College Football’s Top 25 after 10 weeks

#10 Washington State

I don’t think anybody saw Gardner Minshew have the success he has had this season. He leads the country in passing yards and right now he is fourth in the Heisman race. The Cougars offense is for real, scoring 38.3 yards per game and last Saturday being just their second game in which they failed to reach the 30-point mark.

The other time came against Utah when they were “held” to 28 by the number one defense in the country at that point. They also keep their QB clean, allowing the second-lowest percentage of sacks per dropback.

As far as their defense goes, they might not scare anybody with their ability to stop the opposition, but they average three sacks per game and they allow opponents to convert on only 34 per cent of their third-down attempts.

Wazzu has now won five straight and their only loss came by a field goal at the hands of USC. However, their biggest test is still remaining as they are set to host Washington in the season finale, which will decide who represents the North division and likely win the Pac-12 championship game.

I don’t see how anybody out of this conference has a shot to be among the final four in the CFP, but with one narrow loss, it’s Washington State that should be the only squad with any hopes of doing so. Mike Leach’s troops have been climbing up the ranks each week now and the Old Crimson flag will go wherever their team takes them.

Of course for them to play on New Year’s day it would probably take Ohio State to beat Michigan and then lose to whoever comes out of the West in the Big 10 championship game, plus Notre Dame to slip somewhere on the way and Bama to own the SEC title game.

#11 UCF

Alright, this is what everybody wants to talk about – does Central Florida have any shot of making the college football playoff? My answer is a simple no. I love to watch the Knights and those 21 straight wins are incredibly impressive, but if there ever was a time I thought they deserved any consideration it was last year.

I don’t think this team is nearly as good as the 2017 version and let me show you what I mean. They routed UConn and South Carolina State, but they barely squeezed by a Memphis team that lost to Navy, Tulane and then Missouri by 30, and Temple gave them a scare as well last week.

I absolutely love quarterback McKenzie Milton, they have an excellent running back duo and this offense is putting up 45.4 points a game. However, that number is a little inflated due to weaker competition than last year and I’m concerned about this defense.

Temple’s Anthony Russo sliced them apart until the end of the game and Memphis’ Darrell Henderson ran for 200 yards against them. UCF will likely run the table with South Florida finally losing some of those games they pulled out of a hat until two weeks ago and then I’m interested to see if Houston can challenge them, even though they just lost at Tulane.

UCF is outscoring their opponents by 22.6 points per contest and they are second in the country in turnover differential, but for me to give them any consideration they needed to blow out everybody on their schedule and to be honest, they needed the AAC to be a little better overall.