Washington takes the lead out West
The weekend's action was pretty meaningful with Washington taking a lead in the Pac-12 after beating Oregon and watching USC flounder at Notre Dame. Back east, coaches are facing some tough questions.
This may have been the wildest weekend of college football yet. There was actually a crazy game on Thursday night that’s been overshadowed due to the smaller stakes in which West Virginia came back from 35-24 only to lose in dramatic fashion.
The Mountaineers drove the field to make it 35-32, Houston (their opponent) ran five plays and punted it back to them at their own 12-yard line with just 1:17 on the clock. But West Virginia hit several big passes, most notably a 50-yard touchdown thrown over the middle on 4th-and-10 underneath the prevent coverage. Their receiver caught the ball on the run and beat angles from the deep defenders.
Prevent coverage is generally bad, but it’s especially bad in college and particularly when there’s over a minute left.
Houston got the ball back with seven seconds left down 39-35. However, West Virginia did incur an unsportsmanlike penalty which set up Houston with half-decent field position. They threw an out and got out of bounds at the West Virginia 49, then they chucked a Hail Mary into the end zone, their receiver caught it off a deflection, and voila!
Obviously the following night the Prime Time Buffaloes blew a 29-0 halftime lead and lost a game in double overtime 46-43 to 2-4 Stanford.
Colorado is now 1-3 in Pac-12 play and it’s going to be a real fight for them to get to bowl eligibility. They’re basically a really good G5 team, maybe a 10-2 squad in the AAC, which was enough to overcome bad TCU and Nebraska teams early on but not enough to survive the grind of a P5 schedule.
Elsewhere we got some big time action with bigger stakes…
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