stumbled
Heading toward Saturday, I saw plenty of grumbling on social media about how the buzz for Week 5's Georgia-Alabama game was lower than such a game should be, at least in part because of the expanded College Football Playoff and the fact that both teams were likely to make the CFP no matter who won.
Now, some of this stems from the way we're able to fool ourselves on social media -- the "WHY ISN'T ANYONE TALKING ABOUT [thing lots of people are talking about]???" effect. There was all sorts of Georgia-Bama content atop the ESPN college football page throughout the week, and people clicked on it. ESPN's "College GameDay" was in Tuscaloosa, and when the TV ratings come in, I'm pretty sure they're going to show that both "GameDay" and the game itself had a metric crap-ton (technical term) of viewers who were rewarded with 2024's game of the year to date, a 41-34 Bama win.