Collegiate Sports

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10 Takeaways: Pac-12 the biggest loser in a day of college football chaos

The forecast called for a dreary weekend of college football, devoid of marquee games with no match-ups between teams ranked in the Top 25. By the time Arizona State stunned Washington, 13-7, to pull off the fourth Top 10 upset of the weekend, the barrage of unpredictability, field-stormings and College Football Playoff chaos reminded us of an eternal truth in college football: Sometimes the weekends with the lowest expectations yield the ridiculous results.

Consider that 13 teams entered the weekend undefeated and five lost – No. 2 Clemson, No. 5 Washington, No. 8 Washington State, No. 19 San Diego State and No. 25 Navy. (No. 10 Auburn had already lost, but they lost again on Saturday.) The biggest loser from the onslaught of upsets is the Pac-12, which no longer has an undefeated team and takes the midseason poll position as the conference most likely to have a team left out of the College Football Playoff. On consecutive nights that saw both Washington schools lose as two-touchdown favorites, the #Pac12AfterDark hashtag signified a horror movie with an NC-17 rating for league officials. (California smoked Washington State, 37-3, late Friday).

The tenor of Washington’s faceplant in Tempe, Ariz., was as surprising as the result. Washington entered the game a 17.5-point favorite, much thanks to a porous Arizona State defense that ranked No. 119 in the country. The Sun Devils yielded more than 30 points in 11-straight outings, but somehow transformed into the 1985 Bears on Saturday night. Arizona State shut out the Huskies for the game’s first 54 minutes, a stunning performance for vagabond defensive coordinator Phil Bennett’s crew.

“One of the more frustrating nights we’ve had in a long time around here on offense,” UW coach Chris Petersen said.

Washington helped out with self-induced misery, as kicker Van Soderberg missing field goals from 27 and 21 yards. The most amazing statistic of the night was that the last time a top-5 team had a kicker miss two field goals under 30 yards it was 2010, when Kyle Brotzman did it for Petersen’s Boise State team. With history clearly not guiding his game management, Petersen’s decision to kick the second field goal on fourth-and-short will be second-guessed at yachting tailgates on the outskirts of Husky Stadium for years to come. Soderberg doinked the 21-yard chip shot off the upright, the prologue to the end rest. Sometimes, luck and karma are needed to pull off seismic upsets, too.

And Arizona State got that on a fourth-and-3 with just over two minutes remaining. When everyone assumed the Sun Devils would punt, ASU quarterback Manny Wilkins completed a sun-kissed pass coated with a lifetime of good karma, serendipity and fortuitousness to tight end Ceejhay French-Love for 30 yards. The pass somehow made it past five players – two ASU receivers, one of which it was intended for, and between three UW defenders – before settling in French-Love’s hands. It was the fourth-down version of a blackjack player hitting on 19 and getting consecutive aces. They shouldn’t have tried it, shouldn’t have completed it but somehow ended up cashing in.

Arizona State earned its first top-five victory since 1996, potentially salvaging coach Todd Graham’s job after an offseason when his firing appeared an inevitability. “We’re not surprised,” Graham said. “We expected to be here.”

No one else expected them there, including Petersen. He went from his biggest issue last week being a cold war with ESPN to now needing to run the table to have a chance to earn a second-straight spot in the College Football Playoff. Washington will have potentially just two ranked teams remaining on its schedule: Stanford and Washington State.

Those two games will mark Washington’s only two chances over ranked teams this season, as UW’s feather-pillow non-conference schedule of at Rutgers, Montana and Fresno State could end up being the difference between the Huskies and other one-loss teams.

For now, all Washington can do is win out and root for more chaos like the events that unfolded this weekend. They need the whole season to take on the funky vibes that seem to appear every week during the Pac-12’s late-night shenanigans.

https://sports.yahoo.com/10-takeaways-pac-12-biggest-loser-day-college-football-chaos-070212779.html