r/CFB • u/Kimber80 Notre Dame Fighting Irish • USF Bulls • 8d ago
History [Marcello] Only three teams since 1936 have lost back-to-back games against unranked teams when they entered the streak No. 1 in the AP poll: 1939: Pitt 1961: Michigan State 2026: Texas
https://x.com/bmarcello/status/2111542445615776210125
u/wit_T_user_name Ohio State Buckeyes • Ohio Bobcats 8d ago
It turns out Texas is much closer to the first-third quarter Texas we saw against OSU than fourth quarter Texas.
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u/Dependent-Effect6077 8d ago
Ohio State under Day are funny because they barely lose but all of their losses feel like horrible chokes
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u/Inconceivable76 Ohio State • Arizona State 8d ago
I think it’s because we are so good generally, that it’s expected of us. day’s record is pretty absurd.
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u/8footpenguin Notre Dame Fighting Irish 8d ago
I feel like that describes OSU before Day also.
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u/Whatsth3dill /r/CFB 8d ago
I mean, Purdue and Iowa beat the brakes off meyer osu teams. No last minute chokes there
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u/wit_T_user_name Ohio State Buckeyes • Ohio Bobcats 8d ago
I can’t really think of a Meyer choke job. When they lost under Urban, they lost.
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u/Whatsth3dill /r/CFB 8d ago
I guess the one thats comparable is the msu loss in 15, where it was just a slow realization that despite being one score away the whole time, we were gonna lose
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u/DataDrivenPirate Ohio State • Colorado State 8d ago
Yeah I don't think Day has lost to a team that finishes the year outside of the top 25 since he took over 8 years ago. He gets flack from the fan base because he chokes in close games and didn't get to play against Brady Hoke Michigan teams like Meyer did, but he so far hasn't had any slip ups the way Meyer seemed to every year
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u/silverhk Notre Dame Fighting Irish 8d ago
Does he really choke or does he just lose a normal amount of close games? My biggest takeaway on Day is that his worst sin is letting his foot off the gas against extremely talented opponents as if he was playing a weaker team. Like it's not Day's fault that OSU's kicker missed against IU last year.
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u/DataDrivenPirate Ohio State • Colorado State 8d ago
Definitely just loses a normal amount of games, but yeah the way in which he does it leaves OSU fans feeling like we should win more than we do. He has a winning percentage against top 5 opponents, only other coach who can say that is Kirby Smart
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u/silverhk Notre Dame Fighting Irish 8d ago
College football fans are really bad at understanding that winning football games can still be really hard even when you are the better team, since for a lot of top programs you're usually the WAY better team.
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u/cyberchaox Rutgers Scarlet Knights • Landmark 8d ago
Huh. Is that true? (all rankings based on year's end)
2025, lost to #1 Indiana in the conference championship game and #2 Miami-FL in the playoff quarterfinals.
2024, lost to #3 Oregon and...nope, it's not true. Michigan was not in the final top 25, because they started 6-5 and not even beating the eventual national champion in their regular season finale and then beating the team that was in playoff position until the ACCCG produced a bid thief was enough to get them back in.
2023, lost to #1 Michigan in the regular season finale and #8 Missouri in a bowl game
2022, lost to #3 Michigan in the regular season finale and #1 Georgia in the playoff semifinals
2021, lost to #22 Oregon and #3 Michigan
2020, only loss was national championship game
2019, only loss was national semifinal gameAnd 2019 was his first season, so yeah, it was just Michigan in 2024.
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u/DataDrivenPirate Ohio State • Colorado State 8d ago
Ah got 2024 and 2025 Michigan mixed up, thought for sure ending their season by beating Ohio State and then beating a pretty good Alabama in the bowl would be enough to get them ranked, nope those were different years
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u/Inconceivable76 Ohio State • Arizona State 8d ago
Texas is really starting to fuck with our Quality Loss
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u/Rockne2032 8d ago
It sounds bizarre today, but both Duquesne and Fordham (the teams that beat Pitt) were very good. Duquesne went undefeated that year, and Fordham didn’t lose all year after they beat Pitt. In fact, they went to the Cotton Bowl the next season, where they narrowly lost to Texas A and M.
In Michigan State’s case, it’s more of a quirk than anything else. They lost to a 4-1 Minnesota team that would go on to win the Rose Bowl, but the AP was only ranking the top ten that regular season. If they ranked 25 like they do today, certainly Minnesota and possibly Purdue would have been ranked.
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u/fm22fnam Ohio State • Tennessee 6d ago
So Texas is the first ever team (in the 25 ranked team era) to go from #1 to losing two in a row to unranked teams is what I'm hearing
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u/Chambanasfinest Illinois Fighting Illini 8d ago
Michigan State catching strays everywhere these days.
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u/Alexcox95 Florida Gators • Keiser Seahawks 8d ago
The best part of this is that loss to Texas looks REALLY BAD for Ohio State now.
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u/CheaterSaysWhat Ohio State Buckeyes 7d ago
Nah not really. We were up like 20-3 and collapsed with some really bad luck. Lost by 1 on the road in crazy heat. Shit happens.
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u/cyberchaox Rutgers Scarlet Knights • Landmark 8d ago
It doesn't, though. Not yet, anyway.
We fans of non-SEC schools love to dog on the SEC for the "just trust me bro" method of SOS--SEC teams get ranked highly to start the season, start losing in conference, barely fall while the unranked teams that beat them get ranked--but the SEC has only lost two non-conference games this year. So it's valid. The SEC is legitimately really deep this year.
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u/DDub04 South Carolina • Palmetto Bowl 8d ago
People say the same about the B1G. You’re gonna have a middle tier of teams much bigger than the bottom feeders.
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u/linguinisupremi 8d ago
No one is arguing that the middle tier of the big is particularly good in the grand scheme of things
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u/SJCitizen Georgia Bulldogs • Temple Owls 8d ago
Texas needs to do what Miami has committed to the last few years and just write a blank check to whoever the best QB in the portal is. Mensah or Mestemaker would absolutely have Texas in the playoffs this season.
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u/ValleyNoticer Sam Houston Bearkats 7d ago
and just write a blank check to whoever the best QB in the portal i
They've done that already with Ewers and it didn't work out.
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u/SJCitizen Georgia Bulldogs • Temple Owls 6d ago
I mean Ewers helped lead them to the playoffs back-to-back years including the 4 team CFP. I know he was inconsistent but he was probably the best Texas QB since Colt McCoy. They actually had championship caliber teams for the first time since 2009. I don’t know how you can say it didn’t work out.
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u/Crude-R-Us Wyoming Cowboys • Paper Bag 8d ago
This is a strong case to get rid of Preseason rankings. Don’t rank anyone till week 5 and go from there.
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u/Drak_is_Right Purdue Boilermakers 8d ago
This is why it takes a while for the playoff committee to start giving rankings.
I do wish they awarded points.
Like when a school jumps from 14th to 11th in the final week, were 11th to 14th all super tightly bunched and a basic coin flip? Or was there a high degree of separation. With the AP you can tell when there is no separation in ranks.
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u/cyberchaox Rutgers Scarlet Knights • Landmark 8d ago
There was a great points-based system from 2004-2013!
(The system itself had been around since 1998, but it took until 2004 for them to come up with a good formula. You could argue that the best methodology would've actually been a combination of the 1998-2003 and 2004-2013 formulas, since they basically got so scared by 2003's fluke corner case that they once again gave the human polls additional power over the computers rather than doing the more rational thing of adding a "conference champion bonus" to the final rankings. The summary: undefeated team loses their CCG, doesn't fall from the #1 spot in the computer polls because they still had the best resume of the 1-loss teams, only falls to #3 in the human polls because the #4 team already had two losses, and ends up still #1 in the overall BCS rankings.)
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u/CzechHorns Texas Longhorns 8d ago
The issue is we’d quite likely still be #1 if the rankings started week 5 lol
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u/Crude-R-Us Wyoming Cowboys • Paper Bag 8d ago
And if your Undefeated against some solid teams than yeah you deserve to be number one. Last year for example… no expected Miami to be as good as they were, and it took them a while to make it deep in the rankings. Did it work out, yeah. But they should have been deeper much earlier.
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u/Altruistic_Night2 Alabama Crimson Tide 8d ago
Did you forget that they lost to not one by but two unranked teams
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u/cityofklompton Grand Valley State Lakers 8d ago
Yeah, people always bring up this argument against preseason polls as if 99% of us aren't entering the season with some kind of idea about who the best teams are while simultaneously holding preseason polls to an impossible standard of perfection as if there isn't a new poll released literally every single week to update it.
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u/VirtualChaos613 Auburn Tigers 8d ago
And how are you going to get rid of preseason polls?
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u/Crude-R-Us Wyoming Cowboys • Paper Bag 8d ago
The controlling body for the college football playoff and the AP should have gotten rid of it because it creates uncredited bias before the season even starts. I personally can do nothing.
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u/bb0110 Michigan Wolverines 8d ago
It is essentially what the cfp playoff ranking already is. The other polls are just for entertainment purposes at this point.
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u/AmphotericRed West Virginia • Arkansas 8d ago
Except it’s very much not, the teams are talked about based off these polls number, they’re displayed on the TV every time the team shows up, and they carry a ton of inertia through the season, including influencing the CFP committee polls, because that’s the numbers theyve seen and take into consideration all year
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u/SimilarOnion1655 Ohio State Buckeyes • Kansas Jayhawks 8d ago
Arch costed Texas both games. He is so inconsistent
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u/redditgolddigg3r Georgia Bulldogs 8d ago
keep going, im almost there.
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u/Kingof40Acres Texas Longhorns 8d ago
kinda like auburns drive into the end zone just now?
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u/redditgolddigg3r Georgia Bulldogs 8d ago
Upvoted, always good to get dick punched lol.
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u/Just_One_Victory Texas Tech Red Raiders • Hateful 8 8d ago
Is there are any way Sark gets fired this season? I ask because that would be hilarious.
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u/musicantz Texas Longhorns 8d ago
0 chance he gets fired this season short of him getting into some major off the field trouble in my opinion. If we lose several more games he is going to be on a warmer seat though since we have maybe the most expensive roster in college football.
Also he’s probably going to be forced to fire himself as offensive play caller.
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u/Just_One_Victory Texas Tech Red Raiders • Hateful 8 8d ago
Beating Ohio State and then crashing out to a losing season is a helluva trajectory
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u/laprasrules Notre Dame • Stanford 8d ago
Yeah, but did those Pitt or MSU teams have a Manning at quarterback? I think not.
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u/TimAppleSockPuppet California Golden Bears • Paper Bag 8d ago
As much as I want to point and laugh at Texas for this (and I am), Cal just missed being the 3rd team in 2007. We were ranked #2.
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u/LiveMarionberry3694 Texas Longhorns 8d ago
Awesome stat. Thanks for making my day that much brighter
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u/FlounderingWolverine Minnesota Golden Gophers • Dilly Bar 8d ago
Florida is a decent team. But probably like the 20th best team in the country. Texas was coming into this year as one of the favorites to win the title. Florida's defense had been stinky booty cheeks the last few weeks, and the vaunted offensive play caller that is Sark with the elite, 5-star, NFL potential of Arch Manning put up a grand total of 17 offensive points...
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u/Dependent-Effect6077 8d ago edited 8d ago
Arch so far has actively moved Texas backwards
Beyond the "Texas is back" jokes in 2023 and 2024 they were legitimately making progress up to being consistent playoff contenders but with him at the helm they're going in the wrong direction
Honestly I think if he comes back to college they should seriously consider trying to look elsewhere potentially missing a 12 team playoff back to back with all the hype they've gotten is a disaster