If you conked out on the couch Saturday night but then awakened to see wacko things in Auburn, Alabama, and Berkeley, California, deciding key chunks of the college football regular season, don’t worry. You weren’t hallucinating.
If, at 11:36 p.m. Eastern time, you found yourself watching an SMU 52-yard field goal attempt rise through the California air and above the empty seats to determine who would reach the ACC championship game next weekend way over in Charlotte, you did not get “some bad liquor or something,” as the eternal George Bailey once put it.
And if somebody told you the kick staying wide right enabled the ACC title game to include a five-loss Duke, and that unranked Duke won a five-way tiebreaker for second place in the ACC at 6-2 alongside four ranked teams, the person telling you that is not a rascal. It’s all accurate.
Now, if some person told you Duke (7-5) might stand one win against No. 18 Virginia (10-2) from becoming the first five-loss team in the College Football Playoff, you might want to delete that person from your contacts, but don’t.
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That’s technically right, even if the playoff selection committee, which grants automatic berths to its five highest-ranked conference champions, would have the right to omit the ACC champion altogether, were that champion, say, Duke — in favor of Tulane or James Madison or such.
The whole thing stems from bloated conferences, a concept just about everyone detests. Unwieldy behemoths such as the 17-team ACC require granular tiebreakers such as “higher conference opponents winning percentage” because hardly anybody gets to play anybody else, so Duke, for example, never played fellow second-place teams Miami, Pitt or SMU, even as it did play Georgia Tech (and lost).
And if you heard all of this happened after the wildly unpredictable Cal (7-5) led 31-14 with 14:54 left, but then SMU and quarterback Kevin Jennings made drives to score at 12:58 and 7:59 and 2:22 to lead 35-31, but then Cal scored at 0:43 to lead 38-35 before that closing miss, you do retain all your faculties.
Just because you saw the winning coach of a pivotal ACC game had been Nick Rolovich, the Cal interim who had taken over last week after the Bears looked south of dreadful in losing 31-10 to Stanford, the same guy who lost his job at Washington State in 2021 because he wouldn’t take the coronavirus vaccine, don’t think you’ve gone around the bend.
The sport has (for 156 years), but you haven’t.
If, just before that, you happened to catch the latest football phantasmagoria that seems to happen whenever the Iron Bowl goes to Auburn, you might have seen No. 10 Alabama yet again escape its rival, clear to the SEC championship game in Atlanta against Georgia.
You might have seen, blearily, with the score 20-20, Alabama’s Dostoevsky of a 15-play drive that included an either-or Auburn interference penalty on third down, and a probably-not Auburn roughing-the-passer penalty, also on third down.
You might have had your mind half-blown when, on fourth and two from the Auburn 6-yard line with about four minutes left, Alabama Coach Kalen DeBoer went for it, with the following things hanging in the balance: an Alabama playoff berth, maybe DeBoer’s future employment, and whether the SEC championship game might feature a team (Mississippi) whose coach (Lane Kiffin) just left it for its most loathed rival (LSU), because Mississippi would have reached Atlanta for the first time had Alabama lost. And before you could process all that hung on the fourth and two, you might have seen Alabama quarterback Ty Simpson slip a six-yard touchdown pass to Isaiah Horton even as Horton felt a defender close by.
“I feel like there is a confidence you have in the offense, to get the two yards,” DeBoer would tell reporters later. “… And I think there’s also a piece where, backed up like that [near the goal line], you’ve got confidence in your defense.” That still didn’t quite explain forgoing the 24-yard field goal, but the man has won everywhere, from his native South Dakota on.
So when Auburn had started back down the field, and had an either-or interference on fourth down keep its thing going, and had a fourth and two where quarterback Ashton Daniels seemed to teeter right above the line before toppling over into fleeting bliss, but then later fumbled at the Alabama 20, that meant Alabama has:
— won the 2021 game at Auburn after trailing 10-3 at its own 3-yard line with 92 seconds left, then seeing Bryce Young overcome a third and 10, a fourth and 7 and another third and 10 along the 97-yard path toward a tie and a four-overtime win;
— won the 2023 game at Auburn after facing fourth and 31 down 24-20 with 32 seconds left, whereupon Jalen Milroe found Isaiah Bond in the end zone;
— won this lunatic 2025 game at Auburn through too many hairpin turns to fit into one conversation.
(And let’s not even talk about last decade.)
Further, this 27-20 outcome of 2025 managed to point Alabama toward an oh-no scenario: What if, with so many teams bunched tightly at the playoff bubble, Alabama missed the playoff by losing to Georgia while other teams made the playoff — Texas A&M, Mississippi — in part by not qualifying to play Georgia?
“I mean,” DeBoer said to a reporter who asked, “we’re 7-1 in the SEC [with four wins over ranked teams], and I mean, that would blow my mind. But I know what you’re getting at. That’s crazy. I’m not saying your question is crazy, but, just, that would be unreal. I mean, we’re 10-2 and 7-1 in the SEC with all these road wins, some wins on the road [including at No. 4 Georgia]. We’ve got more than a playoff-caliber football team. There’s not a question in my mind.”
How fitting for a season that began with that same Alabama going to Florida State and getting outplayed and outmuscled in some sort of apparent mirage. Then that season ended with Florida State plummeting to 5-7 with a 40-21 pummeling by a 4-8 Florida. And with No. 14 Vanderbilt scoring more points than it ever had on any day in Knoxville in beating No. 19 Tennessee, 45-24. And with No. 8 Oklahoma on the verge of a stifling clunker trailing a dormant LSU with four minutes left, but with quarterback John Mateer seeing Isaiah Sategna III so alone downfield it must have looked strange, then zipping a singing pass 38 yards toward what became a 58-yard touchdown, all after three interceptions and all before crediting “the grace that our defense gives me.”
“We’re still alive,” Mateer also said after the 17-13 win, and so they’re in the playoff, apparently, and maybe so will be, good grief, Duke, which lost to Illinois and Tulane and Connecticut and Virginia and Georgia Tech, and whose sliver of a path included crazy late-night things at Berkeley.
That ended with California quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, the native Hawaiian, trying to answer questions from ESPN’s Lauren Sisler on the West Coast while exultant Cal fans surrounded them and all but knocked them down in a pivotal moment for the season of a conference whose name begins with “Atlantic.”
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