SMQ: Where did Week 7 rank among most upset filled weekends of all time?
By Zach Bigalke
In Week 7, four different top-10 teams suffered losses to unranked opponents. SMQ delves into how frequently such trends occur in college football history.
There is something about seeing multiple top-10 teams tumble on the same weekend that always seems chaotic. Pollsters in the AP Top 25 and Coaches polls are sent scrambling to reorder the hierarchy of teams. Fans have an urge to declare what they have witnessed as a piece of history.
Week 7 in this year’s college football season offered another window into this phenomenon. First, we saw No. 2 Clemson and No. 8 Washington State fall in back-to-back contests on Friday night. Then Saturday rolled around, and No. 10 Auburn was toppled by LSU. As the day shifted into darkness, No. 5 Washington stumbled in a trap game at Arizona State. By the end of the weekend, four top-10 teams had collapsed against unranked opponents.
Immediately this trend led to some questions. When was the last time that four teams all fell out of the top 10 on the same weekend to unranked challengers? Have five or even six top-10 teams collapsed on the same weekend? Where does this weekend’s chaos rank among the most chaotic weekends of college football history?
And where might we find answers to these questions?
To sort out these questions, this Sunday Morning Quarterback dove into the historical AP Top 25 dat. After compiling annual schedules from Sports Reference for every Top 25 game played since the AP Poll started releasing preseason polls in 1950, we can get a better picture of how frequently this chaos phenomenon occurs.
The data show that this is not such a unique phenomenon as it usually seems in the moment. So without any further introduction, let’s dive in and answer some of these questions in the Week 7 edition of Sunday Morning Quarterback.
(You can find the full dataset for every season from 1950 through the present here. Yellow highlighting indicates a loss by a top-10 team, while orange highlighting indicates a tie by a top-10 team. Feel free to ask more questions or report inaccuracies to the Saturday Morning Quarterback on Twitter at @zbigalke.)