The biggest development from Week 9 of the college football season was, of course, LSU firing head coach Brian Kelly after a deflating 49-25 home loss to No. 3 Texas A&M.
For more on that and the Tigers’ ensuing coaching search, it’s covered in-depth here.
But let’s put the spotlight back to what happened on the field Saturday, from validating wins for several programs on the rise to notable College Football Playoff eliminations to compelling quarterback storylines and the most underrated conference race in college football getting even more congested.
Here are our top 10 takeaways from the college football weekend.
1. Texas A&M Is For Real
It’s not that the No. 3-ranked team in the country beating reeling LSU is stunning news, but it was fair to have some skepticism about Texas A&M before Saturday.
The Aggies were undefeated, yes, but they only had one truly notable win and it was a coin-flip game way back in Week 3, 41-40 at Notre Dame. They’d opened SEC play with a narrow 16-10 win over Auburn, beat up on Mississippi State and Florida and then got pushed for four quarters in a 45-42 win at Arkansas.
But no, this team is absolutely legit.
Playing on the road at LSU against a Tigers team with its season essentially on the line, Texas A&M went down 18-14 at halftime and then reeled of the first 35 points of the second half on the way to a 49-25 win that got Brian Kelly fired the next day.
The Aggies outgained the Tigers, 426-278, and dual-threat QB Marcel Reed shot up in the Heisman Trophy odds after passing for 202 yards and 2 touchdowns (with 2 interceptions) and rushing for 108 yards and two scores.
There’s no denying Mike Elko, now in his second year after coming over from Duke, was one of the best coaching hires in college football in the last handful of years. It’s just remained to be seen if the Aggies were truly ready to be a national factor so quickly or if they had an inflated ranking based on a favorable schedule.
I guess that question can linger with road games at No. 19 Missouri and No. 20 Texas still to come, but to a large degree going into Death Valley and being the Grim Reaper for the home team and its coach showed enough to believe this is indeed a top 5-caliber team.
2. Lane Kiffin Is About To Get PAID
Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin joined The Pat McAfee show on Monday and was of course asked about his name being popularly linked to that now-vacant LSU job — and the money that could come with it.
“I have never made a decision based off of money, nor will I,” Kiffin said. “For a lot of people, they’re just like, ‘Well, money, and it does this and it does that.’ I’ve seen too many examples in life where money does not buy happiness, so I am never going to make a decision off of money. Nor do I care about it. [My agent] Jimmy Sexton gets really mad when I say that. ‘We’ve got to get this, we’ve got to get this,’ and I’m like Jimmy, ‘I don’t care.’ And he goes, ‘I do.'”
With No. 7 Ole Miss (7-1) winning its seventh game Saturday — beating then-No. 13 Oklahoma 34-26 on the road in the game of the week — Kiffin had a one-year extension to his contract through 2031 automatically triggered. He’ll make $9 million with $7.2 million guaranteed in that last year.
But more likely, Kiffin will be earning even more than that once the dust settles on this college football coaching carousel — whether he stays at Ole Miss with a fresh raise or leaves for one of the high-profile openings.
Kiffin already has three seasons of at least 10 wins with the Rebels and he’s on his way to a fourth now in his sixth season.
Ole Miss closes with four unranked opponents — South Carolina, FCS-level The Citadel, Florida and at Mississippi State — with a clear path to the program’s first College Football Playoff appearance, regardless of whether it makes the SEC championship game.
3. Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech Keep Making History
We’re lumping a lot together here, but it only makes sense with the parallels between the two teams.
Both No. 8 Georgia Tech and No. 9 Vanderbilt are having historic seasons for their programs — the Yellow Jackets off to the program’s first 8-0 start since 1966 and the 7-1 Commodores off to their best start since 1941 and with their highest ranking since 1937.
Along with Indiana’s own incredible story now two years running, it’s a reflection that now more than ever in the NIL/revenue-sharing era of college football that the playing field has been leveled to the point where just about any power conference program that nails its coaching hire and has the financial backing to build a competitive roster can compete nationally.
Vanderbilt’s Clark Lea and Georgia Tech’s Brent Key will be hot names for bigger jobs, but let’s leave that for later.
Vandy has three top-25 wins this season (over South Carolina in Week 3 when it was ranked No. 11, and the last two weeks vs. then-No. 10 LSU and then-No. 15 Missouri). It closes at No. 20 Texas this week, home vs. Auburn and Kentucky and on the road at No. 14 Tennessee. All of those games are winnable, so there is a very real possibility for an 11-1 Vanderbilt team to earn a CFP berth whether it reaches the SEC title game or not.
Georgia Tech closes its ACC schedule at NC State, at Boston College and home vs. Pittsburgh and could be 11-0 entering a nonconference rivalry game with No. 5 Georgia before playing in the ACC championship game.
So both could well be crashing the CFP for the first time.
Meanwhile, both quarterbacks bear monitoring in the Heisman Trophy race. Vanderbilt’s Diego Pavia has a big national profile at this point, but Georgia Tech’s Haynes King probably hasn’t been appreciated enough by the casual college football fan yet.
King is a throwback run-first dual-threat who leads all Power Four quarterbacks with 651 rushing yards and 12 touchdowns on the ground. But he is also a capable passer when called upon and showed it Saturday in completing 25-of-31 passes for 304 yards and 3 TDs (in addition to his 91 yards and 2 TDs rushing) in the Yellow Jackets’ 41-16 win over Syracuse.
4. Speaking Of Great Coaches …
Willie Fritz doesn’t get a lot of national attention, and at 65 years old he may be past the point of landing one of the big, big jobs at this point, but that doesn’t discount that he just continues to win wherever he goes.
He took Sam Houston State to the FCS national championship game in 2010 and 2011, then went 9-3 and 8-4 in two seasons at Georgia Southern, resigned there and went and built Tulane into the success it continues to be, winning 23 games over his final two seasons with the Green Wave in 2022-23.
Now, he’s at Houston. Following a 4-8 debut last year, Fritz has his Cougars off to a 7-1 start and in the national rankings for the first time this season at No. 22 after a 24-16 win at then-No. 24 Arizona State on Saturday.
Houston really didn’t have a signature win before that, which is why it remained unranked, but with the reigning Big 12 champion Sun Devils needing a win to have any chance at getting back to the conference championship game, it was surely notable that Houston built a 24-0 lead entering the fourth quarter on the road.
5. Speaking Of Fun QBs …
Pittsburgh was 2-2 and coming off back-to-back losses — including to West Virginia, which still hasn’t beaten another Power Four opponent — when it benched QB Eli Holstein and turned the offense over to true freshman Mason Heintschel.
Since then, the Panthers have won four straight games while Heintschel is averaging more than 300 passing yards per game. He threw for a season-high 423 and 3 TDs Saturday in a 53-34 win over NC State.
6. Speaking Of Underrated Teams, Good Coaches And Fun QBs …
The most entertaining college football team that most of the country has not watched is North Texas. The Mean Green is 7-1 with its only loss coming to a South Florida team that spent much of the season ranked in the AP top 25.
It puts up a lot of yards and scores a lot of points (46.1 per game, the most of any FBS team) — including three games now with at least 54 points.
In a 54-20 win over Charlotte on Friday night, North Texas put up 754 yards of offense with redshirt-freshman QB Drew Mestemaker passing for a school-record 608 yards, 4 TDs and 1 INT.
After finishes of 5-7 and 6-7 the last two seasons, third-year head coach Eric Morris has North Texas on track for one of the best seasons in program history depending on where it goes from here.
7. The AAC Race Is One To Watch
There isn’t much banter nationally about the AAC race, but it carries big stakes. The highest-ranked Group of Five conference champion gets a spot in the 12-team CFP field, and that’s likely to come from the AAC (though the Mountain West or perhaps Sun Belt could have something to say about that).
And what a conference race it is …
Navy (7-0, 5-0 AAC) and Tulane (6-1, 3-0) are unbeaten in league play while No. 25 Memphis (7-1, 3-1), South Florida (6-2, 3-1) and North Texas (7-1, 3-1) are among a glut of five teams with one conference loss (also Temple and East Carolina, who likely wouldn’t finished ranked high enough regardless for the CFP berth).
Any of those top five teams could win the conference and punch a ticket to the playoff.
Navy has the toughest road with remaining conference games at North Texas, vs. South Florida, at Memphis and the classic rivalry clash with Army.
South Florida has the most favorable path with just Navy on the remaining schedule among those listed teams.
Tulane has road games at Memphis and at Temple.
Memphis plays Tulane, at East Carolina and vs. Navy.
And North Texas has Navy and Temple at home.
8. Texas’ QB Situation Is … Interesting
Embattled Texas quarterback Arch Manning sustained a concussion during overtime of the Longhorns’ 45-38 win at Mississippi State on Saturday, and his status for Texas’ game Saturday vs. No. 9 Vanderbilt is in question.
Well-traveled senior backup Matthew Caldwell ended up tossing the game-winning touchdown pass two plays after Manning was forced to exit the game.
Caldwell redshirted the 2021 season at Jacksonville State, was mostly a backup at Gardner-Webb in 2022-23 and then started five games at the end of last season at Troy, earning Sun Belt Offensive Player of the Week honors for one of them.
This season at Texas, he’s 8-of-11 passing for 85 yards and a TD and has 2 rushes for 64 yards.
Manning eventually came to life in that game last week after a sluggish start, passing for 346 yards, 3 TDs, 1 INT and a rushing TD, but he’s been pretty unreliable this season.
Is there any chance Caldwell gets the start and leaves coach Steve Sarkisian with a QB controversy moving forward?
9. OK, No More Sleeping On BYU
One of the highly-ranked teams I was most skeptical of entering the weekend was undefeated BYU.
The Cougars had one notable win — over ranked rival Utah — and coming off that victory it looked like their road trip to Iowa State, with the Cyclones’ backs to the wall in the Big 12 race, could be a prime let-down game.
Nope. BYU scored 14 unanswered points in the fourth quarter for a 41-27 win.
The other question about the Cougars was whether they were too one-dimensional with true freshman QB Bear Bachmeier not being asked to do a lot with his arm this season. Well, Bachmeier passed for 307 yards and 2 TDs while rallying BYU back from an early 14-point deficit.
The 8-0 Cougars may still not truly be the No. 10 team in the country, in line with their ranking, but it’s time to believe that they are indeed a top contender in the Big 12.
10. The Magic Of Interim Coaches
Never underestimate the impact firing the head coach of a sinking ship midseason can have on that team the rest of the way.
It doesn’t hold true in all cases (sorry, Oklahoma State fans), but we’ve seen enough examples again this year to appreciate that a new voice and formal reset can make a real difference.
Of course, there was UCLA reeling off three-straight wins under interim head coach Tim Skipper (and helping end the James Franklin Era at Penn State) after firing DeShaun Foster on the way to an 0-4 start. That run ended this past weekend at the hands of Indiana, but nonetheless.
UAB stunned undefeated Memphis two weeks ago as 21.5-point underdogs in its first game under interim coach Alex Mortensen.
Arkansas hasn’t won yet under interim coach Bobby Petrino, but it’s been far more competitive and lost to ranked Tennessee and Texas A&M teams by 3 points each and held a fourth-quarter lead on Auburn this past Saturday.
Oregon State snapped an 0-7 start to the season with a 45-13 win in interim coach Robb Akey’s debut two weekends ago — sure, it was against FCS foe Lafayette, but all the same.
And Virginia Tech is now off to a 2-2 start in ACC play after an abysmal start that had Brent Pry as the first coach fired this season across college football. The Hokies overcame a 10-point halftime deficit Friday night vs. Cal to win 42-34 in double-overtime.
Maybe there will be some fight left in the likes of LSU and Florida after all … Maybe.