I was scorekeeping youth hockey games all morning — you won’t believe the fights these children get into on the ice at that age, it’s brutal stuff — so I apologize for the lateness of this edition of the Weekend Watchlist. Don’t misinterpret my tardiness as neglect; I still love this part of the week more than anything else.

Our journey on the Weekend Watchlist has taken us many places. We’ve gone inside the home of Jason and Kylie Kelce as they prepare to host a gobble of people who were clamoring for every single NFL game. As always, Jason believed the answer was NFL Sunday Ticket. He was right, in a way, but he almost destroyed his family in the process by faking an asteroid attack from outer space in order to elevate himself to the presidency. (How the exact technology actually worked, nobody knows.) When he was found out, he was sentenced to federal prison but was first allowed documentary film cameras to follow his every move in the month before he went behind bars. It was at this point that something incredibly decisive occurred: Jason was dreaming.

None of it was real. In fact, none of it has ever been real. Even his psychedelic experience last week was fake.

I know. It’s shocking.

All of it has been a charade, something I’ve tried to keep hidden from the public for as long as possible. It’s about time that I admit my wrongdoing, bring the bad into the light so that I can be forgiven by all those I love and respect.

Several months ago, I began corresponding with an individual who claimed to represent an international technology consultancy. This person expressed considerable interest in my work, particularly the technological infrastructure required to watch four football games simultaneously. I thought it was a perfectly innocent professional relationship. After all, who among us hasn’t wanted to discuss the capabilities of an HDMI splitter or YouTube TV’s multiview feature with a complete stranger?

Unfortunately, I now understand that the relationship might not have been entirely innocent.

Over several weeks, I shared sensitive information about my viewing habits, including preliminary television schedules and the specifications of the computer chips used to produce this publication. I have since been informed that some of these communications may have reached individuals associated with Chinese intelligence.

I want to make something abundantly clear: At no point did I knowingly participate in an international espionage operation. I believed I was helping somebody with a genuine interest in American football. My attorneys have subsequently advised me that this explanation is unlikely to satisfy the federal government.

I apologize to my family, my readers and everybody who placed their trust in me. The thought that a foreign intelligence service might possess advance knowledge of which Big 12 games I intend to place on my tertiary screen is deeply troubling. I am cooperating with the appropriate authorities, although they have thus far expressed very little interest in the intricacies of the Saturday afternoon television window.

There is no excuse for what happened. I accept full responsibility for my actions, even if I remain somewhat uncertain about what those actions actually were.

What I do know is that there are 19 college football games and 13 NFL games on the schedule this weekend, along with an international soccer match. I cannot allow this unfortunate chapter of my life to prevent me from fulfilling my obligations to the American people.

Besides, the government already has my schedule.

You might as well have it, too.

All times Central.

Friday Night

Primary Screen: Illinois at No. 4 UCLA — 8 p.m. — FOX
Secondary Screen: Florida State at Pittsburgh — 6 p.m. — ESPN
Tertiary Screen: No. 14 Houston at Colorado — 9:15 p.m. — ESPN

Saturday Morning

Primary Screen: No. 13 Wake Forest at SMU — 11 a.m. — ESPN
Secondary Screen: Duke at No. 7 Miami — 11 a.m. — ABC
Tertiary Screen: Northwestern at No. 20 Ohio State — 11 a.m. — FOX

Saturday Mid-Afternoon

Primary Screen: No. 18 USC at No. 9 Indiana — 2:30 p.m. — CBS
Secondary Screen: No. 8 Tennessee at Texas A&M — 2 p.m. — ESPN
Tertiary Screen: No. 22 Missouri at No. 1 Georgia — 2:30 p.m. — ABC
Quaternary Screen: Baylor at No. 10 BYU — 2:30 p.m. — FOX

Soccer Option: Haiti vs. United States — 3:30 p.m. — TBS/truTV

Also Worth Watching: Michigan at No. 16 Oregon — 2:30 p.m. — FS1; No. 19 Ole Miss at Oklahoma — 3:15 p.m. — SEC Network

Saturday Late Afternoon

Primary Screen: Oregon State at No. 24 Boise State — 5 p.m. — USA Network
Secondary Screen: Florida at No. 11 Kentucky — 5:15 p.m. — ESPN

Saturday Evening

Primary Screen: No. 2 Utah at No. 23 Arizona — 6:30 p.m. — FOX
Secondary Screen: No. 6 Texas at No. 21 LSU — 6:30 p.m. — ABC

Saturday Night

Primary Screen: No. 12 Texas Tech at No. 25 Oklahoma State — 8:30 p.m. — ESPN
Secondary Screen: North Texas at UTSA — 8 p.m. — ESPNU

Saturday Late Night

Primary Screen: North Dakota State at Hawai’i — 10 p.m. — CW

Sunday Early Morning

Primary Screen: New England Patriots vs. Detroit Lions — 8:30 a.m. — FOX

Sunday Afternoon

Primary Screen: Minnesota Vikings at Green Bay Packers — 12 p.m. — FOX
Secondary Screen: Kansas City Chiefs at Atlanta Falcons — 12 p.m. — CBS
Tertiary Screen: Houston Texans at Cleveland Browns — 12 p.m. — FOX
Quaternary Screen: Buffalo Bills at New York Jets — 12 p.m. — CBS

Also Worth Watching: Jacksonville Jaguars at Tennessee Titans — 12 p.m. — FOX; Miami Dolphins at Indianapolis Colts — 12 p.m. — CBS; Carolina Panthers at New Orleans Saints — 12 p.m. — FOX

Sunday Mid-Afternoon

Primary Screen: San Francisco 49ers at Dallas Cowboys — 3:25 p.m. — FOX
Secondary Screen: Seattle Seahawks at Las Vegas Raiders — 3:05 p.m. — CBS
Tertiary Screen: Los Angeles Rams at Arizona Cardinals — 3:05 p.m. — CBS

Sunday Night

Primary Screen: Pittsburgh Steelers at Cincinnati Bengals — 7:20 p.m. — NBC

Monday Night

Primary Screen: Los Angeles Chargers at Baltimore Ravens — 7:15 p.m. — ESPN

The College Football Playoff committee has plenty of explaining to do after Indiana’s bizarre fall from No. 4 to No. 9. Seth examines why the Hoosiers were punished for taking a bye week, questions Alabama’s No. 3 ranking despite its head-to-head loss to Tennessee and explains why the Big 12 is positioned to send multiple teams to the playoff.

On the field, No. 18 USC visits No. 9 Indiana in a matchup with enormous playoff implications, while No. 13 Wake Forest heads to SMU hoping to keep its remarkable season alive. Could Arizona knock off undefeated Utah? Will Oklahoma State upset Texas Tech in what could become an old-fashioned Big 12 shootout? Seth also breaks down Duke–Miami, Alabama–Vanderbilt, Tennessee–Texas A&M and Texas–LSU before making some potentially regrettable upset picks.

In the NFL, Kirk Cousins returns to Minnesota just in time for a massive NFC North showdown against the Green Bay Packers, while rookie quarterback Fernando Mendoza makes his first start for the Raiders against Seattle. Seth previews the Patriots–Lions game in Munich, examines the Bengals’ Sunday night matchup with the Steelers and explains why he has absolutely no faith in the Dallas Cowboys against San Francisco. Plus, Washington pulls off a dramatic comeback against the Giants on Thursday Night Football, keeping the NFC East race as ridiculous as ever.

Which college football contender is most likely to fall this weekend? Will Indiana prove the committee wrong? And which NFL upset picks will come back to haunt Seth on Sunday? Let us know in the comments, SUBSCRIBE to The Football Corner and CLICK THE BELL for more college football and NFL predictions, recaps and commentary!

00:00 Welcome to The Kickoff!

03:37 College Football Playoff Rankings Reaction

14:34 College Football Week 11 Preview and Predictions

01:07:07 Commanders-Giants Thursday Night Football Recap

01:15:07 NFL Week 10 Preview and Predictions

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#CollegeFootball #CollegeFootballPlayoff #CFBWeek11 #NFLWeek10 #FootballPredictions #IndianaFootball #TheKickoff #TheFootballCorner

The College Football Playoff selection committee has discovered a fascinating new way to punish college football teams: simply have them take a week off.

Indiana entered last weekend ranked fourth in the country. The Hoosiers didn’t lose, didn’t suffer some devastating injury during a game and didn’t do anything that would ordinarily cause a football team to plummet down the rankings. In fact, they did nothing at all. They were on a bye, presumable sipping on a Mai Tai and having a great time. (Is that what people do in Bloomington, Indiana?)

By Tuesday evening, Curt Cignetti’s team had fallen five spots to No. 9. Apparently, sitting at home is now among the most dangerous activities in college football.

There were other peculiar developments in the committee’s second rankings. Alabama continued its march toward an increasingly privileged position, the Big 12 strengthened its claim to multiple playoff bids, and the newly approved 24-team CFP offered a rather horrifying glimpse into what awaits us next season.

I have thoughts. Quite a few, actually.

Indiana’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good Bye Week

First, I’d like to hand the microphone to Indiana fan Jason Hiebner, who had some rather pointed observations about the committee’s treatment of his beloved Hoosiers.

“I recognize and fully agree that IU is not currently a top-five team or résumé at this point, but to drop a team five spots on a bye week is one of the most ludicrous things this committee has ever done,” Hiebner angrily texted me.

He continued: “SEC teams are told that wins against a Mississippi State team with Kamario Taylor carry significant weight, but Indiana gets punished for Ohio State and Northwestern losing with backup quarterbacks?

“People want to talk down on our non-conference schedule, but North Texas, by all advanced metrics, is a better opponent than Mississippi State, Clemson, Auburn, West Virginia and Oregon State, to name a few,” Hiebner added. “North Texas may very well end the season as a ranked win, despite Brett McMurphy trying to tarnish us for playing them.”

There is quite a bit to unpack there -- especially the Brett McMurphy slight, which I’ll leave for another day (don’t want to tread in those waters) -- but I agree with the general sentiment. Indiana isn’t one of the five best teams in the country right now, and its placement at No. 4 last week was difficult to defend. The offense has been inconsistent, especially when facing respectable opponents, and the quarterback situation remains unsettled, to say the least.

The defense, however, remains terrific. Indiana is allowing just 12.4 points and 259.2 yards per game, which contributes to ESPN’s SP+ ranking the Hoosiers fifth nationally.

And Hiebner isn’t entirely wrong about North Texas, either. SP+ ranks the Mean Green 52nd, ahead of Mississippi State, Clemson and Auburn. Other models disagree, so describing that comparison as unanimous would be a stretch, but the idea that Indiana’s non-conference schedule contains nothing worthwhile deserves some scrutiny.

The committee’s explanation for the five-spot drop was that all six Big Ten opponents Indiana had faced lost over the weekend, damaging its strength of schedule. Ohio State, the only team to beat the Hoosiers, suffered another defeat and dropped to No. 20.

That’s reasonable information to consider. A team’s résumé changes as we learn more about its opponents.

But there’s an enormous difference between acknowledging new information and deciding that an eight-win team deserves to fall five places without playing. This feels suspiciously like the committee correcting last week’s mistake while pretending it’s simply conducting another independent evaluation.

Somebody Please Explain Alabama and Tennessee

The committee absolutely adores Alabama. At this point, I’m beginning to wonder whether the Crimson Tide have been given a permanent residence somewhere inside the selection room. Perhaps Nick Saban is on the selection committee?

There’s a legitimate case for Alabama being one of the best teams in the country. Keelon Russell has been extraordinary at times, and his ceiling is high enough that another national championship in Tuscaloosa feels like a realistic possibility. The problem is that his worst performances occasionally resemble an expedition to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Tennessee knows something about that.

On Oct. 17, the Volunteers beat Alabama 26-10 in Knoxville, holding Russell to 147 passing yards and intercepting him twice. The Crimson Tide managed 201 yards of total offense, converted two of 13 third downs and committed four turnovers.

It wasn’t particularly close.

Both teams now sit at 7-2. Alabama is ranked third, while Tennessee is eighth. The Crimson Tide have impressive victories over LSU and Kentucky, which certainly deserve consideration, but the Volunteers have beaten Alabama and Kentucky themselves.

In fact, here’s a wonderful little statistical coincidence: Both teams beat Kentucky by exactly 28 points. Alabama won 45-17 in September, while Tennessee won 34-6 last Saturday.

The Volunteers’ two losses came by three points apiece against Texas and South Carolina. Alabama also has two defeats, one of which was the aforementioned 16-point humiliation in Knoxville.

Predictive metrics provide some justification for the committee’s decision. ESPN’s Football Power Index ranks Alabama third and Tennessee 11th, suggesting that the Crimson Tide would be favored in a hypothetical rematch.

Fair enough. But they already played the actual game, and Tennessee won convincingly.

I’m not demanding that head-to-head results override everything else. Alabama has a legitimate championship résumé, and Russell might eventually produce the kind of postseason performance that makes this entire argument look ridiculous.

But five spots? Really?

The Big 12 Might Finally Get Its Moment

There was a time, not particularly long ago, when suggesting that the Big 12 might be more interesting than the Big Ten in the national championship conversation would’ve earned you some concerned looks.

Well, welcome to November 2026.

Utah is undefeated and ranked second. BYU sits 10th, with its victory over Notre Dame doing considerable work for an otherwise imperfect résumé. Texas Tech is 12th, while Houston has climbed to 14th. The conference also has Arizona at No. 23 and Oklahoma State at No. 25.

Meanwhile, the Big Ten’s strongest playoff candidates are undefeated UCLA, led by a first-year head coach, and reigning national champion Indiana. Ten years ago, that sentence would’ve sounded like something somebody invented after consuming a questionable substance.

There are still plenty of potential complications. Utah has to survive a difficult closing stretch, while BYU’s two losses leave it vulnerable to another setback. Texas Tech is close enough to the field that a strong finish might change everything.

Still, the prospect of two Big 12 teams making the playoff feels increasingly realistic.

That would be a first for the conference in the 12-team era. Arizona State represented the Big 12 in 2024, and Texas Tech followed in 2025. The league has been close to earning additional bids without quite managing to get there. For example, BYU was dropped out of the field despite having an identical or similar record to other playoff teams last season. Based on the current trajectory, a similar scenario doesn’t seem as likely in 2026.

The Official Corner Poll

The Corner Poll remains an exercise in personal judgment rather than an attempt to reproduce the playoff rankings. Wins matter, obviously, but so do expectations and the emotional response a team produces whenever it appears on my television.

The rankings below reflect how I feel about the teams at this particular moment. There is no complicated voting procedure, no conference enhancement formula and certainly no punishment for taking a bye week.

Just vibes. Wonderful, occasionally inexplicable vibes.

Read more

Manchester United and Crystal Palace appear headed for managerial changes, Manchester City have lost three consecutive Premier League matches, and Bournemouth simply cannot stop winning. Seth Dowdle is back with another episode of The Matchbook, breaking down all the biggest stories from Premier League Matchweek 10.

Manchester United produce a miraculous late comeback to draw Aston Villa 4-4, but Michael Carrick’s future remains uncertain with the Red Devils sitting 18th. Could Mauricio Pochettino be headed to Old Trafford? Seth examines the leading candidates before turning to Crystal Palace, where Pierre Sage appears destined for dismissal following another disappointing defeat. Thomas Frank looks like the favorite to replace him, but is he capable of keeping Palace in the Premier League?

Elsewhere, Nottingham Forest stun Manchester City 3-1, Arsenal continue winning ugly, and Brighton strengthen their case as legitimate title challengers. Sunderland defeat Chelsea in one of the weekend’s strangest results, while Bournemouth and Everton continue giving their supporters plenty of reasons to celebrate.

Plus, Seth makes his relegation predictions after 10 matchweeks, explains why Arsenal should be considered the overwhelming title favorite and identifies the Premier League’s biggest feel-good stories.

Who should replace Michael Carrick at Manchester United? Is Arsenal already running away with the title? And which three clubs will be relegated? Let us know in the comments, SUBSCRIBE to The Football Corner and CLICK THE BELL for more Premier League recaps, predictions and commentary!

00:43 Introduction and Overview of the Show

03:51 Man United 4, Aston Villa 4

13:51 Who Will Save Manchester United?

26:58 Liverpool 3, Crystal Palace 1

33:50 Nottingham Forest 3, Man City 1

44:21 Arsenal 1, Hull City 0

49:14 Brighton 2, Brentford 0

53:34 Sunderland 1, Chelsea 0

58:05 Everton 3, Coventry City 1

01:00:29 Who’s Getting Relegated?

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#PremierLeague #ManchesterUnited #CrystalPalace #ManchesterCity #Bournemouth #Arsenal #TheMatchbook

This week, “Fire everybody!” seems to be the prevailing sentiment across the football world. Whether you’re an Ohio State fan demanding change or a Manchester United supporter simply hoping for the best, we’ve officially reached that time of year when everybody starts getting a little fed up with the status quo.

Fortunately, not everybody is miserable. Across the Atlantic, Bournemouth have discovered one of the greatest joys sports can offer: happiness. How wonderful that must be.

There are three stories in today’s notebook, covering all three versions of football we follow here at The Football Corner. Despite their differences, all three revolve around two of the simplest emotions in sports: joy and despair.

Without further ado, let’s open the notebook.

Michigan and Ohio State Are Having a Very Bad Time

There aren’t many jobs in American sports that come with more unreasonable expectations than coaching football at Michigan or Ohio State, although I suppose those expectations become somewhat more reasonable when you consider the resources available to both institutions. Each program has won a national championship within the past three years, and both have enjoyed enough success throughout their histories to make a three-loss season feel like an act of institutional sabotage. Their fans expect to compete for championships every year, and anything less generally produces an enormous amount of discussion about whether the current coaching staff understands what it’s doing.

Well, it’s November, and the two programs appear to have discovered a rare point of agreement. Michigan fans are miserable, Ohio State fans are furious, and I suspect both groups would organize recall elections tomorrow if college football coaches were subject to the same rules as certain elected officials.

The circumstances aren’t identical, however, and I think it’s worth distinguishing between a disappointing season caused by an injury and one that appears to have gone wrong at almost every conceivable point. Michigan’s problems began well before the losses started accumulating, while Ohio State had just one loss until Julian Sayin suffered an elbow injury against Indiana. Both situations are unpleasant, but only one has convinced me that the entire coaching arrangement might have been a mistake worthy of Shakespeare.

Let’s begin in Ann Arbor, where I genuinely believed Kyle Whittingham was going to be an excellent hire.

Michigan needed stability after firing Sherrone Moore in December 2025, following the university’s discovery of an inappropriate relationship with a staff member. Sixteen days later, the school introduced Whittingham, who had built an impressive reputation during his two decades at Utah. He brought offensive coordinator Jason Beck with him, inherited former five-star quarterback Bryce Underwood and appeared to have everything necessary to produce a reasonably successful first season.

I liked the decision because Whittingham had consistently demonstrated that he could win football games without enjoying the advantages available to college football’s wealthiest programs. Utah wasn’t recruiting at Michigan’s level, yet Whittingham regularly produced teams that competed for conference championships. Giving him access to Michigan’s resources seemed like a perfectly sensible proposition, one I was happy to get on board with.

Read more

The NFC North is an absolute juggernaut. The division’s four teams are a combined 25-8, with the Green Bay Packers somehow sitting in last place at 6-3 despite demolishing the New England Patriots 45-27. Jordan Love looks like an MVP candidate, Chicago survives five turnovers against Tampa Bay, and Detroit grinds out another victory over Miami. Meanwhile, Minnesota prepares for a massive Monday Night Football showdown against Buffalo.

In Dallas, the Cowboys escape Indianapolis with an ugly 27-23 victory over the struggling Colts. Fourteen penalties, several embarrassing mistakes and Jerry Jones’ latest comments about head coaching salaries leave Seth questioning whether Brian Schottenheimer is equipped to lead this franchise. Even with a win, the Cowboys remain an organizational disaster.

Elsewhere, Cincinnati defeats Atlanta 34-17 in Madrid, forcing Seth to reconsider his opposition to international NFL games. Then it’s time to identify the 12 teams that could actually win Super Bowl LXI. From the Bills and Chiefs to the Packers, Rams and Jaguars, which contenders have what it takes to win a championship, and which teams are destined to fall short?

Plus, Houston demolishes the Chargers, the Giants beat the struggling Eagles, and New Orleans survives an overtime thriller against Cleveland.

Is the NFC North the greatest division we’ve ever seen? Are the Cowboys doomed under Brian Schottenheimer? And who’s YOUR Super Bowl favorite? Let us know in the comments, SUBSCRIBE to The Football Corner and CLICK THE BELL for more NFL recaps, predictions and commentary!

00:00 Welcome to After Sunday!

05:04 Is the NFC North the Best Division Ever?

20:14 Cowboys Are Still a Disaster

30:05 International Games are Awesome?

35:07 Who Can Actually Win the Super Bowl?

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#NFL #NFLWeek9 #DallasCowboys #NFCNorth #SuperBowl #AfterSunday

The second international break of the season has arrived, giving us a chance to assess the first 10 matchweeks, catch up on everything we’ve neglected over the past three months and, if you’re a Premier League manager, contemplate whether you’ll still have a job by the end of the month.

Some clubs have made enormous strides since August, while other have found themselves in circumstances that make a root canal sound like a pleasant alternative. Manchester United is in the relegation zone, Crystal Palace stinks and is at the bottom of the table, and Nottingham Forest just beat Manchester City in a match that might’ve saved Oliver Glasner’s job.

All 20 managers have survived the first 10 matchweeks, which feels like a clerical error considering the Premier League’s recent history. Eleven managers departed during the 2025-26 season, and according to the BBC, nearly a third of all managerial exits in Premier League history have occurred in November or December.

That’s right — the grim reaper is coming.

Of course, the logic behind making a chance now is straightforward. Clubs have two weeks without league football to evaluate their options, interview candidates and attempt to fix whatever has gone wrong before the congested December schedule arrives. Waiting until January might mean losing several more matches, while acting now could provide a new manager with enough time to potentially rescue the season.

But firing somebody is the easy part. Finding a replacement who makes things better is more complicated, and a couple of these clubs have already learned that lesson the expensive way.

So, we’re going to evaluate five managers who find themselves in some degree of danger, using three questions: What do the results tell us? Do the underlying statistics support those results? And would a managerial chance solve the problems?

First, some numbers.

Figures through 10 Premier League matches. Expected-goal difference (xGD) measures the quality of scoring chances created minus those conceded. It isn’t a forecast, but it helps distinguish poor performances from poor results.

Manchester United: Yes, It’s Time

Michael Carrick seems like a good person, which is unfortunate because being a good person doesn’t appear to be worth much when you’re managing Manchester United. The former midfielder returned to Old Trafford with the unenviable responsibility of repairing the wreckage left behind by Ruben Amorim, although the results suggest that he may have underestimated just how much damage had been done. United has eight points through 10 league matches and sits 18th in the table, having failed to win any of its previous eight Premier League games.

Sunday’s 4-4 draw against Aston Villa was the sort of match that makes United supporters wonder whether watching football is a worthwhile use of their limited time on Earth. Villa scored twice inside four minutes, the earliest United has ever fallen two goals behind in a Premier League match, before Carrick’s side managed to drag itself level by halftime. The second half wasn’t much kinder, with Villa restoring its two-goal advantage before Joshua Zirkzee and Patrick Dorgu scored in stoppage time to rescue a point.

There is something admirable about a team refusing to surrender, especially after United’s extraordinary Champions League comeback against Roma earlier in the week. But the fact that United keeps requiring emergency rescue operations should probably concern the people responsible for preventing those emergencies in the first place. This isn’t a football club so much as an episode of Kitchen Nightmares, where everybody seems surprised that the restaurant keeps catching fire despite nobody bothering to fix the stove.

The expected-goals numbers are somewhat encouraging, with United generating 18.0 xG while allowing 17.9. That’s the statistical profile of a midtable team rather than one destined for relegation, suggesting that the results have been unkind to Carrick. But even the most generous interpretation of those numbers leaves United some distance from competing for Champions League qualification, and the fact that mediocrity represents the optimistic scenario should tell us something about the standard of football being produced.

Carrick didn’t appreciate questions about his future after the Villa match, challenging a reporter who suggested that discussions with the club’s leadership would take place during the international break. I admire the confidence, but it’s difficult to argue against having those conversations when your team hasn’t kept a clean sheet in its first 10 league matches, something United hadn’t managed to do since 1986-87.

There might come a time when Carrick becomes the manager Manchester United needs. For the moment, however, the performances haven’t demonstrated enough improvement to justify continuing with a project that appears to have reached its ceiling.

Verdict: Sack him.

Crystal Palace: Yes, and This One Isn’t Particularly Close

Crystal Palace has managed to produce a more depressing opening 10 matchweeks than Manchester United, which deserves some recognition considering the competition.

Read more

No. 1 Miami’s undefeated season comes crashing down in South Bend as Notre Dame survives a furious comeback to win 31-24. Seth examines the Hurricanes’ recent struggles, the impact of Malachi Toney’s absence and why the Fighting Irish might have secured their College Football Playoff spot. Meanwhile, Utah wins a wild Holy War against BYU to remain undefeated, overcoming four Bear Bachmeier interceptions and taking control of the Big 12 championship race.

Elsewhere, Alabama delivers a statement victory over Lane Kiffin’s LSU Tigers, winning 31-13 despite being outgained by 172 yards. Keelon Russell strengthens Alabama’s championship credentials, while Kiffin’s struggles in big games continue. Oregon storms into Columbus and dismantles Ohio State 41-28, raising serious questions about Ryan Day, the Buckeyes’ quarterback situation and whether their playoff hopes are officially finished.

The SEC produces two more beatdowns as Georgia demolishes Ole Miss 42-7 and Tennessee embarrasses previously unbeaten Kentucky 34-6. Seth declares Georgia the best team in the country, issues a formal apology to Tennessee fans for picking the Wildcats and examines how the Volunteers have emerged as legitimate championship contenders. Plus, Arch Manning delivers another encouraging performance as Texas takes down Missouri and strengthens its playoff résumé.

Then it’s time for a conference-by-conference trip through the rest of the country. Texas Tech survives an absolutely ridiculous 53-48 shootout against West Virginia, TCU finds an almost impossible way to lose to Arizona, and Michigan State hands Kyle Whittingham another embarrassing defeat. UCLA remains undefeated, Nebraska continues its miserable slide, and Texas A&M makes history for all the wrong reasons against South Carolina. Plus, Oklahoma State scores 66 points, Wake Forest hangs 77 on Merrimack, Florida Atlantic destroys UTSA, and James Madison’s strange season takes another turn.

Was Week 10 actually a disappointment, or did the results make up for the lack of close games? Let us know your biggest takeaway in the comments, SUBSCRIBE to The Football Corner and CLICK THE BELL for more college football recaps, predictions and commentary!

00:32 Welcome to After Saturday!

03:00 Notre Dame Survives Miami

10:24 Utah Wins the Holy War

21:01 Alabama Executes When it Matters Against LSU

31:05 Oregon’s Comeback Exposes Ohio State

43:40 Texas Closes Out Missouri

51:59 Georgia Crushes Ole Miss; Tennessee Silences Kentucky

59:41 ACC Rapid Fire

01:04:37 Big 12 Rapid Fire

01:09:32 Big Ten Rapid Fire

01:14:06 SEC Rapid Fire

01:17:17 G6 Rapid Fire

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#CollegeFootball #CFBPlayoff #CollegeFootballWeek10 #NotreDameFootball #MiamiHurricanes #OhioStateFootball #AfterSaturday

Welcome back to the Weekend Watchlist, where Jason Kelce is in a (fictional) crisis. We’ve been tracking his story as he’s saved the world from an asteroid and become president of the United States before everything came crashing down. He then invited a documentary crew into his home as he prepared to serve time in federal prison.

Except none of that actually happened. (Duh.)

It was all just a dream.

The asteroid wasn’t real. Neither was the presidency, the conviction or the documentary. Jason hasn’t spent the past decade becoming the most famous man on the planet. He’s still just Jason Kelce, a retired Philadelphia Eagles center and media personality who, while famous, is still just the owner of an unnecessarily elaborate television setup.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t make the experience any less confusing. Jason has lived what feels like an entire lifetime in the span of a single night’s sleep, and he’s having some difficulty processing the implications.

What follows is his attempt to return to reality, a place that, as it turns out, has something more exciting waiting for him.

The following is entirely fictional. If you hadn’t figured that out by now, I don’t know what to tell you.

INT. KELCE BEDROOM — EARLY MORNING

Jason Kelce wakes up.

He is lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. His breathing is heavy. His eyes move around the room, searching for something that isn’t there.

He looks down at his hands.

No handcuffs.

He turns toward Kylie, who is still asleep beside him.

JASON: Kylie.

Nothing.

JASON: Kylie.

KYLIE: What?

JASON: Am I going to prison?

Kylie opens one eye.

KYLIE: What?

JASON: Am I going to federal prison?

KYLIE: What are you talking about?

JASON: I was convicted. Eleven years. They said I manufactured an asteroid. There was a trial.

Kylie stares at him.

KYLIE: Jason, it’s six in the morning.

JASON: So I’m not going to prison?

KYLIE: Not unless you’ve done something I don’t know about.

Jason exhales. He sits up.

JASON: Was I president?

KYLIE: Of what?

JASON: The United States.

KYLIE: No.

JASON: Did I save the world?

KYLIE: Jason.

JASON: From an asteroid.

KYLIE: You need to go back to sleep.

Jason looks toward the window. Outside, everything appears normal. No Secret Service agents. No satellite dishes. No documentary crew preparing to record his final days of freedom.

JASON: There was a documentary about us.

KYLIE: You were on television yesterday.

JASON: No, it was different. They were following us around. They asked me all these questions, and I kept trying to explain what happened, but nobody believed me.

KYLIE: Did you explain it?

Jason pauses.

JASON: Not very well.

Kylie rolls over.

KYLIE: That sounds about right.

CUT TO: LIVING ROOM — MORNING

Jason stands in front of his television setup.

Four screens. Four perfectly ordinary televisions. No classified government technology. No machinery capable of redirecting an asteroid. No evidence of the remarkable, catastrophic and occasionally embarrassing life he remembers living.

He picks up the remote.

He turns on the first television.

A sports program is discussing Miami and Notre Dame.

He turns on the second.

A graphic advertises Alabama at LSU.

The third displays the Holy War between BYU and Utah.

The fourth shows Georgia at Ole Miss.

Jason studies the screens.

He picks up his phone and opens the weekend schedule.

He scrolls.

And scrolls.

And scrolls.

JASON: Oh my God.

From the kitchen, Kylie hears him.

KYLIE: What?

JASON: Kylie, come look at this.

KYLIE: What is it?

JASON: I think this might be the greatest weekend of football that’s ever happened.

Kylie appears in the doorway.

KYLIE: You say that every weekend.

JASON: No, no. This is different. Miami and Notre Dame. Georgia and Ole Miss. Alabama and LSU. BYU and Utah. Oregon and Ohio State. Kentucky and Tennessee. All on the same day.

He scrolls again.

JASON: And then there’s the NFL. And soccer. There’s a whole weekend of Premier League games. And Barcelona is playing Atlético Madrid.

Kylie looks at the phone.

KYLIE: That’s a lot of football.

JASON: That’s what I’m saying.

KYLIE: Well, I’m glad you’re not going to prison.

She leaves.

Jason remains standing in front of the televisions.

Something about the room has changed.

A low, almost imperceptible hum begins to emerge from the speakers.

Jason looks up.

The televisions are no longer showing football games.

They are showing stars.

CUT TO: THE LIVING ROOM — SOMEWHERE ELSE

The room is perfectly white.

Jason stands in its center, surrounded by four enormous television screens suspended in the air. There are no walls, no windows and no visible ceiling. The floor stretches into an endless expanse of pale light.

He walks toward the first screen.

BYU and Utah are playing football.

He moves toward the second.

Miami and Notre Dame.

The third shows Georgia and Ole Miss.

The fourth, Alabama and LSU.

Jason turns around.

There are now eight screens.

Then 16.

Then 32.

Each displays another game. College football. The NFL. The Premier League. Games that have already happened. Games that haven’t happened yet. Football games from decades ago that Jason remembers watching as a child.

He walks through the room.

The screens continue multiplying, stretching into an enormous corridor of light.

At its end sits a recliner.

An elderly man occupies it, watching four televisions.

Jason approaches.

The man turns.

It is Jason.

Much older, with a long white beard and a Philadelphia Eagles shirt that looks like it has survived several centuries.

The older Jason says nothing.

He points toward a remote sitting on the armrest.

Jason picks it up.

The older man smiles.

And disappears.

Suddenly, the televisions begin moving. They rotate around Jason, slowly at first, before accelerating into a brilliant ring of light.

The sound of a crowd rises from somewhere beyond the room.

Thousands of voices.

Then millions.

Jason looks down.

Beneath his feet is the Earth.

He is suspended above the planet, surrounded by football games, watching the entire world pass below him. Stadium lights illuminate the continents like constellations.

A football floats into view.

Jason reaches for it.

The moment his fingers touch the leather, everything goes white.

CUT TO: KELCE RESIDENCE — MORNING

Jason is standing in his living room.

The four televisions are off.

Kylie enters with a cup of coffee.

KYLIE: Jason?

He doesn’t respond.

KYLIE: Jason, are you OK?

Jason turns toward her.

For several seconds, he says nothing.

JASON: I think I understand.

KYLIE: Understand what?

Jason looks toward the televisions.

JASON: Everything.

CUT TO BLACK.

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The first College Football Playoff rankings are officially here, and Alabama somehow finds itself ranked fifth despite losing two of its past three games. Seth breaks down the committee’s bizarre decisions, the enormous SEC influence on the rankings and the questionable logic behind separating teams with head-to-head results. Plus, a look at the latest Corner Poll and the biggest differences between Seth’s rankings and the committee’s.

Then it’s time for one of the most loaded college football weekends in recent memory. No. 1 Miami travels to South Bend for an enormous showdown with Notre Dame, Alabama heads to Death Valley for a matchup with Lane Kiffin’s LSU Tigers, and undefeated Utah hosts BYU in a top-10 Holy War. Seth makes his picks for all three games, including some major upsets that could completely reshape the playoff picture.

Elsewhere, Georgia seeks revenge against Ole Miss in a rematch of last season’s playoff thriller, Ohio State attempts to survive without Julian Sayin against Oregon, and Kentucky looks to continue its remarkable season against Tennessee. Plus, Texas faces a tricky road test against Missouri, undefeated UCLA travels to Minnesota, Northwestern hosts Iowa, and Oklahoma attempts to turn things around against Florida.

The NFL takes center stage next, with the Chicago Bears attempting to continue their remarkable rise against Tampa Bay, Buffalo facing Minnesota’s dominant defense on Monday Night Football, and Jacksonville visiting a depleted Baltimore Ravens team. Seth picks every NFL game on the Week 10 slate, including Cincinnati’s matchup with Atlanta in Madrid, Kansas City’s attempt to rebound against the Jets and several intriguing NFC showdowns.

Finally, the Premier League enters its final weekend before the international break. Arsenal looks to extend its lead atop the table, Brighton attempts to continue its historic start against Brentford, and Tottenham hopes to win its fourth consecutive match against Leeds. Plus, Manchester United’s dramatic Champions League comeback raises new questions about Michael Carrick’s future ahead of a difficult matchup with Aston Villa.

Which game are you most excited to watch this weekend? Let us know your biggest upset picks in the comments, SUBSCRIBE to The Football Corner and CLICK THE BELL for more college football, NFL and Premier League predictions, recaps and commentary!

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Tuesday was election night in America, and while millions of people were watching television to discover who would control Congress, 13 other Americans were exercising their own democratic rights in a conference room somewhere, deciding the fate of the college football universe.

The results were, depending on your personal allegiances, either deeply encouraging or downright horrifying. An enormous SEC wave swept through the College Football Playoff rankings, lifting Alabama into the top five and giving several other conference members a renewed sense of purpose. UCLA, Notre Dame and BYU were among those left surveying the damage, wondering what they could’ve possibly done differently to earn the approval of their fellow Americans.

I’m not sure anybody would’ve predicted the magnitude of this SEC wave. It was a tremendous night for the conference, which somehow managed to place five teams inside the top 10 and 10 inside the top 25, despite the fact that its members have developed an unfortunate habit of beating each other to a pulp every Saturday.

There were some rather peculiar decisions along the way, and I’ve spent much of the past 24 hours attempting to understand them. I’ve consulted the numbers, examined the committee’s methodology and watched a considerable amount of media coverage featuring people who appeared even more confused than I was.

The committee might have a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything. I would love to hear it, because the explanations offered Tuesday night only made the whole thing more fascinating.

The SEC Wave Has Arrived

In my preseason SEC preview, I jokingly suggested that the conference’s new nine-game schedule would eventually produce a collection of three-loss teams demanding playoff consideration in November.

Well, we’re here. It’s November, the SEC has more representatives in the CFP rankings than any other conference and two of its three-loss teams are already among the nation’s top 25.

I’m not going to pretend the SEC isn’t good. I wrote extensively about the challenges of its nine-game schedule before the season began, and I’ve maintained that its depth is better than that of any other conference. The problem is that the committee’s treatment of the SEC appears substantially more generous than its treatment of everybody else.

Consider the representation in Tuesday’s rankings:

Five SEC teams occupy the top 10, including three with two losses: Alabama, Texas and Ole Miss. Meanwhile, undefeated UCLA is eighth, BYU is ninth despite beating Notre Dame, and Notre Dame itself is 11th despite sitting fourth in the AP poll.

The committee’s rankings are hardly a carbon copy of the national consensus. Alabama jumped from ninth in the AP poll to fifth in the CFP rankings, Texas moved from 10th to seventh and Ole Miss climbed into the top 10. Notre Dame, on the other hand, fell seven positions, while UCLA dropped three.

I’m not suggesting those movements are necessarily wrong. The committee exists precisely because college football wants somebody to conduct an independent evaluation, rather than simply reproducing whatever the AP voters decided Sunday morning.

But if the justification for placing two-loss SEC teams above undefeated opponents is strength of schedule, then I’d expect that philosophy to apply with some consistency throughout the rankings.

It doesn’t.

Alabama’s Remarkable Election Night

Alabama is the committee’s fifth-best team in college football, an extraordinary assessment for a program that has lost two of its past three games.

The Crimson Tide are 6-2, with losses against Georgia and Tennessee. The former was a competitive 20-17 defeat against the committee’s second-ranked team, while the latter was a 26-10 loss in Knoxville that wasn’t particularly competitive.

Alabama’s most impressive result came against Kentucky on Sept. 12, when the Tide overcame a four-point halftime deficit to win 45-17. They outscored the Wildcats 32-0 in the second half, held them to 209 total yards and allowed just one third-down conversion in 14 opportunities. That’s a tremendous victory, and Kentucky’s subsequent improvement has only made it more impressive. The Wildcats are 7-1 and ranked sixth, which makes Alabama’s 28-point road win one of the strongest results any team has produced this season.

There is also Alabama’s 49-18 victory over South Carolina, another team the committee apparently admires enough to rank 21st despite three defeats.

So the argument for Alabama is reasonably straightforward: the Crimson Tide have two wins over currently ranked opponents, including an absolute demolition of the team immediately behind them.

The problem is Tennessee.

The Volunteers are 6-2, just like Alabama, and defeated the Crimson Tide by 16 points. They have two three-point losses against Texas and South Carolina, both of which the committee also ranked.

Yet Tennessee finds itself 13th, eight positions behind Alabama, which means the committee believes the team that lost their head-to-head meeting by more than two touchdowns deserves to be substantially higher than the winner. ESPN’s Football Power Index provides some support for that assessment. Alabama ranks sixth in FPI, while Tennessee is 14th, and the Tide’s collection of quality wins is stronger.

But Alabama’s predictive strength isn’t an adequate explanation for everything else. Notre Dame ranks first in FPI and finds itself 11th in the CFP rankings, while Ohio State is second in FPI and 12th according to the committee. Kentucky, meanwhile, ranks 26th in FPI and sixth in the CFP. UCLA is 28th in FPI and eighth in the CFP.

In other words, the committee appears perfectly comfortable rewarding a strong résumé when evaluating Kentucky, predictive strength when evaluating Alabama and actual wins when evaluating Miami.

I suppose that’s one way to approach the exercise, although it makes predicting the rankings roughly as straightforward as predicting what will happen next on The Traitors.

The Committee’s Wonderful Little Clusters

There’s an explanation for some of this weirdness, and it involves the committee’s voting process, something that’s been a subject of controversy for a while now.

According to the official CFP selection protocol, members begin by identifying a pool of six teams before ranking them in smaller groups. The process continues through seven rounds of voting until all 25 positions have been filled.

This sounds OK until you consider what happens when two teams that played each other aren’t evaluated in the same group.

Take Ohio State, for instance. The Buckeyes defeated Indiana 19-15 in Bloomington on Oct. 17, but the Hoosiers are ranked fourth and Ohio State is 12th. Committee chairman and Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek acknowledged Tuesday that the committee never directly compared the two programs because they weren’t in the same group.

Alabama and Kentucky, meanwhile, were compared against each other, and Alabama’s head-to-head victory helped determine their order.

So Alabama gets credit for beating Kentucky because the two programs happened to be evaluated together, while Ohio State’s victory over Indiana receives no equivalent direct comparison because the teams were too far apart in the committee’s preliminary assessment.

Wonderful. We’ve created a ranking system where the importance of an actual football result depends, at least partly, on which group of teams happens to appear on somebody’s ballot.

To be fair, Ohio State’s loss against USC was ugly, and quarterback Julian Sayin’s absence creates legitimate questions about the Buckeyes’ immediate future. Indiana’s superior record also deserves consideration, though the Hoosiers have continually had to survive scares, this past weekend’s overtime adventure against Minnesota being the latest chapter in that story.

But Ohio State has the better predictive profile. It beat Indiana on the road. And if we’re going to reward Alabama so heavily for defeating Kentucky, I would appreciate somebody explaining why the same logic isn’t being applied with comparable enthusiasm elsewhere.

The committee says it evaluates each team’s full body of work, and I’m willing to believe that’s what its members are attempting to do. I just wish the results reflected a more coherent understanding of what constitutes an impressive body of work.

The Three-Loss Club Is Back in Business

Tuesday was also a wonderful evening for South Carolina, Oregon and Florida, three programs that had probably begun making alternative holiday arrangements before discovering that the committee still considers them among the country’s 25 best teams.

South Carolina is 21st at 5-3, Oregon is 23rd at 5-3 and Florida is 24th at 5-3. All three sit above schools like New Mexico or Northwestern, the former of which is 7-1 and ranked 22nd in the AP poll but received no invitation to the committee’s exclusive little gathering.

There are legitimate arguments for those placements. Oregon has played an extremely difficult schedule, Florida owns a victory over Texas and South Carolina has defeated Tennessee. Their records don’t necessarily reflect their underlying quality, which is precisely why predictive metrics and schedule adjustments exist.

But the committee’s decision creates an uncomfortable incentive for teams outside the major conferences. Apparently, seven wins and one loss aren’t necessarily worth as much as five victories and three defeats if the latter come against opponents the committee already considers impressive.

And while that might be mathematically defensible, there’s also a possibility of creating a rather convenient feedback loop. SEC teams receive credit for beating other SEC teams that are ranked because they’ve beaten still more SEC teams, and eventually everybody receives a participation certificate for surviving the conference schedule.

I’m exaggerating, obviously. But only a little.

The new strength-of-conference enhancement was designed to provide more context about schedule difficulty, and it appears to have arrived at exactly the right moment for the SEC.

The committee has made clear that losing doesn’t necessarily disqualify a team if the opposition is sufficiently strong. Fair enough. I would simply like to know where that forgiveness ends, because the boundary seems to move depending on which team is being evaluated.

The Official Corner Poll (Finally)

Enough of the committee’s nonsense. It’s time to introduce an entirely different variety of nonsense.

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The following is an excerpt from this week’s The Football Notebook. To read the full article, subscribe and click the link below.

There is a fairly simple argument for firing Mike Norvell, and it doesn’t require much beyond looking at Florida State’s record over the past three seasons. The Seminoles went 2-10 in 2024, followed that with a 5-7 campaign in 2025 and have started this season 3-5, with Saturday’s 36-24 loss to Clemson proving to be the final straw. That’s 10 victories in 32 games for a program that entered the 2024 season believing it had one of the best coaches in college football. If Florida State had finished 8-4 in each of those seasons, we’d be having a very different conversation. But it didn’t, and there is only so long an administration can continue insisting that a successful turnaround is right around the corner before everybody stops believing it.

So Norvell is gone, which is an outcome that has seemed likely for most of the past two years. Florida State announced his dismissal Sunday, named Rick Stockstill its interim coach and began the search for somebody capable of restoring the program to something resembling its former standing. None of that is surprising, although I do find it remarkable that the Seminoles managed to tolerate so much losing before reaching a conclusion that many people thought was obvious after the 2024 season.

What is surprising, or at least what ought to be surprising, is how much money Florida State will have to pay to make the change. Depending on which report and contract calculation you use, Norvell’s buyout is worth somewhere around $47 million to $50 million, with the costs of dismissing other members of his staff potentially pushing the total much higher. Even allowing for the fact that his future earnings could reduce what Florida State ultimately owes, this is an enormous amount of money to spend on somebody the university no longer wants to employ.

And before we get too far into the discussion, I should clarify something. I don’t blame Norvell for negotiating the contract that put him in this position, because I don’t believe there’s a person reading this who would have turned down the same arrangement. If somebody offered me more than $10 million a year to coach college football and promised to pay me tens of millions more if they eventually decided I wasn’t very good at it, I would accept before they had an opportunity to reconsider. I’d probably even offer to pay for lunch afterward.

But that’s a rather different question from whether Florida State should have agreed to those terms, and I think the distinction matters. We’ve developed a habit of examining coaching contracts only after they’ve become financial disasters, then treating the entire arrangement as though it was obviously a terrible idea from the beginning. Sometimes that’s true, but I’m not convinced it was entirely true in this case. The real problem is that Florida State made a defensible decision in 2024 without doing enough to protect itself against the possibility that its assumptions about the future might be wrong.

To understand how we got here, we need to return to the end of the 2023 season, when Norvell was one of the hottest names in college football and Florida State appeared to have restored itself to national prominence. The Seminoles went undefeated through the ACC championship game, finishing 13-0 and winning their first conference title in nearly a decade. They had gone 10-3 the previous season, and the improvement under Norvell looked genuine. Florida State wasn’t winning games because of some unusual statistical fluke or a series of fortunate bounces. It had assembled a talented roster and was beating good football teams.

Then Jordan Travis suffered a season-ending injury, and the College Football Playoff committee decided the Seminoles were no longer deserving of a place in the four-team field. I’m not going to spend another thousand words explaining why that decision was wrong, although I certainly could, because it remains one of the most irritating things I’ve witnessed in college football. Florida State did everything asked of it and was punished for an injury to its quarterback, a standard that wasn’t applied with anything resembling consistency. The Seminoles deserved to play for a national championship, and the fact that they weren’t allowed to remains a stain on the final year of the four-team playoff.

The point, though, is that Florida State had every reason to believe its program was moving in the right direction. Norvell had inherited a mess, worked through some difficult early seasons and produced a team that won 13 consecutive games against legitimate competition. If you’d asked me in December 2023 whether the Seminoles should try to keep him, I would have said yes without much hesitation. I suspect most people who follow college football would have agreed.

Then Nick Saban retired at Alabama, which changed the entire calculation.

The Crimson Tide needed a replacement for the most successful coach of the modern era, and Norvell’s name emerged among the leading candidates. Washington’s Kalen DeBoer was another obvious possibility, having just led the Huskies to the national championship game, but Florida State had no way of knowing which direction Alabama would go. Norvell was coming off an undefeated conference championship season, his reputation had never been higher, and the Seminoles were faced with the prospect of losing the man responsible for their revival at the worst possible moment.

Florida State responded by giving Norvell an eight-year extension worth more than $84 million, keeping him under contract through 2031 and placing him among the highest-paid coaches in the sport. DeBoer eventually took the Alabama job, Norvell remained in Tallahassee, and the Seminoles could congratulate themselves for making sure their head coach wasn’t going anywhere. At the time, that probably seemed like a good outcome for everybody involved, especially the people responsible for convincing wealthy Florida State supporters that the program was prepared to compete for championships.

I don’t think the decision to retain Norvell was foolish. In fact, I think the university would have been criticized far more heavily had it allowed him to leave after a 13-win season without making a serious effort to keep him. The problem was the structure of the agreement, which assumed that preventing Norvell from leaving was worth exposing the university to a massive financial penalty if it eventually wanted him gone. Florida State wasn’t merely paying for the coach it already had. It was betting that the coach it had would continue being successful for most of the next decade.

That’s an important distinction because good coaching decisions and good coaching outcomes aren’t the same thing. Sometimes a university hires somebody who looks like an excellent candidate, only to discover three years later that the arrangement isn’t working. Sometimes a coach who appeared to be heading toward unemployment turns everything around and becomes a national championship contender. There are too many variables involved in college football for anybody to be certain about what will happen, and pretending otherwise is a good way to get yourself into trouble.

If I’m Florida State in January 2024, I’m operating under the assumption that Norvell is more likely to succeed than fail. The evidence supports that belief, and losing him to Alabama would have created a difficult situation for a program that had just enjoyed its best season in years. But I’m also asking what happens if the program takes a step backward, or if the transfer portal additions don’t work out, or if the roster loses more talent than it can replace. Those aren’t unlikely scenarios. They’re the sorts of things that happen to football programs every single season, which is why guaranteeing so much money to one person strikes me as an unnecessary risk.

Of course, I doubt anybody at Florida State expected the worst-case scenario to arrive quite so quickly.

The Seminoles went 2-10 in 2024, producing one of the most embarrassing seasons in the program’s history. The offense was dreadful, the transfers failed to deliver what had been promised, and the team often looked incapable of competing against opponents it would have expected to beat a year earlier. There were plenty of explanations for why things went wrong, but none of them changed the scoreboard. Florida State had gone from being undefeated in conference championship week to losing 10 games in the span of a year, and there wasn’t much reason to believe the decline was some temporary statistical accident.

At most programs, that would have been enough to get the coach fired. Florida State is not supposed to go 2-10, and it certainly isn’t supposed to go 2-10 while paying its head coach more than $10 million annually. Yet Norvell survived, in part because dismissing him would have required the university to absorb one of the largest buyouts in college football history. It was a difficult position, and I can understand why Florida State’s administrators hoped another season might produce a turnaround.

That doesn’t mean keeping him was necessarily the wrong decision, either. One of the problems with college football’s coaching carousel is that administrators often react to disappointing seasons as though every setback proves that a coach has forgotten how to do his job. Norvell had demonstrated the ability to win at Florida State, and there was at least a plausible argument that the 2024 season represented an extreme collapse from which the program might recover. Giving him another year wasn’t an outrageous choice, even if there were plenty of reasons to be skeptical.

But that argument became harder to make in 2025, when Florida State went 5-7 despite opening the season with a victory over Alabama. The Seminoles showed enough early promise to suggest that the previous year might have been an exception, only to spend the rest of the campaign proving that the program’s problems had not been fixed. Norvell made changes, brought in new players and tried to give supporters reasons to believe. The results didn’t support the optimism, and the margin for error entering 2026 had become awfully small.

By this point, Florida State’s administration was dealing with two separate questions. One was whether Norvell remained the right person to coach the Seminoles, and the other was whether the program could justify spending tens of millions of dollars to replace him. Those questions were related, but they weren’t identical. Keeping a coach because you believe he’s likely to improve the program is one thing. Keeping him because you’ve already committed so much money that admitting the mistake feels unbearable is another.

That’s where these contracts become dangerous, because the money already committed begins influencing decisions that ought to be based on what gives the football program its best chance of succeeding. There are legitimate financial reasons to delay a coaching change, including the immediate costs of a buyout and the expense of hiring a replacement. But there is also a cost to continuing down a path that isn’t working, particularly when every disappointing season makes the program less attractive to recruits and harder to sell to supporters.

Florida State finally decided that the second cost had become greater than the first. Following Saturday’s loss to Clemson, a game the Seminoles entered as favorites, the administration determined that enough evidence had accumulated to justify moving on. I think that’s the right decision, although it would have been better for everybody involved if the university hadn’t spent the past three seasons reaching it.

The broader issue is that Florida State isn’t alone. Texas A&M paid Jimbo Fisher more than $75 million to leave in 2023, and LSU found itself facing another enormous buyout when it dismissed Brian Kelly last year. There are other coaches around the country whose contracts would make separating from them a difficult financial undertaking, often because an athletic director became frightened that somebody else might offer a better deal. The numbers have reached the point where a coach getting fired is sometimes less interesting than the amount of money the school has agreed to pay him afterward.

Why does this keep happening? I think the answer has a lot to do with the incentives facing the people making these decisions. An athletic director who loses a successful coach to another school faces immediate anger from fans and donors, while an athletic director who gives that same coach a massive extension usually receives praise for demonstrating ambition. The contract’s risks might not become apparent for several years, by which point the administrator responsible for negotiating it may have moved on to another job. Meanwhile, the coach and his agent have every reason to push for as much guaranteed money as possible, because that’s what they’re being paid to do.

It’s a system that rewards short-term thinking, even though everybody involved insists they’re making decisions for the long-term health of the program. Florida State could have offered Norvell a substantial raise without agreeing to the sort of financial protection that now makes his dismissal so expensive. The Seminoles might have risked losing him, but that risk needed to be weighed against the possibility of being stuck with a coach who wasn’t winning. Instead, the university paid a premium to avoid one outcome and ended up suffering an even more expensive one.

And there is a broader question about the value of a head coach that I think deserves more attention. We’re accustomed to discussing the position as though the right person can transform an entire football program through sheer force of personality, and there are certainly coaches who have demonstrated an ability to do that. But successful teams also depend on recruiting departments, coordinators, financial resources and the players themselves. Florida State had all of those things working in its favor in 2023, and when several of them began to break down, Norvell proved unable to compensate.

Perhaps that’s the real lesson here. Athletic departments place so much emphasis on retaining or acquiring a famous coach that they sometimes forget the rest of the organization matters, too. Florida State invested an enormous amount of money in the person at the top, then discovered that the name on the office door wasn’t enough to prevent everything underneath him from falling apart.

The Seminoles will now begin another coaching search, presumably hoping to find somebody who can reproduce the success Norvell briefly delivered. Whoever gets the job will inherit a program with plenty of resources and a fan base that has become understandably tired of losing. I hope Florida State finds the right person, but I also hope the university has learned that no coach is worth surrendering its ability to change course when things go wrong.

Because the most remarkable part of this entire story isn’t that Mike Norvell got fired. It’s that Florida State had to spend around $50 million to do something everybody knew was coming.

Manchester United falls 2-0 to Chelsea, leaving Michael Carrick’s struggling side in 17th place with just seven points. Despite some encouraging moments at Stamford Bridge, United’s problems continue to pile up. Why hasn’t Carrick been fired? Is there anything he can do to save his job? And how much of the blame belongs to the people running the club?

Meanwhile, Arsenal earns a massive 1-0 victory over Liverpool at Anfield, extending its lead atop the Premier League table. Liverpool manages 18 shots without putting a single one on target, while Mikel Arteta’s side delivers another defensive masterclass. Have the Gunners already established themselves as overwhelming title favorites, or is there somebody capable of challenging them?

Manchester City remains Arsenal’s closest competition, but a 1-0 defeat to Brighton raises more questions about Pep Guardiola’s squad. Brighton continues its remarkable start with victories over both Arsenal and City, making a legitimate case for Champions League qualification. Plus, Tottenham wins its third consecutive match, Chelsea shows signs of progress, and Bournemouth continues its incredible run of form.

Finally, it’s time for a Premier League table reset. Crystal Palace, Nottingham Forest and Sunderland are struggling near the bottom, while Manchester United finds itself uncomfortably close to the relegation zone. Could one of England’s biggest clubs actually go down? And which mid-table teams have the best chance of climbing into European contention?

Is Arsenal already running away with the Premier League title? Let us know in the comments, SUBSCRIBE to The Football Corner and CLICK THE BELL for more Premier League analysis, Champions League coverage and soccer commentary!

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There are only two topics in today’s notebook, but they are both doozies, so prepare yourselves accordingly. Without further ado, let’s open the notebook.

Florida State, Mike Norvell and College Football’s Buyout Problem

There is a fairly simple argument for firing Mike Norvell, and it doesn’t require much beyond looking at Florida State’s record over the past three seasons. The Seminoles went 2-10 in 2024, followed that with a 5-7 campaign in 2025 and have started this season 3-5, with Saturday’s 36-24 loss to Clemson proving to be the final straw. That’s 10 victories in 32 games for a program that entered the 2024 season believing it had one of the best coaches in college football. If Florida State had finished 8-4 in each of those seasons, we’d be having a very different conversation. But it didn’t, and there is only so long an administration can continue insisting that a successful turnaround is right around the corner before everybody stops believing it.

So Norvell is gone, which is an outcome that has seemed likely for most of the past two years. Florida State announced his dismissal Sunday, named Rick Stockstill its interim coach and began the search for somebody capable of restoring the program to something resembling its former standing. None of that is surprising, although I do find it remarkable that the Seminoles managed to tolerate so much losing before reaching a conclusion that many people thought was obvious after the 2024 season.

What is surprising, or at least what ought to be surprising, is how much money Florida State will have to pay to make the change. Depending on which report and contract calculation you use, Norvell’s buyout is worth somewhere around $47 million to $50 million, with the costs of dismissing other members of his staff potentially pushing the total much higher. Even allowing for the fact that his future earnings could reduce what Florida State ultimately owes, this is an enormous amount of money to spend on somebody the university no longer wants to employ.

And before we get too far into the discussion, I should clarify something. I don’t blame Norvell for negotiating the contract that put him in this position, because I don’t believe there’s a person reading this who would have turned down the same arrangement. If somebody offered me more than $10 million a year to coach college football and promised to pay me tens of millions more if they eventually decided I wasn’t very good at it, I would accept before they had an opportunity to reconsider. I’d probably even offer to pay for lunch afterward.

But that’s a rather different question from whether Florida State should have agreed to those terms, and I think the distinction matters. We’ve developed a habit of examining coaching contracts only after they’ve become financial disasters, then treating the entire arrangement as though it was obviously a terrible idea from the beginning. Sometimes that’s true, but I’m not convinced it was entirely true in this case. The real problem is that Florida State made a defensible decision in 2024 without doing enough to protect itself against the possibility that its assumptions about the future might be wrong.

To understand how we got here, we need to return to the end of the 2023 season, when Norvell was one of the hottest names in college football and Florida State appeared to have restored itself to national prominence. The Seminoles went undefeated through the ACC championship game, finishing 13-0 and winning their first conference title in nearly a decade. They had gone 10-3 the previous season, and the improvement under Norvell looked genuine. Florida State wasn’t winning games because of some unusual statistical fluke or a series of fortunate bounces. It had assembled a talented roster and was beating good football teams.

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Detroit grinds out a 19-15 victory over Minnesota behind 230 rushing yards and a brilliant performance from Jahmyr Gibbs, although a frightening injury to linebacker Jack Campbell overshadows the win. Meanwhile, Denver erases an 11-point fourth-quarter deficit to beat Kansas City 28-24, while Buffalo dismantles Baltimore after Lamar Jackson suffers another potentially devastating injury.

Elsewhere, Joe Burrow throws for 462 yards and five touchdowns as Cincinnati survives a ridiculous 43-36 overtime thriller against Tennessee. Pittsburgh continues rolling against Cleveland, and Las Vegas outlasts the Jets in another wild AFC matchup.

Then there are the Dallas Cowboys, who somehow blow another double-digit lead against Gardner Minshew and the Arizona Cardinals. Dallas falls 33-30 in overtime, sending Seth into another rant about Jerry Jones, Brian Schottenheimer and an organization that has seemingly perfected the art of embarrassing itself.

Finally, the weirdest results of Week 9 take center stage. Tampa Bay beats Atlanta 16-0 WITHOUT COMPLETING A PASS, Miami collapses against New England, the Chargers remain winless, and Washington embarrasses Philadelphia on Sunday Night Football.

Which Week 9 result surprised you the most? Let us know in the comments, SUBSCRIBE to The Football Corner and CLICK THE BELL for more NFL recaps, predictions and commentary!

00:00 Welcome to After Sunday!

02:36 Lions Spoil Vikings’ Unbeaten Season

13:22 Broncos Stun Chiefs

20:51 Ravens Lose as Lamar Jackson’s Season Potentially Ends

28:22 Bengals and Titans Play a Thriller

34:52 Cowboys Embarrass Themselves vs. Cardinals

46:40 Steelers Take Down Cleveland

56:46 Weird and Wacky Results from Week 9

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Lincoln Riley earns perhaps the biggest victory of his USC tenure with a 30-18 win over No. 2 Ohio State, leaving the Buckeyes with serious questions about their quarterback situation and playoff hopes. Meanwhile, Indiana needs a miraculous 60-yard field goal to force overtime against Minnesota, Miami survives a scare from Bill Belichick’s Tar Heels, and Georgia absolutely dismantles Florida in a game that was somehow even uglier than the final score suggested.

The Big 12 continues to make absolutely no sense. Texas Tech rebounds against Arizona behind a dominant rushing attack, Utah demolishes Cincinnati, and BYU survives Arizona State ahead of next weekend’s enormous Holy War. Plus, Iowa State and Oklahoma State transport us back to the glory days of Big 12 football with a 51-49 thriller featuring 100 combined points and practically nonexistent defense.

Elsewhere, Iowa embarrasses Wisconsin, Nebraska finds another heartbreaking way to lose against Washington, and Wake Forest continues to make its case as a legitimate College Football Playoff contender. Oregon keeps its postseason hopes alive against Northwestern, Notre Dame takes a little too long to figure out Navy’s triple option, and Syracuse hands SMU another frustrating defeat.

And because it’s Halloween weekend, we’re celebrating some of the funniest results in college football. Duke beats Boston College 47-2, Colorado survives Kansas State, South Carolina crushes Oklahoma, and Clemson puts away Florida State in another strange chapter of the ACC season.

Finally, we look ahead to an absolutely loaded Week 10 featuring Miami vs. Notre Dame, BYU vs. Utah, Alabama vs. LSU, Oregon vs. Ohio State, Kentucky vs. Tennessee and several more games with enormous postseason implications.

Which Week 9 result surprised you the most? Let us know in the comments, SUBSCRIBE to The Football Corner and CLICK THE BELL for notifications as we bring you college football recaps, predictions and commentary throughout the season!

00:00 Welcome to After Saturday!

03:06 USC Upsets Ohio State

12:43 Indiana Survives (Again) vs. Minnesota

21:13 Miami Beats North Carolina

28:12 Georgia Clobbers Florida in Atlanta

34:55 Texas Tech Takes Down Arizona

40:31 Oklahoma State and Iowa State Play a Thriller

46:39 Utah and BYU Keep Winning

50:40 Rapid Fire Week 9 Reactions

01:04:08 The Funniest Results of Week 9

01:11:02 Previewing Week 10

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Welcome to this week’s Corner Poll, where I think it’s important that we acknowledge something before proceeding: We are in uncharted waters. Much like the sailors on The Wager, we’re encountering territories we’ve never seen before.

I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time staring at these rankings, attempting to make sense of what’s happening across college football, the NFL and the Premier League, and I’ve reached the rather concerning conclusion that none of it makes much sense at all. There is so much wacky, inexplicable nonsense taking place that the whole exercise has begun to boggle the mind, and that’s before we even get to some of the decisions I’ve made.

At some point, trying to impose order on this madness becomes a waste of everybody’s time, so I’ve decided to embrace it instead. Teams are occupying places I never imagined they’d reach, the usual suspects have found themselves in unfamiliar circumstances, and I’ve resorted to some rather unconventional methods of determining who belongs where. I would attempt to defend all of this, but I’m not entirely certain I could do so with a straight face. So, welcome aboard. We’re sailing into completely uncharted territory, and I haven’t the slightest idea where we’re going.

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Welcome back to the Weekend Watchlist, where the Kelce family has spent the better part of the past decade enjoying the privileges that come with saving the world, occupying the White House and becoming perhaps the most celebrated family in American history.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Jason Kelce might not have saved the world after all.

Ten years have passed since Jason supposedly redirected an asteroid using an NFL Sunday Ticket satellite dish, an act of heroism that propelled him into the presidency. Investigative reporting has since uncovered evidence that the entire incident was manufactured using sophisticated satellite and projection technology, something akin to Mysterio’s illusions in Spider-Man: Far From Home.

Jason was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. He maintains that the public has misunderstood what happened, and with 34 days remaining before he must report to prison, he and Kylie have invited a documentary crew into their home to tell their side of the story.

They’ve promised the filmmakers complete access.

Or something resembling it.

The following is an entirely fictional parody.

YOU CAN WATCH EVERYTHING

34 DAYS UNTIL FEDERAL PRISON

INT. KELCE RESIDENCE — AFTERNOON

The camera remains fixed on Jason Kelce, sitting in his living room. Behind him, four televisions are mounted to the wall.

All four are turned off.

FILMMAKER: Why did you want us to make this documentary?

JASON: I think people have a certain idea of who I am, and I don’t think it’s accurate. I want people to see the real me.

FILMMAKER: What do you think they don’t understand?

JASON: I think there’s a difference between what actually happened and what people think happened.

FILMMAKER: But you were convicted of creating a fake asteroid.

JASON: Right.

FILMMAKER: So what actually happened?

JASON: Well, people saw an asteroid.

FILMMAKER: Because you made them see one.

Jason smiles.

JASON: I think you’re getting caught up in the wrong part of the story.

A long silence.

FILMMAKER: What’s the right part?

JASON: That everybody was OK afterward.

The camera remains on Jason for several seconds longer than seems necessary.

CUT TO: DOCUMENTARY INTERVIEW — KYLIE

FILMMAKER: Do you believe Jason is innocent?

Kylie looks toward the floor.

KYLIE: I believe Jason believes he’s innocent.

FILMMAKER: Is that different?

KYLIE: I don’t know. I think that’s why you’re here.

CUT TO: DOCUMENTARY INTERVIEW — JASON

FILMMAKER: You’ve said that people have misunderstood you. Do you think the media is responsible for that?

JASON: Well, yeah. I think that’s a big part of it. They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.

The filmmaker looks up from his notes.

FILMMAKER: A character you created?

JASON: Right.

FILMMAKER: So you created a character?

Jason pauses.

JASON: No, I mean, they created the character. That’s what I’m saying.

FILMMAKER: But you just said you created it.

JASON: Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I say something, and then somebody takes what I said and makes it mean something else.

FILMMAKER: I’m asking what you meant.

JASON: And I’m telling you.

The filmmaker waits.

Jason waits.

Neither speaks.

CUT TO: LIVING ROOM — EVENING

Jason has turned on the televisions. Three display sporting events. The fourth shows a satellite image of Earth.

The filmmaker points toward the fourth screen.

FILMMAKER: Is that the same system you used ten years ago?

JASON: It’s a newer version.

FILMMAKER: Could you show us how it works?

JASON: Sure.

Jason reaches for a remote.

He pauses.

JASON: Actually, I don’t think I should.

FILMMAKER: Why?

JASON: Well, I don’t want you to think I’m trying to create something that isn’t there.

FILMMAKER: Do you think we would?

JASON: I don’t know. Why would I deceive you? I don’t have anything to deceive on.

The filmmaker looks at him.

FILMMAKER: You were convicted of fraud.

JASON: Right.

FILMMAKER: For deceiving people.

JASON: That’s what the jury decided.

FILMMAKER: But you’re telling me you wouldn’t deceive us.

JASON: Of course not. Why would I invite you here if I was going to do that?

The filmmaker looks back toward the television.

FILMMAKER: Then why can’t you show us how it works?

Jason looks confused.

JASON: I am showing you. You’re looking at it right now.

Neither says anything.

From somewhere in the house, Kylie calls for Jason.

He gets up and leaves.

The camera stays on the empty couch.

CUT TO: DOCUMENTARY INTERVIEW — FILMMAKER

FILMMAKER: Jason invited us here because he believes that if people spend enough time watching him, they’ll understand that he’s telling the truth. But I started wondering whether the amount of time we spent with him had anything to do with our ability to understand what happened.

He looks toward somebody off-camera.

FILMMAKER: I also wondered why he had agreed to let us film him in the first place.

A pause.

FILMMAKER: I hadn’t asked him that.

CUT TO BLACK.

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College Football Week 9 brings a loaded slate, including Ohio State vs. USC, Georgia vs. Florida, Arizona vs. Texas Tech, Northwestern vs. Oregon and Utah vs. Cincinnati. Can Indiana keep rolling against Minnesota? Will Miami survive North Carolina? And could another ranked team find itself on the wrong end of a Halloween upset?

The NFL Week 8 schedule has its own share of massive matchups. The Ravens face the Bills, the Chiefs take on the Broncos, and the Lions battle the Vikings in a crucial NFC North showdown. Plus, Eagles vs. Commanders on Sunday Night Football, Bears vs. Seahawks on Monday Night Football and a full slate of predictions across the league.

In the Premier League, Chelsea host Manchester United, Liverpool face Arsenal, and Brighton attempt to continue their remarkable season against Manchester City. Tottenham also face Crystal Palace, while Aston Villa look to maintain their momentum against Fulham.

And we’re not finished with soccer just yet. Inter Milan vs. AC Milan and Napoli vs. Juventus round out another enormous weekend across Europe.

Every game gets a pick. Every prediction goes on the record. And if last week’s 23-24 showing taught us anything, it’s that nobody is safe from a little humiliation.

What are your biggest upset picks this weekend? Let us know in the comments, SUBSCRIBE to The Football Corner and CLICK THE BELL for notifications as we bring you multiple football shows every week!

00:00 Welcome to The Kickoff!

00:43 Recapping Last Week’s Picks

05:28 Picking Every NFL Week 8 Game

38:33 Picking Every College Football Week 9 Game

01:04:49 Picking Every Premier League Matchweek 9 Game

Every football season deserves to be remembered.

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Manchester United’s 3-0 defeat to Bournemouth has raised even more questions about Michael Carrick’s future, the decision to bench Bruno Fernandes and whether there’s any realistic solution to the problems at Old Trafford. Meanwhile, Bournemouth are enjoying a remarkable week after beating AC Milan in the Europa League before dismantling United. Aston Villa handed Manchester City a rare defeat, raising questions about whether Unai Emery is the best manager in the Premier League, Nico Jackson’s emergence and whether City’s siege mentality has finally run its course.

And yes, Tottenham Hotspur have beaten Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. An improbable, historic victory that might genuinely be the greatest day of Seth’s life. We’ll relive every glorious moment before discussing Liverpool’s win over Brighton and Arsenal’s thoroughly unremarkable victory against Everton. Of course, that Arsenal result looks considerably less important after Fleetwood Town produced an absolutely astonishing Carabao Cup upset. Is this the greatest shock in English football history?

Plus, Real Madrid win El Clásico, Harry Kane takes home the Ballon d’Or, and there’s plenty more to discuss from another unforgettable week of football.

What was the biggest result of the week? Is Carrick’s time at Manchester United running out? And just how far can this Tottenham team go? Let us know in the comments, SUBSCRIBE to The Football Corner and CLICK THE BELL for notifications as we bring you football coverage throughout the week!

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#PremierLeague #ManchesterUnited #Tottenham #Chelsea #Arsenal #RealMadrid #TheMatchbook