5-at-10: Who won the weekend

Morning, how was your weekend?

photo McCallie School and Brentwood Academy football players warm up as the sun sets over the Blue Tornado's home field on Friday.

As for us, well, there were ups and downs and ins and outs. We caught some sort of stomach flu late Friday night, and since dinner before the McCallie-BA game (Ouch-standing), we have had a piece of cheese toast five Saltines and half a turkey sammich. Yes, it has been less than pretty.

And that was still better than what the ol' alma mater threw out/up at Starkville. So it goes.

From the "Talks too much" studios, you know the drill - who won the weekend?

Winners

Has there been a crazier weekend in, oh, ever. Consider the winners and the preconceived notions about them, be it before the season or before the weekend:

• How about you, Mississippi - The MSU Bulldogs played better than Auburn (we originally described it as MSU played OK; Auburn played pretty bad) and with three consecutive wins over top-10 foes, the Bulldogs deserve to be the nation's No. 1 team. Ole Miss handled prosperity after last week's win over Alabama and went to Texas A&M and controlled the Aggies in front of the largest crowd in SEC history. Other than MSU against Alabama, the two Magnolia State schools will be favored to deliver an 11-0 vs. 11-0 Egg Bowl that would be No. 1 against No. 2 in the country. Wow.

• The Dallas Cowboys are the best team in football. Let that marinate for a second after the Cowboys went to Seattle and won. To add to that craziness, the Cowboys likely picked an offensive lineman in the middle of round one that could be the rookie of the year (and took him despite Jerry Jones wanting to draft Jonny Football) and likely have the comeback player of the year in linebacker Rolando McClain, who has gone from first-rounder to Pro Bowler to murder suspect to out of football to Dallas star on a defense that went from historically bad to pretty salty in less than a year.

• The Kansas City Royals emerged from a crazy weekend of LCSs as the World Series favorite. How crazy was the weekend: The Giants scored the tying run Sunday night with two outs in the ninth when a runner scored from second on a wild pitch. Yes, you read that right.

• OK, we had several here, but as we are wont to do, we'll venture back to college football. And we could go Baylor Bears, who needed almost all of their 61 points to beat TCU. We could go Notre Dame, which will be the most popular team in the country next week when they face FSU. We could go Les "The Mad Hatter" MIles and his fourth quarter voodoo. We could go a lot of places - heck, even though Downtown Patrick Brown gigs us about how impressed we are with Arkansas even if they didn't beat Alabama, who in Arkansas is not encouraged about the progress of the Hogs in year 2 (more on that to come) - but we are going to go with Mark Richt and Georgia Bulldogs, who dealt with the lost of the nation's best player and delivered a statement win. Nice job coach, and welcome to the party Nick Chubb.

photo Will Muschamp

Losers

• Faclons defense. Gross. Simply gross. And how about that "high-powered" offense that gets all of 13 points against a Bears team that was without not 1, not 2 but 3 starting linebackers. We're ready to start the Mike Smith hot seat. Speaking of hot seats...

• Will Muschamp. Tough loss in Gainesville for Florida and Muschamp. There was some good. There were explosive plays. Jeff Driskel did some good things. There were several big plays in the kicking game. But... There's always a but. The Gators lost a winnable game because in the final two minutes they dropped a TD and Driskel committed his third turnover on a bad decision with a throw in traffic. And this is not exactly 2007 LSU. Plus, Muschamp has burned up his mulligans. But there were a slew of UT fans we know who were less than sad about all those Gators fans going home disappointed.

• We were going to go with the UT offensive line, but decided that the Fab 4 picks must be mentioned. In fact, we are anther bad week from getting name change. We went 1-4 - and that one was a Georgia Southern cover in the final seconds with a reserve RB scoring a meaningless TD - and fell to under-.500 for the first time this late in the season in our career. We're 22-24. Not good.

• Thunder fans in particular and NBA fans in general. Kevin Durant will miss up to two months with a broken foot. We're LeBron fan - you likely knew this - and even we are sad about this because KD can flat play.

• Philadelphia Eagles fans. In the midst of an impressive 27-0 divisional win over the Giants, the Philadelphia police department was summoned to the stadium. That's not that big of surprise for a rowdy bunch that has booed Santa Claus and thrown eggs at an opposing teams. Well, Sunday night, the call was for a woman in Eagles gear who had stolen a dude's prosthetic leg. You stay classy Philly.

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College football

We needed more here, and without going too deep into our Wednesday's "Who's in" segment.

But we have two fundamental issues here that dawned on us in between bathroom trips this weekend:

photo Football tile

First, are you OK with Mississippi State jumping FSU in the polls? We ask this impartially and openly because we can see the following three parts of this discussion:

1) We have zero idea how much the polls if any will influence the committee. Could be some, could be none.

2) A lot of this question can be determined by answering, "Are you a believer in voting for the best team or voting for the tam you think has the best chance to be No. 1?"

3) Are we discounting FSU's run of continued excellence and its huge galvanized ability to block out distractions?

Secondly, the four-team playoff now makes strange bed fellows. In years past, Auburn would now need Mississippi State to lose twice to get into the SEC title game, and that still would be OK with the Tigers, provided they right their ship - a huge if considering they have road trips to three top-10 teams still left. Or Alabama would need Ole Miss to lose twice and handle its business.

Now, is Mississippi State rolls through or Ole Miss rolls through, that would speak well for Auburn or Alabama respectively. In turn, if either of the Mississippi schools only lose once, they would hold have to hold the advantage in the committee's eyes, no?

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This and that

- Wow, went to a NASCAR race and a demolition derby broke out. Where were the Malachi Crunch brothers? Kevin Harvick got the win to punch his ticket into the next round. Brad Keselowski tangled with not one, not two but three NASCAR drivers, including mild-manner Matt Kenseth. It also left a real chance that Keselowski, super-champ Jimmie Johnson and Dale Eanrhardt Jr. will need a win at Talladega next week to advance.

photo Butch Jones

- More UT-UTC. Butch Jones to TV reporter before the game: "Just get 4 yards a carry." We instantly said, "Huh?" Turns out the Vols would have been giddy to get 4 yards a pop against the UTC front.

- More college football: The SEC West is 35-9 combined this season. Those nine losses came to other SEC West teams. So the SEC West is 26-0 against everyone else, and the SEC East's best chance to claim one win against the West this year is Saturday when No. 10 Georgia visits SEC West cellar-dwellar Arkansas. Georgia is a 3-point favorite.

- Man, field goal kickers are like life insurance. You don't need it until you need it and then you really need it. Ask Arizona, which had its unbeaten run stopped when Casey Skowron missed a 36-yarder in a 28-26 loss to USC. Or LSU, which got a 50-harder in the final seconds to beat Florida. Or Arkansas, which had a PAT blocked in a heart-breaking 14-13 loss to Alabama in which the Hogs outgained the Tide 335-227.

- Interesting fact from that last item. The win for Alabama puts Nick Saban at 49-0 as the coach of a top-10 Tide team against unranked foes. Here's the chart, according to Elias:

Alabama's Nick Saban 49-0

Miami's Dennis Erickson 42-0

Georgia's Mark Richt 47-1

Colorado's Bill McCartney 19-0-1

OU's Bud Wilkinson 76-1-2

  • Minimum 20 games

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Today's question

Who won the weekend? Who lost the weekend?

And yes, this will definitely come up on Press Row.

If you still need more, Jeremy Hill celebrated with the Icky Shuffle on Sunday as a shoutout to the former Bengals great? What's our Rushmore of TD celebrations? Go.

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