From one perspective, Saturday brought one of the cruelest moments in years. In a must-win game for Ole Miss, the Rebels played a back-and-forth contest with perhaps the best team in college football. Trailing 35-31, Bo Wallace and the offense took over on the Mississippi 48-yard line with just over three minutes remaining. The Rebels moved quickly down the field, and on short pass to Laquon Treadwell appeared to turn into the go-ahead score. Just as Treadwell crossed the goal line, he was tackled from behind, suffering an injury that you knew was bad as soon as it happened. As it turned out, Treadwell broke his leg, and then the insult came. Upon review of the score, while Treadwell crossed the goal line, the ball did not, and he fumbled as he was taken down. Auburn recovered in the end zone, and the Tigers would prevail.

From another perspective, though, the victory moved Auburn to the front of the pack in college football. Sure, the Tigers lost to Mississippi State, but (1) Auburn has already played and defeated Mississippi, while MSU has not ^[1]The Bulldogs already used up their Texas A&M card, while Auburn has not. Each team still has to play Alabama., (2) Auburn actually has a better points differential solely in SEC West play despite one fewer home game, and (3) Auburn beat Kansas State, while MSU has a cupcake nonconference schedule. Sure, if you were to come up with rankings, right now, you would put Mississippi State ahead of Auburn on the basis of the head-to-head victory, but when it comes to predictive rankings, Auburn has jumped back to the top of the pack. The last two weeks, the Bulldogs have come away with close, 7-point wins ^[2]Technically, MSU beat Kentucky by 14 after returning an onside kick for a touchdown. against middle-of-the-pack SEC teams. That gets penalized in the SRS, which is why MSU has now fallen to 5th overall.

Also of note this week: Oklahoma is good at stomping on bad teams, which is why the Sooners have actually vaulted into 4th place. OU beat Iowa State (59-14), Louisiana Tech (48-16), and Tennessee (34-10) by big scores. Who cares, you say? Well, ISU may be terrible, but their next-worst loss was by 21 to Baylor. Louisiana Tech also played Auburn, and the game was four points closer. Tennessee has played Alabama and Mississippi, and lost by an average of 22.5 points. In other words, in those three games, the Sooners have played like a dominant SEC West team. And while Oklahoma has two losses, one was a 1-point loss to Kansas State which included a missed extra point and a missed chip shot, and the other was a 37-33 loss at TCU. Baylor travels to Norman this week, and the SRS suggests that the Bears should be a touchdown underdog.

The table below shows the SRS ratings through ten weeks:

Neither Florida State nor Notre Dame can crack the top 10. What’s up with that?

• FSU is hurt by a 37-12 win over The Citadel that wasn’t as close as the score suggested, although one really shouldn’t need any qualifiers when talking about games against The Citadel. That said, removing that game (SRS score of 40.4) only increases the Seminoles’ rating to 12th overall. FSU beat Oklahoma State by only 6 points, — lest you’ve been asleep the last 3 weeks, the Cowboys have lost badly to TCU (42-9), West Virginia (34-10), and Kansas State (48-14) over that time frame. Also, FSU’s top win was just a 62.4 on the SRS scale, which was the Thursday win over Louisville. The lack of top wins, plus the lack of dominant wins over mediocre teams, is penalized in the SRS.

• Notre Dame just beat Navy (#75) by 10 and North Carolina (#65) by 7. The Fighting Irish has one win over a top-50 team (Stanford at #35), and that was on the last second of the game. Stanford, meanwhile, just lost by 29 to Oregon. Notre Dame, in my view, is getting by solely on brand right now. Of course, part of the issue here is that FSU seems massively overrated, too, so nearly beating the Seminoles doesn’t carry quite the same weight here.

Below are the single-game ratings for week ten. As always, you can see the results from every game of the year at this page.