OK, so the score is 24-24. Undefeated BYU has just forced a fumble on UCF quarterback Keyone Jenkins to set itself up for a game-winning field goal! One of the BYU players was so excited he got flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct.

However, the fumble was overturned because Jenkins was ruled to have thrown an incomplete pass. HOWEVER, the penalty from the post-fumble celebration still stood, even though there was technically no fumble to celebrate. This reversal of fortune gave UCF the ball and a bunch of additional field position to attempt a game-winning field goal of its own.

HOWEVER, BYU blocked the kick! The game was headed to overtime.

HOWEVER, the kick was attempted on third down. And because UCF’s kicker picked up the ball and ran with it, UCF technically retained possession, bringing up fourth down and another opportunity to kick.

HOWEVER! as the kicker ran with the ball, his helmet came off, which stopped the clock. But because the helmet came off during the closing minutes of regulation, it then led to a 10-second run-off, which ended regulation. (The run-off wouldn’t have occurred if the helmet was removed due to a defensive penalty like a facemask, but it seemed to fly off because of a legal hit. Kickers typically don’t strap on their helmets tightly because they don’t expect to be tackled.)

HOWEVER², NBC rules analyst Terry McAulay pointed out that the helmet clock stoppage should have been overruled by the fact that all kicking plays end with a clock stoppage. Approximately 99.9 percent of the time, the clock would have stopped after the kick due to a score or a change of possession. But in this rare instance, when a kick gets blocked and the kicking team recovers it on third down, the clock should also stop automatically. Therefore, there was no need for the run-off triggered by the helmet removal.

When the refs made the helmet-removal-clock-stoppage call, I was like, “damn, that’s good reffing, I didn’t think about that.” Then Terry showed up with his once-in-a-lifetime Uno Reverse card ruling from an even deeper section of the rulebook and I was like, “damn, no wonder half of the refs in the NFL are lawyers.”

Anyway, there we were, 11 rounds deep into a sword fight between guys who have spent their lifetimes studying the rulebook for its most bizarre edge cases … and I couldn’t help thinking about how a few plays earlier, UCF’s quarterback lined up and spiked the ball on first down for no particular reason, to the bewilderment of all his teammates and coaches.

A few minutes later, UCF fans were using the end zone cabanas like the emergency exit slide on an airplane.

I thought college football was starting to make more sense in 2026. We finally know how much money teams are spending on players! Reporters from The Athletic started tracking how often teams that spend more money beat teams that spend less money, and sure enough: Almost all the time. In Weeks 1-7, teams with a $5 million roster advantage had a winning record every single week. It felt like we could finally explain the world’s most chaotic sport.

That understanding crashed in Week 8. For the first time all season, the teams that spent less money had a winning record, going 10-4 in matchups against teams with at least a $5 million spending advantage.

Elsewhere in the Big 12: Cincinnati, ranked 66th out of the 68 power conference teams in spending, beat Texas Tech, the team whose oil money billionaire bought Cincinnati’s quarterback from the previous year. (He ended up not playing for Texas Tech — you may have heard about it, it was the #1 college football storyline of June.)

Last week, BYU felled mighty Notre Dame. This week, it lost to a team that lost 12-7 to Pitt. Every team in the SEC has beaten every other team in the SEC. I am done trying to make sense of all this. We are in The Nonsense Season, a year defined by teams looking great one week and garbage the next.

11/6: UConn men’s basketball vs. Michigan, in Boston

11/7: UConn football vs. North Carolina, in East Hartford

11/8: UConn women’s basketball vs. Iowa, in Storrs

If you play New Mexico, you have to say goodbye to the ball. The Lobos lead the nation with 23 forced turnovers. They’re first in interceptions (15) and third in fumbles gained (8).

They got a pretty big one Saturday night. Austin Brawley had a huge pick-six in the fourth quarter that pretty much iced the game:

Eck was an A++++ hire for the Lobos. In his first head coaching job at Idaho, he took the Vandals to their first three FCS playoff appearances. This man was accustomed to working miracles in unusual places west of the Rockies.

In Year 1 of Eck, the Lobos went 9-4 and missed out on the Mountain West Championship Game due to a tiebreaker. Their season finale against San Diego State drew 30,000. It was the first time I’d ever tuned into a New Mexico game and thought there were people there.

The football is the most important part, but Eck also just Gets It from a cultural standpoint. Last week, he appeared in a skit where he pretended to blend in as an employee in the New Mexico ticket sales office:

(Eck has actually done several skits attempting to boost ticket sales; last year he did a remake of the so-cringe-you-have-to-skip-over-it-on-your-rewatch Scott’s Tots episode of The Office, and pretended to be Tony Soprano in a schedule release video.)

(I think they’re intentionally avoiding a certain TV show that took place in Albuquerque, for understandable reasons.)

There is a bittersweet note to New Mexico’s incredible season: It’s almost definitely the final ride for Eck, who was a hot commodity on last year’s coaching market but signed an extension with the Lobos. He’s gonna get snapped up by somebody with a bigger budget than UNM. I hate talking about it, but it’s obviously true.

This season is either the start of something or the end of something for New Mexico. Maybe the Lobos can build off the Eck era … or maybe it will be the last time they ever pack out the stadium like this in Albuquerque.

Either way: They’ve got to make the most of this moment. With no undefeated teams left in the non-power conferences, UNM will have a legit case for the 12th spot in the playoffs if it can win out.

Every year, Iowa fans swear that their team is different — that, this time, the Hawkeyes have finally put together a competent offense to pair with their usual corn-fed defense and future NFL punter.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Defense-and-a-punter was good enough to get Iowa into the top 20 of the polls, and it was almost good enough to beat Minnesota. The Golden Gophers scored only one touchdown in this game: a fourth-and-inches run up the middle after Iowa had stuffed Minnesota on first-and-inches, second-and-inches, third-and-inches, and fourth-and-inches. Minnesota got to redo fourth-and-inches because an Iowa player was offsides.

Minnesota’s defense was almost as mean as Iowa’s in this game. It forced four turnovers, including three interceptions off Iowa’s two bad quarterbacks. The Gophers also blocked a punt to set up their first field goal.

You don’t win the pig unless you play in the slop. The final score of this game was 13-10, Minnesota. In 2022, the score of this game was 12-10, Minnesota. In 2021, it was 13-10, Iowa. When these two teams played for the first Floyd of Rosedale — an actual live pig — back in 1935, the score was 13-6. These teams figured out how many points they like scoring 100 years ago and they will keep scoring that many points forever.

Floyd’s origin goes back to two long-ago governors trying to restore some friendliness to a rivalry that had gotten out of hand. Iowan Lucy Rohden explained it well yesterday:

Minnesota plays for five rivalry trophies, the second-most in the sport. Notre Dame plays for six, but some of those series are rarely played.

The Gophers now have four of those trophies. Earlier this year, they beat Michigan in the Little Brown Jug game, their first win over Michigan since 2014 and their first home win over Michigan since 1977.

Last year, they beat Wisconsin for Paul Bunyan’s Axe, the most played rivalry in NCAA football history. (They’ll play again in November.)

And they also beat Nebraska last year for the $5 Bits Of Broken Chair Trophy, a meme come to life, although it’s not clear which athletic department actually has the original chair trophy.

In a couple weeks, the Gophers will have a chance to hold all five trophies. They’ll play Penn State for the Governor’s Victory Bell, a forgettable trophy invented when Penn State became the 11th school in the Big Ten in 1993, and some schools felt like they needed to come up with trophies to make the new members feel part of the cultural fabric. (Michigan State also invented the Land-Grant Trophy, a bunch of little knick-knacks fastened to a massive hunk of wood.)

It’s honestly quaint that schools did this; nobody felt the need to pretend to have rivalries with Maryland or Rutgers when the Big Ten added them, let alone the newer West Coast additions like Oregon and USC.

The Gophers have never held all five trophies at once. They’d beaten Iowa just once in the last decade before Saturday, they’d beaten Michigan just twice in the last 40 years before their latest win, and they lost 14 in a row to Wisconsin from 2004 to 2017.

Nobody is sure what will happen if Minnesota assembles all the stones in The Infinity Hotdish. Some speculate the world will end; others say a thriving Minnesota indicates the world already has.

Most excited about this: Minnesota head coach P.J. Fleck, a ball of enthusiasm who has never met a gimmick he didn’t like. He was legitimately thrilled to experience the Duke’s Mayo Bowl victory mayo dump last season, and smeared a player’s blood on his face earlier this year. He mimicked chugging out of the Little Brown Jug after the Michigan win.

Minnesota won’t make the Playoff this year even if it wins out; the Gophers are 5-2, but the two losses were blowouts against Mississippi State and Purdue. But just one more win will send them to a bowl game, and you know what you get when you win a bowl game?

That’s right: a weird trophy. You got this, Minnesota.