King Kaufman's Sports Daily

This upset-crazy college football season has been a lot of fun, but is it a paradigm shift or just a flukey year?

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Oct. 23, 2007 | I'm ready to admit that the 2007 college football season is doing something that approximates being halfway interesting.

I know. Big of me.

National powerhouses are losing all over the place. The team that's sitting atop all the polls wasn't even in the conversation for No. 1 a few weeks ago -- and was utterly humiliated on national television nine months ago. Being ranked No. 2 in the country has pretty much become a recipe for defeat. And nobody has any idea who's going to play for the national championship.

Except we all know it won't be Hawaii.

Things are so nutty, listen to the excellent Terry Bowden, writing for Yahoo sports: "After another weekend in which four teams in the top 10 lost, you have to begin to wonder if anyone is going to be able to remain undefeated when the regular season is all over."

Mercy! Imagine that.

Here's something I wrote about the lopsided nature of major college football in 2004:

If I had to pick a minimum required level of competitiveness, I'd put it at 30 percent. Any competition where one side has less than a three-in-10 chance of winning is not competitive enough to warrant sustained interest ...

So when it's routine for there to be eight losses among the college football top 25 in a given week, when that's the minimum we can expect, let me know. Shoot, I'll settle for seven losses, even though that's only 28 percent. I'm a big-hearted person.

Well, here we are. In the last four weeks, the Associated Press top 25 has gone 16-9, 11-12, 16-7 and 11-9. Four straight weeks when the overall winning percentage of teams lining up opposite top 25 teams has cracked .300. That includes games in which top-25 teams have played each other, but that's OK. A loss in the top 25 is a loss in the top 25, and another of my complaints has been that the top 25 don't play each other enough.

But even throwing out the 14 intra-top-25 games in the last four weeks, ranked teams have only gone 40-23 against unranked teams, a highly competitive .365 winning percentage for the underdogs, well within my requirements.

And, as Bowden points out, and as everyone who follows a team that's poked its nose into the top 10 knows, it isn't just lower-ranked teams that are struggling. Teams in the top 10 are only 22-15 in the last four weeks. Not exactly beat-down city.

I'm all for it, I'm happy to see it, and I'm almost ready to sort of become a believer in more than just the in-stadium atmosphere and the possibility for lavish amounts of excitement in any given game.

Next page: If anybody can beat anybody, just how absurd is the BCS?