Table for 12 Week 11: Fernando Mendoza stars in the week of the quarterback

This season has been filled with wild upsets and shocking results, but Week 11, aside from the wildly unstable ACC, was devoid of them. Only one top 10 team lost, and it was No. 8 BYU falling to No. 9 Texas Tech in Lubbock. Otherwise, all the top teams held serve. That doesn’t mean, however, that there weren’t scares. 

Penn State pushed Indiana to the wire in Happy Valley and Iowa gave Oregon everything it could handle in Iowa City. With DJ Durkin installed as the interim head coach and just one play-caller instead of three (a novel idea), Auburn took Vanderbilt to overtime after building a 17-3 first-half lead. The difference in all three of those games was the quarterback play. 

The quarterbacks we came into the season expecting to compete for the Heisman Trophy and No. 1 overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft have almost universally disappointed. Yet, the Drew Allars and Cade Klubniks have hardly been missed. There are plenty of great quarterbacks in college football, and many of them were at their absolute best in the biggest moments on Saturday. 

It was the week of the quarterback in college football (isn’t it always?), so I’m serving up some of the best throws of the week. Bon appetit. 

First Course

1. Fernando Heis-Mendoza (No. 2 Indiana 27 Penn State 24)

Gus Johnson was ready to hand Fernando Mendoza the Heisman Trophy after the Indiana QB led a game-winning touchdown drive in Happy Valley on Saturday. It’s fair to acknowledge that Mendoza had to put on the Superman cape was a fourth-quarter interception that led to a Penn State touchdown that gave the Nittany Lions a 24-20 lead with six minutes left, but it’s also impossible to ignore that Mendoza might be the only quarterback in the country who would’ve bounced back from that back-breaking pick. And that it’s the second time he’s done it this season. 

Mendoza vaulted his name to the top of the Heisman Trophy conversation at Autzen Stadium in Week 7 when he led the game-winning touchdown drive after throwing a pick-six that tied that game at 20 on the previous drive. Now, he may have cemented his case with a 10-play 80-yard touchdown drive in front of 100,000 desperate Penn State fans at Beaver Stadium. 

He made ridiculous throws the entire final drive, ripping the ball with rare velocity over the middle of the field, and doing it without his No. 1 wide receiver, Elijah Sarratt. Without Sarratt on the field, Penn State trusted its corners to hold up in coverage, a questionable decision considering their personnel, which allowed seven catches for 118 yards to Charlie Becker. Becker came into the game with seven career receptions, and he had three of Indiana’s five of seven contested catches on seven opportunities. 

All that blitzing did net a 47.2 percent pressure rate and three sacks. Regardless of the wisdom of blitzing at a 55 percent clip, Mendoza cooked it, especially on the final drive and his final throw, with two free rushers barring down.

It’s been said before, but Mendoza’s creativity is the superpower that Indiana’s offense didn’t have last year. It’s also the thing that might make him the most enticing quarterback prospect in the 2026 NFL Draft. Big rhythm throwers like Mendoza often don’t deal with pressure well because they tend to be either too stiff to generate the torque off-platform or need space in the pocket to keep their mechanics consistent and step into throws. Mendoza doesn’t. 

If you buy into the upside of his accuracy and anticipation as a downfield thrower, he could be Jared Goff plus, and that’s easily worth the No. 1 overall pick. If you buy into his late-game heroics and unflability, even in the face of circumstances that he had a hand in creating, then he’s a worthy Heisman Trophy winner. 

Second Course

2. This Bear can’t catch you from behind (No. 8 Texas Tech 29 No. 7 BYU 7)

BYU is always the team to take advantage of its opponents' mistakes. Always the team winning the third phase of the game on special teams. Almost always, playing with a lead. On Saturday in Lubbock, that all flipped. 

BYU, in its first-ever head-to-head matchup between two top 10 teams, forced Texas Tech into a three-and-out on its first possession. Then, reliable returner Parker Kingston muffed the punt, and set up the Red Raiders at the 23-yard line. Texas Tech settled for a field goal on that drive, and from that point, never relinquished the lead. 

It was always going to be tough for BYU to move the ball. The Red Raiders boast easily the best defensive line in the Big 12, a clear tier above anything the Cougars had faced through the first 10 weeks. However, BYU’s offense, with a reliable run game and a physical quarterback like Bear Bachmeier, is theoretically a good matchup. The best way to slow down an elite pass rush is to make them play the run, but that’s tough to do if you’re trailing the entire way. 

Kingston’s muffed punt and a Will Ferrin missed 51-yard field goal in the second quarter put the Cougars behind the eight-ball, and they could never recover. Texas Tech only managed four tackles for loss and one sack, but held Bachmeier to 4.82 yards per dropback and a 27 percent rushing success rate. 

It’s just too difficult to consistently stay on schedule offensively against a defense that is as disruptive as Texas Tech’s, and anything you end up in an obvious passing situation, you’re in trouble. The entire game was a slog offensively, on both sides, but it’s still glaring to see that BYU finished with -0.44 late down EPA/play. 

It’s not just Texas Tech’s defensive line and college football’s sack leader, David Bailey, who can hurt you; it’s the country’s most disruptive linebacker, Jacob Rodriguez. The threat of the pass rush forces teams to throw underneath and attack horizontally. That allows Rodriguez to clean up in the middle of the field. He finished Week 11 with 14 total tackles, a tackle for loss, and an interception. That’s his second pick to go along with 7 forced fumbles. 

Third Course

3. Dan Lanning is built for Big Ten ball (No. 9 Oregon 18 No. 20 Iowa 16)

The Ducks may have won the conference title last season, but beating Iowa 18-16 in disgusting November weather at Kinnick Stadium with only 112 passing yards means that Oregon’s assimilation into the Big Ten is officially complete. While Lincoln Riley struggles to consistently match the league’s physicality, and on the same day that Washington lost 13-10 in the snow to Wisconsin, Oregon out Big Ten’d Iowa. 

Oregon entered the game without its top two pass catchers, Dakorien Moore and Kenyon Saddiq, and lost Gary Bryant Jr. early on. So, on a day when it was tough to throw the ball, the Ducks ran for 261 yards, with four different rushers over 40 yards on the ground, including quarterback Dante Moore. 

Oregon’s 61 percent rushing success rate was the highest against an Iowa defense since Ohio State beat the Hawkeyes 55-24 in 2017 behind 63 yards on 14 carries from J.T. Barrett. Since that game, only two teams have managed a rushing success rate better than 60 percent against the Hawkeyes: 2019 USC and 2021 Michigan. 

That running game is the counterpunch that Oregon has desperately needed to complement a passing offense that ranks 91st percentile in explosive play rate. Iowa lived in zone coverage with deep safeties and lighter boxes to hold Oregon to a three percent explosive play rate. 

That rushing success, however, doesn’t fully capture Oregon’s dominance in the trenches. The Ducks didn’t allow a single pressure on Dante Moore and finished with just one tackle for loss. Yet, the game still came down to Moore needing to make a throw, and though his Heisman hype and draft stock have fallen considerably since their peak after Oregon’s Penn State win, he made a ridiculous one to set up the game-winning kick. 

Moore entered that last drive 0-for-2 in the second half, then completed his first four throws for 41 yards.

Reservations: The season isn’t over yet, but these teams have all but locked up a spot in the CFP

4. Who needs a run game? (No. 4 Alabama 20 LSU 9)

Blake Baker’s LSU defense has a very clear weakness against the run game, and rushing quarterbacks in particular. Quarterbacks have rushed for 31.0 yards per game against the Tigers this season, but heading into Week 11, SEC quarterbacks averaged 60.6 yards per game. 

Yet, Ty Simpson, who is an athletic creator, but not a dynamic runner, rushed for eight yards and four attempts, and Alabama managed 56 total rushing yards on Saturday night at Bryant Denny Stadium. By Collegefootballdata.com’s predicted points added metric (a relative facsimile of EPA), Alabama’s -0.26 PPA/rush is the worst against a Blake Baker defense since LSU’s 34-17 win over UCLA last season, which included -51 yards on the ground by UCLA quarterback Ethan Garbers, who was sacked five times. 

Despite all of those struggles on the ground, Ty Simpson carried the Tide. He averaged 8.81 yards per dropback with a ridiculously aggressive downfield passing game. 84 percent of his passing yardage came on throws over 10 yards downfield, and on throws over 10 yards downfield and between the numbers, he went 7-for-9, for 180 yards, and a touchdown. 

Simpson continues to be an absolute downfield marksman. Alabama can struggle to run the ball and struggle to handle the blitz, but as long as Simpson is at quarterback, the Tide have a chance to win the national championship; that’s how good he’s playing. With one non-conference loss heading into the final three games of the season, Alabama can start to pick out an outfit for the CFP dinner party because it has a seat at the table. 

5. Will 9-3 be enough? (No. 5 Georgia 41 Mississippi State 21)

Georgia’s flaws are as obvious as Alabama’s. The Dawgs can’t get any type of pass rush, and it’s costing them dearly against quality passing offenses. Yet, Kirby Smart, like Kalen DeBoer, has his team heading into the final three games, one of which is against Charlotte, with just one loss. 

The Dawgs are playing a much tougher closing slate than Alabama, hosting Texas next week and closing out the year at Georgia Tech. However, with wins over Tennessee and Ole Miss already on its ledger, 9-3 Georgia has a strong case to make the CFP. It’s only a matter of time before we get a three-loss team in the CFP, and this year, Georgia and Oklahoma would have the best cases. 

As for that weakness, Georgia needed to blitz at a 60 percent clip against Mississippi State just to pressure Blake Shapen on 25 percent of his dropbacks. It was Georgia’s third game with a greater than 50 percent blitz rate this season, yet the Dawgs rank 128th in sack rate at 3.07 percent, the worst in the SEC and third lowest of any Power 4 program. That’s not good, but it hasn’t stopped Smart from leading his team back to the CFP. 

Reservations: Week 9- Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Indiana Week 10- Ohio State Week 11- Alabama, Georgia

Check Please!: When it’s clear there won’t be a seat for you at the CFP table, it’s time to pay your check and go

6. Matt Zollers flunks his pop quiz (No. 3 Texas A&M 38 No. 22 Missouri 17)

Eli Drinkwitz ran out of quarterbacks; it’s as simple as that. Now, I don’t think this Missouri team was good enough to make the College Football Playoff with Sam Horn or Beau Pribula, but after his 7-for-22 performance against Texas A&M in his first career start on Saturday, it certainly can’t carry true freshman Matt Zollers there. 

The passing game was completely untenable with Zollers on the field. Granted, Mike Elko is one of the most diabolical defensive minds to face in your first start, but Zollers wasn’t even connecting when Drinkwitz and the Missouri staff tried to hit the easy buttons. He went 3-for-3 on screen passes for -2 yards, and 0-for-3 on his three dropbacks with play-action. Zollers actually averaged fewer yards per attempt (2.9) on clean dropbacks than pressured ones (5.6). 

Zollers has plenty of arm, but Texas A&M did such a good job maximizing its blitzes, generating a pressure on five of its nine blitzes (56%). A freshman quarterback is just not equipped to pick up his pressure looks, like this one, which generated the biggest splash play of the day for the A&M defense. 

Missouri has six to block six after the far side defensive end drops out. Yet, with Daymion Sanford shading to the left side of the formation pre-snap and the end playing coverage, A&M gets an overload and forces Missouri right tackle Keagen Trost to pick up two rushers. Understandably, he whiffs on Sanford, who gets a free runner and Zollers for the strip sack. 

That’s 300-level stuff, and Zollers is still getting up to speed with his gen-ed material. He just never had a chance. 

7. The Big Ten fringe contenders (No. 9 Oregon 18 Iowa 16) (Wisconsin 13 No. 23 Washington 10)

Should either of these teams have been considered legitimate College Football Playoff contenders heading into the week? Probably not. I had mentally written off both teams long before they appeared in the first CFP rankings of the season, but with losses, it’s official. 

The Big Ten is almost certainly going to be a three-bid league. Michigan can get in by winning out and finishing at 10-2, but that would include a win over Ohio State for the fifth-straight year, and that doesn’t look plausible. 

The league’s only hope of getting four teams into the CFP is that USC wins out, beating Oregon in Eugene in two weeks, so both the Trojans and the Ducks finish at 10-2 while Indiana and Ohio State meet in the Big Ten Title Game to determine the No. 1 overall seed. 

I don’t see a world in which Lincoln Riley goes on the road and wins that game. He’s 10-9 overall on the road since taking the job at USC and 3-6 on the road since joining the Big Ten. That is the Big Ten’s hope of getting three teams into the CFP and preventing the SEC from getting five. It doesn’t feel particularly promising. 

8. Jeff Brohm’s heat check gone wrong (Cal 29 No. 15 Louisville 26 (OT))

You have to respect a heat check, and this offseason, Jeff Brohm pulled up from the logo. After resurrecting Tyler Shough’s career and turning him into a second-round NFL Draft pick, against all odds, Brohm thought he’d take on another of the game’s preeminent QB whispers failed projects, adding Miller Moss after Lincoln Riley benched him for Jayden Maiava at USC. Sometimes the heat check doesn’t go down; should we be surprised that this one didn’t? Probably not. 

Miller Moss has all the same problems he had at USC. He doesn’t take many sacks, but he’s an undersized pressure-sensitive quarterback with undue arm arrogance. Moss has an interception in every ACC game, except Louisville’s win over Miami, and ranked 119th among 129 FBS QBs in yards per attempt on pressured dropbacks heading into the week. Yet, there aren’t many teams in the country that throw the ball as often as Louisville. 

Against Cal, Louisville had a 61 percent pass rate, despite averaging 0.31 EPA/rush with a 59 percent rushing success rate. That trend bears out over the course of the season as well. 

Brohm is an elite play-designer, but this season, he’s been a delusional play-caller. He has two of the more dynamic running backs in the country in Isaac Brown, who missed this game with an injury, and Keyjuan Brown, who saw only 14 carries despite averaging 9.71 yards per attempt. 

Head of the table: The best individual performance earns the seat at the head of the table

9. Vanderbilt QB, Diego Pavia (No. 16 Vanderbilt 45 Auburn 38)

Last week, Vanderbilt fell behind Texas 34-10 before nearly fighting all the way back in a 34-31 loss. This week, found itself down 17-3 to Auburn, in its first week with DJ Durkin installed as interim head coach. 

Vanderbilt is good enough to compete in the SEC, but that doesn’t mean the Commodores have elite SEC athletes. It took Vanderbilt offensive coordinator Tim Beck three quarters to learn that lesson against the Longhorns. This week, it only took a quarter and a half. 

Texas’s defense was too fast for Vanderbilt to rely on its misdirection and long-developing option plays. They wrecked the offensive line, crashed the mesh point, and had the speed to chase the pre-snap motion across the field. So, Beck, as he did last week, had to speed things up. That meant asking Pavia to suddenly play spread-and-shred football, with more static sets, spread formations, and traditional dropbacks. 

Pavia attacked downfield, was accurate in the quick game to keep the offense on schedule, and took advantage of the extra space created by those spread formations as a scrambler. He finished 25-for-33 passing for 377 yards and three touchdowns with 112 yards and another score on 18 carries. 

The philosophical offensive transition isn’t complete. It’s more been in-game patchwork, but Beck needs to commit to it for Vandy to have a chance to make the CFP because his got-to-have-it plays, like a failed fourth-and-1 in the final minutes that could have set up a game-winning field goal, and the game-winning touchdown in OT, were both staples of Beck’s option-attack, and Auburn’s defensive speed caused problems. 

Further proof of the viability of Vanderbilt’s shift to more of a true dropback passing game is the Commodores’ off-the-charts success rate on passing downs this season, by far the best in college football. 

Appetizers: A little something to chew on from the week that was in college football

10. Virginia’s luck finally ran out (Wake Forest 16 No. 14 Virginia 9)

In fairness, Virginia lost its starting quarterback, Chandler Morris, for the entire second half on Saturday. That’s the only time I’ll entertain a caveat for the most fraudulent team in college football.

Saturday was Virginia’s third game this season with a negative offensive EPA/play, and the first time that it resulted in a loss (Louisville and North Carolina). The other four one-loss ACC teams (Georgia Tech, SMU, Duke, and Pitt) have just two such games combined. 

The other 11 teams that were projected in the 12-team CFP field after Tuesday night’s rankings have just one total game with a negative offensive EPA/play, and it is BYU’s loss to Texas Tech on Saturday. The only other team in the mix for the CFP with more than two such games is Texas, which also has three. 

And yet, I can’t remove the Hoos from the CFP race yet, because Virginia has just one ACC loss, thanks to a scheduling quirk that had UVA play NC State in a non-conference game this year. The ACC is too much of a jumbled mess, and with only one conference loss, they have as good a chance as any of winning the conference title and grabbing the automatic bid. 

Dessert: Whether it’s a rich play design or a decadent athletic display, here’s a sweet football treat

11. Thicc Six (No. 18 Miami Syracuse 10)

Like I said, I’m terrified to eliminate teams from the ACC, and that includes two-loss Miami, which the Athletic gives a six percent chance of winning the conference. That’s because a win over Notre Dame could ultimately still loom large if both teams finish with two losses when it comes to an at-large conversation. 

And because we have yet to make the Hurricanes pay their check and leave, we get to enjoy this thicc six to Francis Mauigoa. 

Kid’s menu: The CFP is a 12-team reservation that needs one kid’s menu for the Group of Six team

12. The American has left the door open (Tulane 38 Memphis 32)

Sometimes, game-script can be everything, and Tulane’s hot start put Memphis in a hole that it just isn’t built to dig out of. That’s a credit to Jake Retzlaff, who was benched in the Green Wave’s loss to UTSA, and a Tulane passing offense that averaged 15.04 yards per dropback, but it also exposed the relative weakness of the Memphis passing attack. 

With Brendon Lewis at QB, Memphis has been one of the most efficient running teams in the country, ranking second in the country in EPA/rush and eighth in rushing success rate.  However, Memphis trailed from the early second quarter on, and that forced Ryan Silverfield’s offense to throw the ball on 67 percent of its early down plays. The Memphis offense is great, but if you can force Lewis to become primarily a dropback passer, you have a much better chance.

Memphis still nearly pulled off a fourth-quarter comeback, scoring 15 points in the final frame while holding Tulane to 93 yards of total offense in the second half, but it was too little too late. Now, the American has four teams with one conference loss: North Texas, South Florida, Tulane, and East Carolina. USF is the safest bet to win the conference, but as the league keeps canibalizing itself at the top, it opens the door for James Madison to grab the Group of Six’s CFP spot.