College football's 6 wildest weekends ever*

And the Watch Grid

This past weekend in college football was a Blood Week.

What’s a Blood Week? That’s the Shutdown Fullcast’s term for a weekend in college football when way too many good teams lose. It’s fun when powerful people fail!!

The usual bare-minimum requirement in order to be considered for Blood Weekness: At least three top-10 teams must lose upsets, though there are caveats and exceptions and nuances. In order to gain full Blood Week status, the mayhem should include something truly merry, like the #1 team losing, a top-five team getting destroyed outta nowhere, or Notre Dame losing to someone very funny, such as Marshall, which has happened.

So! This week, people have asked: Was this past weekend, when seven ranked teams lost to unranked (or barely ranked) opponents, the craziest CFB weekend ever?

As an amateur college football historian, I can attempt an answer.

(Bona fides, for anybody who doesn’t know: My job throughout the 2010s was running the internet’s best pound-for-pound CFB editorial team, and I’ve led CFB history projects like this enormous retrospective on the 2007 season and a sci-fi western about the history of the NCAA. Also, here’s my list of every “true” national champion, 1869-2023.)

By my count (my spreadsheet on this exact subject began five years ago), there have been 54 Blood Weeks in the AP Poll era, or about one every 1.6 seasons.

This week, I went through them all, looking for ones that arguably produced more on-paper devastation than 2024’s first October weekend did. Since 2024’s bar is pretty high, due to #1 Alabama losing to freaking Vanderbilt, I decided to only consider weeks in which a #1 team lost, which eliminated quite a few weekends from consideration.

With that qualification in mind, along with * the fact that we’re only considering weeks from 1936 onward (because I do not care to attempt this exercise without the assistance of contemporaneous AP Poll rankers), here’s the list. It’s possible I missed a really good one, but I was out here looking at 1939 and 1956 and so forth, so it’s also possible I didn’t.

1963 Week 5

2024’s Blood Week had three upsets of top-nine teams. 1963’s had five and a half:

• #1 Oklahoma lost 28-7 to #2 Texas

• #3 Alabama lost at home to 1-1-1 Florida

• #4 Navy lost to eventual 4-7 SMU

• #7 USC lost to eventual 2-7 Notre Dame

• #8 Ohio State tied unranked Illinois at home

• #9 Penn State lost at home to 2-1 Army

At the time, only 10 teams per week had AP rankings, which means in one weekend, most of the AP Poll faceplanted all at once. Overall, that week’s ranked teams went 1-4-1 against unranked teams. (Wisconsin handled business against Purdue.)

The only knock against this weekend is that #1 merely lost to #2 (and lost to Texas for the sixth year in a row), rather than to a true underdog. Still a 21-point blowout, though.

1974 Week 10

In 2024’s Blood Week, six unranked teams beat top-25 opponents. Fifty years prior, just as many unranked teams beat top-16 opponents.

• #1 Ohio State lost to 4-3-1 Michigan State

• #5 Texas A&M lost to 5-3 SMU

• #6 Florida lost to 5-3 Georgia

• #7 Penn State lost to 7-2 NC State

• #12 Texas lost to 4-3 Baylor

• #16 Arizona State lost to 4-3-1 BYU

For a Blood Week to register as a mega-event, the biggest takedown should involve a true monster, a la Alabama losing in Nashville. The Buckeyes almost always fit that description — and, unlike 2024 Alabama, 1974 Ohio State wasn’t in transition, but was in the middle of Woody Hayes’ second peak.

But the team that beat the Buckeyes, Michigan State, wasn’t exactly a Vanderbilt. The Spartans had claimed two national titles within the previous decade. So this was a big upset, but not an exclaim-at-a-stranger-after-seeing-the-score-on-Twitter stunner. There wasn’t any Twitter at the time, because of woke.

1990 Week 11

All hail the second or third wackiest season in college football history, depending on where you rank 1984. (In our bigass retrospective on 2007, Bill Connelly ranked 1990 #2.)

During one of 1990’s most depraved days, almost the entire top five lost upsets, with multiple of those four favorites not just losing, but getting splattered:

• #1 Virginia lost at home to #16 Georgia Tech

• #3 Nebraska lost 27-12 at home to #9 Colorado

• #4 Auburn lost 48-7 to #15 Florida

• #5 Illinois lost 54-28 at home to #13 Iowa

• #19 Wyoming lost to 5-3 Colorado State

• #21 USC tied 5-3 Cal at home

The only thing missing here: a final-boss supervillain at #1. Virginia? What the hell were you even doing up there? What did you think was gonna happen?

2007 Week 14

Despite setting a lunacy standard that might never be broken, this season actually didn’t have many individual weekends that went all that far off the rails. Instead, it had week after week of near-insanity, which accumulated into something far more disturbing than a single silly Saturday could’ve ever mustered.

However, look at this shit from conference-championship weekend:

• #1 Missouri lost 38-17 to #9 Oklahoma 

• #2 West Virginia lost to 4-7 Pitt

There were only 17 FBS games that weekend. But 12% of that weekend’s games were upsets that knocked teams directly out of the national championship — and one of the two was a 28.5-point upset in an archrivalry game that felled a top-two team for the 11th time in 56 days.¹

Since the College Football Playoff’s introduction in 2014, lots of teams have lost early and then remained in the hunt. A handful of teams even made it into the four-teamer after losing their final games before Selection Sunday, and now that the CFP is a 12-teamer, somebody will pull that off every year or so. If 2007 had involved a 12-team playoff, WVU would’ve still made it, and Mizzou would’ve even hosted a game.

But 2007 was still the two-team BCS era, meaning both Mizzou and WVU saw their odds of playing in the title game go from 100% to 0%, just like that.

Oh, and for seasoning:

• #18 Oregon lost at home to 7-4 Oregon State

2008 Week 5

In the 2024 weekend, seven ranked favorites lost. Same story here, except this damage was more top-heavy, including three top-four teams.

• #1 USC lost to 1-2 Oregon State

• #3 Georgia lost after trailing 31-0 at home to #8 Alabama

• #4 Florida lost at home to 2-2 Ole Miss

• #9 Wisconsin lost to an eventual 3-9 Michigan

• #16 Wake Forest lost at home to 2-2 Navy

• #20 Clemson lost at home to 3-1 Maryland

• #23 East Carolina lost 41-24 at home to 1-3 Houston

Any loss by 2000s USC absolutely left a Goliath-sized crater. Stealing a little thunder here, though: Oregon State had already done the same thing two years prior.

(You might discredit this week’s Blood status because Florida went on to win the title despite that loss to Ole Miss. On the contrary, if a school puts up a plaque in memory of a loss, then that loss was an all-timer.)

2024 Week 6

• #1 Alabama lost to 2-2 Vanderbilt

• #4 Tennessee lost to 3-2 Arkansas

• #9 Missouri lost 41-10 to #25 Texas A&M

• #10 Michigan lost to 3-2 Washington

• #11 USC lost to 3-2 Minnesota

• #22 Louisville lost at home to unranked SMU

• #25 UNLV lost at home to unranked Syracuse

If Bama had lost to almost anyone else, I don’t think this week would rank in the tippy-top tier of Blood Weeks.

Only a few of these games were significant point-spread upsets, for one thing. Texas A&M and Washington were actually favored. I’m guessing that wasn’t the case for most of the games in this post’s older years that lack such data.

But Bama didn’t lose to “someone else.” Bama lost to Vanderbilt … for the first time since 1984. Vanderbilt had never beaten a top-five team, let alone #1, let alone a #1 named “the Alabama Crimson Tide.” Bama has won more national titles since 2008 than Vandy has won bowl games ever.

The spread was only 22.5, but because of the history that’d cast this game as The God vs. The Punchline, this upset felt twice that size, near the magnitude of 2007 App State-Michigan or 2007 Stanford-USC.

Then again, this wasn’t Nick Saban’s Alabama.

Then again, Kalen DeBoer’s Alabama had just beaten previous #2 Georgia seven days prior in maybe the game of the year. So … it kind of was Nick Saban’s Alabama. Until Vandy happened.

Well, was this the craziest weekend ever?

Partly, it comes down to what we mean when we say “Vanderbilt beat Alabama.”

On paper, the answer is nah. Above, I demonstrated several ways in which previous weekends delivered more surprise.

But life doesn’t happen on paper. The centerpiece of this mess isn’t a loss by #1 Virginia or a win by a #2 Texas, and that matters.

Still, each of those other weekends eliminated contenders from national title races, rather than potentially adjusting a handful of playoff seeds. So I think the standard has gone up, meaning a 2024 Blood Week must hit much harder in order to out-debacle one from a previous decade. Shit, Bama’s still likely to make the playoff, and they’ll probably be favored to win a game or two!

So my answer is: No. I think 2007 did it with just two games, whether or not we give those two games extra credit for providing the crescendo to that season’s two-month tumult.² And now that there’s such a huge playoff, I barely think it’s even possible to top it.

Anyway, let’s get out there and try to top it:

1. The 13-9 final score of this game is so iconic, fans of both Pitt and WVU have asked me whether my novel’s usage of “13.9-year-old” is a tribute to that Backyard Brawl. Well, that number is a nod toward the novel’s Psalm 139 refrain. Though it’s possible that those psalmists who were pondering the unknowable future also foresaw what Pitt’s defense would do in 2007. “Where can I hide from your spirit, Dave Wannstedt?” wondered Pat White on that day.

2. One other note: Over the past few days, I’ve seen some people decide that this past weekend proved NIL and the portal have established so much parity, anyone can now beat anyone!! Well, as we’ve seen in this post, big upsets aren’t new. Plus, I’d hesitate to make any declarations about what NIL and the portal have or haven’t changed, seeing as everyone was arguing up until about 11 seconds ago that they’d made the sport less competitive.