The College Football Clean-State Top 25: Iowa’s Slugfest Takes Week 10’s Top Spot

The Clean-Slate Top 25 is ready to present you with where every team should be ranked if we simply threw out all the wins and losses that came before Week 10. Come with me and live in the now, where status and history mean nothing!

1. Iowa: To start the week with the lowest over/under in college football betting history after pre-firing your offensive coordinator and then make that number look absurdly high in a 10-7 win over Northwestern is just a perfect piece of Iowa football art. Neither team hit 175 yards of total offense, and the longest run by either the Hawkeyes or the Wildcats gained ten yards. Iowa’s leading receiver caught ONE PASS FOR 23 YARDS, and they ended up being some of the most crucial of the game as they set up the Iowa field goal that kept this game from going to overtime tied 7-7. Thank you to Brian Ferentz, who taught me it’s okay to be different.

2. Oklahoma State: You are duty-bound to support any team being left behind in conference realignment, like the Cowboys, winning their final (for now, at least) matchup against the hated rival departing for greener money pastures. After the Sooners went up 21-17 midway through the third quarter, their next three drives all reached Oklahoma State territory. But they only created a total of three points thanks to timely defensive stops, leaving the door open enough for the Cowboys to snatch a 27-24 win. 

3. Clemson: Phil Mafah ran for 186 yards and two touchdowns, and the rest of the Clemson offense gained 119 yards and scored once. This imbalance did not save Notre Dame from a 31-23 loss, nor did its three turnovers. Jeremiah Trotter Jr. arguably had the most fun of anyone on Clemson’s defense, leading the team in tackles (11) and sacks (2) while snaring this pick six that gave the Tigers their largest lead of the day.

4. Alabama: Any Jalen Milroe number you pick out from Alabama’s 42-28 win over LSU will be eye-opening, so let’s condense it to just what he did on third down — five for five passing for 93 yards and six rushes for 53 yards and two touchdowns. The sole third-down sack he took happened on Bama’s opening drive and led to the only Crimson Tide punt of the night. I will find a way to send a message back to the year 2011 to let people watching Alabama 9, LSU 6 know that, in just over a decade, they will be able to see the very same game played with three combined punts.

5. Louisville: Virginia Tech’s longest drive covered 53 yards and ended in a field goal; the shortest Hokie drive went for negative 11 and was one of three backward-pointed possessions they had in a 34-3 drubbing by Louisville. The Cardinals made use of short fields all game, with three of their five touchdown drives starting inside Virginia Tech territory. The Hokies had a very bad time on third down, where they only converted two of 11 tries, but only two of those attempts came on something shorter than third-and-8. 

6. Arizona: UCLA’s defense didn’t have any answers for the Arizona offense, which put up 429 yards of offense on 68 plays in a 27-10 win. Those aren’t video game numbers, but the Wildcats kept staying on the field for extended drives; they held the ball longer than UCLA in every quarter, including nearly 19 minutes of possession in the second half. Do not show the combined Bruin passing line in the fourth quarter to your children: four-of-11 for 14 yards and one sack taken.

7. Army: I do not possess the historical data to tell you if anyone’s ever won a game where they lost six turnovers without forcing any of their own, but I’m just going to assume that would be impossible. It certainly was for Air Force, who gave Army the ball in plus territory on its first three possessions, which the Knights turned into a 20-0 lead before we even hit the 13-minute mark of the second quarter. That was more or less all Army needed to win 23-3, as they only picked up three first downs in the second half but kept creating miscues by the Falcons on defense.

8. James Madison: Georgia State didn’t get a third-down stop in the second half until there was about a minute left in the game and the Dukes had already scored touchdowns on their first four post-halftime possessions to blow this score wide open. JMU held the ball for over 42 minutes in this 42-14 steamrolling and only allowed the Panthers to pick up ten first downs in the entire game. Someone needs to figure out which bowl team successfully avoids playing JMU this postseason so it can send the NCAA a thank-you note.

9. Oregon: The Ducks didn’t take a sack (and with 46 passing attempts, it’s not like the opportunity wasn’t theoretically there) and only got tackled for a loss by Cal three times in a very, very easy 63-19 win. Bo Nix did throw a pick that wasn’t his fault on the first Oregon offensive snap to keep things interesting, and after that he threw for 486 yards and four touchdowns.

10. Georgia: It feels weird to say that Georgia’s two most important drives against Missouri both successfully ended in field goals, but it holds some dramatic truth. After the Tigers cut Georgia’s lead to three points early in the fourth quarter, Carson Beck successfully navigated the Dawgs to Mizzou territory for two kicks that gave us a 30-21 final score. Doing that on a day where the Georgia ground game was fine but certainly not spectacular (131 yards on 33 carries) counts for more than you might think at first.

11. Ole Miss: What if we just didn’t talk about the Ole Miss defense? There’s no rule that says we have to. The Rebels averaged 7.8 yards per play in a 38-35 win over Texas A&M and had eight plays that gained at least 20 yards against the Aggies. Hey, how’d those 35 points get scored against them? Well, seven were on this blocked field goal.

Let’s just assume the other 28 were as well. Stop asking so many questions about the defense and what it does or does not do!

12. Florida State: The Seminoles forced nine Pitt punts and three turnovers in their 24-7 victory, one of which occurred on the longest Panthers play of the day:

The CIA should recruit exclusively from the Pitt fanbase. These are people who cannot be broken.

13. Utah: Arizona State had 83 yards of offense against the Utes. Utah had exactly that many (and 14 points, to boot) after its first two drives. This 55-3 final could not have been more lopsided; four different Utah players ran for more yards than the 43 the Sun Devils managed on the ground. Seven ASU drives didn’t pick up a first down.

14. Michigan: A very tidy 41-13 win over Purdue, where the defense held the Boilermakers to one third-down conversion on 14 tries and the offense converted half of their attempts on the same number of third downs. “Nothing bad or weird happened” is not necessarily a high bar, but it’s probably worthwhile one for Michigan, currently trapped in a world where it can get dunked on by New Mexico’s video board even while the Lobos are getting blown out.

15. Arkansas: Beating 2023 Florida 39-36 in overtime isn’t necessarily a major accomplishment, but I owe the Razorbacks a debt of gratitude for giving these awful uniforms the loss they deserved:

These are Florida uniforms someone left in the oven after they forgot to set a timer. These are the Florida uniforms an AI would generate with the prompt “Florida Gators licorice.” These are uniforms Fanatics would not send out for delivery. These are the uniforms of a team that is featured for 27 seconds of montage as an opponent in “Any Given Sunday.” These uniforms went straight to a Nike Factory Outlet Store, where they will sit, unpurchased, for a calendar year until being recycled into playground material.

16. Kansas: Got a pick six and hit an 80-yard touchdown pass in a 28-21 win over Iowa State. The Jayhawk defense fell apart a bit in the second half, allowing the Cyclones to score on all three of their possessions, but they were labor-intensive drives that took up lots of time, and Kansas stayed on the field and the scoreboard enough when it had the ball to grind out the win.

17. Ohio State: I once overslept for a final in college and arrived so late to the administration of the test that I had to take a separate version that was all essays. I still got an A, which is the only thing that shows up on my transcript, so I’m not going to be too hard on Ohio State for trailing Rutgers at the half before finishing with a 35-16 win.

18. Duke: Quarterback A goes 16 of 19 for 241 yards and one pick. Quarterback B goes seven of 19 for 86 yards, with one touchdown and one interception. Quarterback A also runs for 55 yards and two scores, while Quarterback B gets 17 yards on the ground without reaching the end zone. Each quarterback also loses a fumble. Which quarterback wins the game? The answer, of course, is Quarterback B — Duke’s third-stringer, Grayson Loftis — because the bad moments for Quarterback A (Wake Forest’s Mitch Griffis) set up most of the good moments for his opponent, as Duke scored ten unanswered points in the fourth quarter to win 24-21.

19. NC State: 231 yards of offense should not be enough to beat any Miami team of the last, I dunno, 40 years, much less sufficient to do it by two touchdowns. But NC State 20, Miami 6 is a real score that lives forever, thanks in part to one of my favorite scoring combinations by the Wolfpack: losing yards on a drive (12, to be precise) but still getting points (a 39-yard field goal). The Hurricanes put together an offensive second half that was as varied as it was nightmarish: a missed field goal, two three-and-outs, getting stuffed on 4th and one from the NC State three-yard line and two interceptions. Really only a “safety after snap sails over punter’s head” away from Misery Yahtzee.

20. Indiana: The Hoosiers can’t really create any chaos in their own division, but that does not prevent them from causing issues in the Big Ten West, Where Problems Are Welcome! Indiana beat Wisconsin 20-14 in a game where it never trailed despite gaining only 36 yards of offense in the second half while giving up 187 yards to the Badgers after halftime. It is one thing to lose to Indiana when they stop doing Indiana things; it is entirely different to lose to them when they still do Indiana things.

21. Sam Houston State: Sure, Jacksonville State and James Madison make it look easy, but winning games when you move from FCS to FBS is hard! That seemed to be the case yet again for Sam Houston when they fell in a 21-7 halftime hole against Kennesaw State that could have been worse had the Owls not missed two field goals. But the Bearkats put together two long touchdown drives, each taking more than 12 plays and seventy yards and ending with miraculous touchdown catches:

These are essentially the exact kind of scores that have been happening to Sam Houston State all season, and it is nice to know that sometimes the universe decides to even the scoreboard a little bit, as the Bearkats kicked a 35-yard field goal to walk off a 24-21 win.

22. Georgia Tech: The Yellowjackets don’t run the triple option anymore, but they still had three different players run for at least 75 yards and a touchdown as they dismantled Virginia 45-17. Let us also take the time to acknowledge Georgia Tech punter David Shanahan, who pinned the Hoos inside their own ten on two separate occasions. Virginia didn’t really need a harder path to scoring points, but it’s nice that you’re challenging them anyway, David.

23. Oregon State: A 26-19 win looks close, and it technically is, but it ignores some key facts, like “Shedeur Sanders was only averaging 2.6 yards per pass through the third quarter” and “Colorado finished with negative rushing yards.” I am excited to see who gets to call plays next for the Buffs and I sincerely hope it’s Barry Switzer Calling In On An iPad.

24. Houston: We’re just going to skip regulation altogether and talk about the Houston Overtime Experience. After giving up a Baylor touchdown to start OT, the Cougars had to start from their own 40-yard line thanks to a personal foul on Baylor’s extra point. The team nonetheless managed to punch the ball in the end zone and did the thing we so often beg coaches to do in this situation: go for two rather than extend the game. And look how easy it went!

Just always listen to the internet, coaches. It’s never wrong.

25. Memphis: Beating USF 59-50 isn’t necessarily a great sign of stability and development, but it is wildly entertaining and I’m not above rewarding that, especially when the Tigers wear these sweet striped helmets: 

LOOKING AT YOU AGAIN, FLORIDA.