Spooky season arrived last week and already provided college football with a bag-full of tricks & treats. Penn State’s gobsmacking loss to a UCLA team that earlier in the day I told a friend might be worse than Oklahoma State made me forget for a brief moment that Big Ten football is bad for going Michael Meyers on the Pac-12.
Week 6 also ushered in October and the Halloween season with Theo Von wearing a clown suit on the otherwise unwatchable in its current iteration College Gameday.
What’s in store for Week 7? Let’s dive in with Five for Friday!
The entire complexion of the race for the Group of Five’s automatic berth into the College Football Playoff was shaken up on Thursday night of Week 1. With its 34-7 rout of 2024 season’s Playoff qualifier Boise State, USF immediately upended expectations.
And, despite embarrassing attempts by some voters to avoid doing so, the Bulls even broke into the Top 25 before a tough loss at currently No. 3-ranked Miami.
On Saturday, the up-and-coming South Florida Bulls pulled off one of the biggest upsets of the college football season so far. Under the oppressive roar of nearly 90,000 fans in one of the sport’s most intimidating road environments, they overcame an 18.5-point spread in favor of 13th-ranked…
a month ago · 2 likes · Preston Pack
While Miami setback dropped USF from the Top 25, bounce-back blowout wins over South Carolina State and Charlotte helped the Bulls pull to No. 24. Last week’s 52-24 trouncing of Charlotte is particularly noteworthy for USF quarterback Byrum Brown going off for 211 yards passing with four touchdowns and another 162 yards with a rushing score.
Brown’s was the second-most impressive two-way quarterback performance of Week 6. More on that in a moment.
On Friday, USF begins a stretch with three high-profile conference dates in the coming month, all on the road. The Bulls visit Navy on November 15, Memphis on Oct. 25 and begin with North Texas.
Quietly, the Mean Green are undefeated behind the nation’s eighth-most prolific scoring offense (44.8 points per game). UNT quarterback Drew Mestemaker has thrown for 11 touchdowns without an interception, while freshman running back Caleb Hawkins has scored seven total touchdowns — six rushing and one receiving — in the last two games.
Friday’s American Athletic Conference matchup should go a long way in revealing if UNT’s perfect start is a byproduct of a weak schedule, or if the Mean Green are indeed legitimate title contenders — which in turn, means they’re contenders for a Playoff berth.
A 59-10 drubbing of Washington State is impressive, though not as impressive as it would have been even a year ago. UNT has also gone to overtime twice in wins over Western Michigan and Army, the latter replicating a feat that Lone Star State FCS counterpart Tarleton reached in Week 1.
Still, undefeated is undefeated and the pairing of UNT’s offense against a feisty USF defense offers an intriguing contrast in styles.
We stay in the American and turn our attention to that aforementioned quarterback stat line that exceeded USF’s Brown a week ago.
Last week in the first leg of the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy series, Navy quarterback Blake Horvath put up one of the single-most impressive stat lines of the year: 20-of-26 for 339 yards and three touchdowns with no interceptions, 17 carries for 130 yards and a touchdown.
Read the above again and let it marinate that Navy’s option quarterback completed 20 passes for 339 yards and three touchdowns. That’s the most a Midshipmen quarterback has put up since Keenan Reynolds against Houston in 2015.
And, yes, this is your semi-regular reminder that Reynolds should have been a Heisman finalist in 2015.
Ahead of the 2025 season, I touted Horvath as a dark-horse Heisman Trophy candidate. The Midshipmen reach the midway point of their schedule on Saturday visiting Temple, and nothing in Horvath’s performance through five games has dissuaded me in my support for his inclusion in the Heisman race.
All Aboard The Blake Horvath Heisman Express for 2025
Taking a second-and-9 snap from his own 5-yard line, Blake Horvath read the Oklahoma defense as it shifted parallel with Navy slotback Eli Heidenreich. With the Midshipmen blockers executing their jobs to perfection, a gap opened in the middle of the field for Horvath to keep the ball after selling the handoff to Heidenreich.
He ranks 12th in FBS with 97 rushing yards per game, 22nd in rushing touchdowns with six, and has now thrown six scores, all for an undefeated Naval Academy. Saturday’s visit to Temple could be a prime opportunity for Horvath to further grow his totals, facing an Owls defense that ranks No. 98 against the rush (158 yards per game) and that surrenders 5.2 yards per carry.
Speaking of the Heisman Trophy, last September I wrote about the 30th anniversary of Sports Illustrated’s iconic cover advocating for Alcorn State quarterback Steve McNair.
McNair was the last in a brief but significant run of players from lower-division programs who were Heisman finalists between 1985 and 1994. In that column, I suggested we may never see another FCS Heisman like McNair or legendary Holy Cross running back Gordie Lockbaum again.
Steve McNair & the Heisman Trophy Campaign of 1994
“Hand Him the Heisman,” one of the most iconic covers in Sports Illustrated history, hit newsstands and mailboxes on Sept. 26, 1994. The seminal piece of sports journalism introduced much of the country to Alcorn State Steve McNair, a quarterback whose presence in college football borders on American folklore.
And, I still believe so.
If Heisman voters today were more bold, though, they might give a look at Monmouth quarterback Derek Robertson.
Robertson heads into a Week 7 road date with Towson with 22 touchdown passes in just five games. That’s three more than FBS leader Sawyer Robertson of Baylor (no relation) has amassed in six contests.
And while Sawyer Robertson has a slight edge in total yards (2,058) Derek Robertson’s 2,028 are almost 400 more than the next-most productive quarterback in FCS, Rhode Island’s Devin Farrell, who has also played one game more.
The Monmouth quarterback’s output is all the more impressive when noting that the Hawks run a balanced offense. Monmouth running back Rodney Nelson actually leads FCS in rushing at 142.4 yards per game, and has scored six touchdowns.
Robertson won’t approach McNair’s ahead-of-its-time run-game production (920 yards), but the Hawks quarterback is on pace to throw for more touchdowns over 11 games (48; McNair tossed 47 in 1994) — and do so attempting around 150 fewer passes. Robertson’s thrown 207 in 2025, while McNair aired it out 612 times for Alcorn State.
We’re at the halfway point of the season and no power-conference contenders have really separated themselves as clear Heisman candidates in any real way. Why not at least give Derek Robertson a look and show love to the FCS?
I love these league prints from the 1970s, like the above of the old Western Athletic Conference. Aside from the lively artwork and the originality, these prints provide visual reminders of just how dramatically the leagues have shifted in the last half-century.
WAC football no longer exists — and I promise Press Break will bring back the Dead Conference series soon to continue the deep dive into the life and death of the once-influential league — and half of the programs depicted above now reside in the Big 12.
As much as I detest the bloating of conferences that the most recent rounds of realignment created, the above WAC artwork does make me appreciate that there is still some regionality and shared history to be found with some of these shakeups.
And, for one Saturday, WAC football makes a comeback with Arizona hosting BYU and Arizona State at Utah.
Both games have potentially significant implications for the Bizarro Big 12, with BYU and Arizona State both undefeated early into conference play and Arizona and Utah both seeking to avoid 1-2 holes.
In Utah’s case, this is a shot at redemption after a disastrous home game against Texas Tech. The Red Raiders — former Border Conference counterparts of Arizona and Arizona State, thank you very much — look like the class of the Big 12 thus far, but it’s still early. Arizona State’s ascension on the back-half of the schedule a year ago serves as testimony to the chaos of this Frankenstein’s Monster conference.
The Sun Devils flirted with disaster two weeks ago in a Friday night comeback against TCU, showing some vulnerability. Despite its no-show against Texas Tech, I still think Utah is a Top 25-caliber team capable of being in the Big 12 race by late November, but the Utes need this one at Rice-Eccels Stadium.
BYU climbed to No. 18 in the most recent AP Poll, making the Cougars the second-highest ranked Big 12 team following Iowa State’s failed comeback attempt from down 31-7 at Cincinnati. BYU’s been defensively dominant, albeit against middling-at-best competition.
Of the Cougars’ four FBS wins, three came against opponents with losing records: Stanford, Colorado and West Virginia. The fourth was over 3-3 East Carolina.
Arizona’s in a similar situation, however, sitting at 4-1 with wins over FCS Weber State, 2-4 Kansas State and a thorough deconstruction of an atrocious Oklahoma State team. UA’s Week 1 opponent, Hawai’i, is 4-2 and along with a K-State team that’s lost its four games by a combined 13 points, the most noteworthy victories for the Wildcats.
Add in a blowout loss at Iowa State, one week before the Cyclones fell at Cincinnati, and it’s tough to gauge just how improved this Arizona team is compared to last year’s disappointing 4-8 bunch. Each is perhaps the most telling measuring stick either Arizona or BYU has faced to this point.
The destabilization of college football vis a vis Big Ten and SEC expansion was sold to the public on the promise of better matchups week-to-week. Whether that’s been the case through the microscopic sample size of a season-and-a-half is, most charitably, debatable.
However, Week 7 does offer up a taste of what TV execs and conference figureheads promised us with three top 20 showdowns between the Big Ten and SEC.
The marquee matchup pits Indiana against Oregon in a game that I can’t believe is perhaps the best of the season to date. But here we are!
I’ll admit that I found Indiana’s inclusion in the inaugural 12-team Playoff field revolting — not specifically because it was a historically inept program. That part is actually pretty neat and the ability of a long-downtrodden program to break through into championship contention was one of the selling points behind a full-fledged tournament.
However, Indiana didn’t deserve its Playoff spot in 2024. The Hoosiers finished the regular season 10-2 which, hey, that’s really impressive in the Big Ten! Right?
Well, IU had the Big Ten branding supporting it, but the Hoosiers managed to play one of the softest schedules in the nation devoid of a single Top 25 win. A Playoff hopeful from the Group of Five with Indiana’s resume last season would have been scoffed at and immediately dismissed, and deservedly so. Not one team IU beat finished ranked in the Top 25, it was routed by the two Playoff-caliber opponents it faced, and fell to a Michigan team hovering around .500.
Ironically, Indiana’s run to the Playoff may have been a year premature. This year’s Hoosiers team does look to be of championship quality. IU dismantled Illinois, and it has the chance to further prove its mettle in Week 7 visiting Oregon.
As for Illinois, it recovered from the 63-3 depantsing at Indiana nicely with a 34-32 win over USC, scored on a game-ending field goal. The Illini probably aren’t built to hang with reigning national champion Ohio State, which has at times looked to be a cut above the rest of the country.
Still, I appreciate that this matchup is happening both for giving us another Top 25 game when such offerings have felt scarce, and for pitting actual conference counterparts head-to-head.
What’s more, Illinois and Ohio State play for a trophy!
As examined in last week’s edition of Five for Friday, I love off-the-radar trophy games. Illinois-Ohio State is among the most off-the-radar you can get between two power-conference programs.
The Illibuck Trophy, a wood-carved turtle, replaced the original award introduced 100 years ago: AN ACTUAL, REAL-LIFE TURTLE.
With the thought-process being that turtles live exceedingly long lives, the pet could be past around regularly. It didn’t make it to a second season, dying in the spring of 1926. Thus today’s Illibuck was eventually born.
