Rivalry Week is generally a good time for upsets and surprises in college football. Since we can't have nice things in 2020, we not only lacked a lot of the rivalries that define the week, we also missed out on a lot of intrigue. Among the top seven teams in the initial College Football Playoff rankings, four won easily, two dealt with unexpected bye weeks, and while No. 2 Notre Dame took some solid blows from No. 19 North Carolina, the Irish brilliantly suffocated the life from both the game and the upset bid in the second half.
Sure, No. 8 Northwestern lost, but a loss by a team as one-dimensional as the Wildcats (third in defensive SP+, 107th on offense) is never going to feel like an earth-shattering development.
Instead, the week was defined as much as anything by a recurring 2020 theme: disappointment.
Five teams that were ranked in the preseason top 25 are dealing with losing records. A couple more are barely above .500. Sure, part of that stems from the simple fact that they didn't have any/many nonconference games to prop up their records. Then there's the extra depth-chart damage everyone's been dealing with due to COVID-19.
That doesn't change the fact that we haven't seen what we expected to see from quite a few teams. Who gets a mulligan, and who has genuine concerns?
Mulligan Meter 2020
Note: We're not going to do any speculation about job security here. I'll leave that to far more sourced writers. This is purely a look at what has doomed these teams and how much of a mess the current coach has, or doesn't have, on his hands.
