This Week In Our Dumb Beautiful Sport: Indiana Ascends, Dabo Crashes Out, And A Massive Week Awaits

By Ryan Ginn on September 22, 2025 at 9:10 am
Dabo Swinney is feeling the pain of Clemson's 1–3 start
GREENVILLE NEWS-USA TODAY Network via Imagn Images
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Welcome to This Week in Our Dumb Beautiful Sport, a weekly look at the chaos that reigns over the most perfectly imperfect world of college football.

Week 4 of college football went full LinkedIn. Indiana showed what's possible when you hire the right coach, Luke Fickell showed what happens when you take the wrong job, several SEC coaches need to start updating their resumes, and Dabo Swinney dared Clemson to fire him. Was it dumb? Of course. But was it also beautiful? Always.

INDIANA ASSERTS ITS CFP CONTENDER STATUS

A good litmus test of intelligence is how you felt about Indiana’s inclusion in last year’s College Football Playoff. The incorrect take, sadly voiced by a quite loud contingent, is that the Hoosiers’ loss to Notre Dame in the CFP was evidence that they didn’t belong and that we should have instead rewarded an Alabama team that lost to Vanderbilt and Oklahoma (both 6-6) and Tennessee. Never mind that the No. 10 team is supposed to lose to the No. 7 seed, or that Notre Dame made the national championship game, or that nobody in Knoxville claimed that Tennessee didn’t deserve its postseason spot after the No. 9 Vols got shredded by No. 8 Ohio State. I guess Twitter must have been down in East Tennessee that week.

Anyways, it seems most people assumed that Indiana was a one-hit wonder that hit the transfer portal jackpot – a position that didn’t seem entirely unreasonable after the Hoosiers opened 2025 with a 27-14 win over Old Dominion. But here’s what happened next: Indiana beat the brakes off of Kennesaw State (56-9) and Indiana State (73-0) – something good teams do against bad teams – and then rampaged to a record-setting 63-10 win against No. 9 Illinois. It’s the first time in the history of college football a team outside the top 10 has beat a top 10 team by that wide a margin. On top of that, the Old Dominion result suddenly doesn’t seem as bad after the Monarchs beat Virginia Tech 45-26 in Lane Stadium.

There’s good news for the rest of us, too. Indiana has road games at No. 6 Oregon and at No. 3 Penn State. Chances are those games will make it clear whether or not the Hoosiers will be in the CFP field. If they keep playing like they played on Saturday, there aren’t enough Nick Saban TV interviews in the world that will keep them out.

LUKE FICKELL PROBABLY REGRETS MAKING THE CFP

I think all the time about the fact that if Luke Fickell loses a regular-season game at Cincinnati in 2021 instead of going undefeated, he would almost certainly be coaching at Notre Dame right now. Instead, Notre Dame hired his longtime defensive coordinator who had left for South Bend one season prior and Fickell is in Madison listening to students chanting for him to be fired.

All of this is the result of a wonky system, including the completely shortsighted early signing period, that forces teams to make coaching decisions in time to try to salvage the recruiting class before mid-December. That was even more important in 2021, before the existence of today’s lawless transfer hellscape that makes it easier for coaches to rebuild a roster. Fickell obviously could not leave a team that was playing in the College Football Playoff, so the end result was Marcus Freeman inheriting a job that his old boss would have jumped at while the Bearcats were largely overmatched in a 27-6 playoff loss to Alabama.

Fickell stayed another year at Cincinnati, where he ended up between a rock and a hard place. If you stay too long, you risk ending up like Matt Campbell, who I assume will be buried in Ames, Iowa. But if you jump at the wrong job, well… you’re seeing what happens. None of the jobs you’d imagine Fickell might jump at – Ohio State, Notre Dame, Penn State – came open in 2022, but Fickell rolled the dice on a solid Big Ten team a step below those teams and replaced Paul Chryst at Wisconsin.

It hasn’t gone to plan. Fickell’s recipe at Cincinnati – recruit Ohio State castoffs in the portal and win with superior talent – doesn’t really apply at Wisconsin. And Wisconsin isn’t the type of job that recruits itself like Notre Dame, Ohio State, or similar such programs. I assume both parties wish they’d done something different, but it didn’t make the Badgers’ 27-10 loss to Maryland any less jarring. That’s a straight up ugly loss, which is made more unfortunate by the fact that it’s not an outlier in Fickell’s tenure. Now Wisconsin has to decide if it wants to spend $25 million for Fickell to not coach its football team or if that money might be better spent buying better players.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL IS THE BEST

This is a personal note, but a) it’s my column and I can (mostly) do what I want and b) I have a feeling everyone who reads this can relate in some way. I’ve been debating when it might be the right time to take my daughter, who recently turned 3, to her first LSU game. I didn’t want to bring her as an infant, and last year still didn’t line up very well with naptime and bedtime. That hasn’t really changed this year, but the schedule did and a game against FCS team Southeastern Louisiana felt like the perfect time to take her and see what happened. I figured the stadium would be emptier, and the people who were there would be less annoyed by any three-year-old antics given the low stakes of the game.

The author's daughter at an LSU game

The game was a blowout and she didn’t quite make it to halftime (the 6:45 p.m. kickoff was pretty close to bedtime as it was, so even getting that far was a win) but it was legitimately one of the happiest days of my life. She knows the words to the LSU fight song and is obsessed with LSU’s live mascot Mike the Tiger – or Tiger Mike, as she calls him – and could not have been happier to be there to watch a 56-10 game that was otherwise meaningless. I spent all day wondering if I was doing the right thing, if it was too early, if catching her on the wrong day might make her less likely to ask to go back in the future. In the end, none of that mattered.

I say all this for two main reasons. First, it’s another reminder that college football is the best. There’s nothing like it. Second, if you’re in a similar position, my advice would be to find a less important game and go for it. There’s no wrong time to share college football with someone. And if you have any similar stories, I’d love to read them in the comments.

OKLAHOMA'S DEFENSE IS DANGEROUS

Heading into this season, Brent Venables appeared to be coaching for his job in Norman. After a 24-17 win against Auburn (more on that below), the Sooners are 4-0 and look like a formidable test. With the Red River Shootout just two weeks away, they’re trending in a much better direction than the preseason No. 1 Longhorns.

Quarterback John Mateer deserves his share of the headlines, but it’s the Sooners defense that could turn them from a 6-6 team into a playoff team. They harassed former Sooners quarterback Jackson Arnold to the tune of 10 (!!!) sacks, suffocating Hugh Freeze’s offense.

SAM PITTMAN, REPORT TO THE AD'S OFFICE

Yikes, Arkansas. The Hogs lost 32-31 to Memphis, making it a lot harder for Arkansas AD Hunter Yurachek to keep kicking the can down the road when it comes to Sam Pittman’s future (or lack thereof) in Fayetteville. It will probably haunt Pittman that this loss came in a completely preventable fashion, with Arkansas fumbling while in range to kick a game-winning field goal. The fact that they were in that position to begin with, though, is a big enough problem regardless of the outcome.

YOU TOO, BILLY NAPIER

Billy Napier’s days are surely numbered after a 26-7 loss to Miami that was much closer for most of the game but never on the right side of saving the Florida coach’s job. The Hurricanes made the score look worse than it was thanks to two touchdowns in the final seven minutes, including one after the Gators were forced to go for it on fourth and long deep in their own territory, but the better team won. Florida will have to figure out how to keep DJ Lagway on campus following Napier’s inevitable firing, or perhaps if they even want to keep him if the lackluster showings (12 of 23 for 61 yards and no touchdowns against the Canes one week after throwing five interceptions against LSU) continue the rest of this season.

BIG TEN DOMINATES OLD PAC-12 RIVALRIES

I’m glad to see the Apple Cup and Civil War return, but it’s hard to imagine a sustained interest in playing them if the games continue to be this lopsided. This year’s scores:

Oregon 41, Oregon State 7

Washington 59, Washington State 24

Plenty of rivalries are historically lopsided, but most of those continue because those games are conference matchups and the teams effectively have no choice but to play them. That’s not the case here, where these games are now non-conference matchups. It’s going to be next to impossible for Oregon State and Washington State to compete with their in-state rivals in today’s college football, especially with the disparity in revenue payouts between the Big Ten teams and Pac-12 castoffs.

ARCH MANNING FLEXES ON SAM HOUSTON

Bragging about doing this against a Conference USA team is about as big a self-own as it gets.

Though it’s really no different than his high school career at Isidore Newman, where he spent the regular season padding stats against small schools stocked with future accountants before getting blown out in the playoffs.

HOW IS THIS SCORE REAL

Coast Guard 92, Nichols 60. This is a football score, not a basketball score. I have some questions, to say the least. The two teams combined for more than 1,400 yards. Somehow there were three punts!

CERTIFIED BANGERS AWAIT NEXT WEEK

Although there’s no such thing as a bad Saturday of college football, look at the matchups that we’ll have on Sept. 27:

  • No. 6 Oregon at No. 3 Penn State: Dan Lanning vs. a whited out Beaver Stadium? Yes please.
  • No. 4 LSU at No. 13 Ole Miss: I have a terrible feeling about this one. No further questions at this time.
  • No. 17 Alabama at No. 5 Georgia: One of these overrated teams is going to win. But just as importantly, one of these overrated teams is going to lose.
  • No. 1 Ohio State at Washington: The Silver Bullets, currently allowing less than 6.0 points per game, face an offense averaging 54.0 points per game.
  • No. 21 USC at No. 23 Illinois: Either the Fighting Berts go away or Lincoln Riley has to enter witness protection.
  • Cal at Boston College: Please do not actually watch this, I just want to point out that it’s disgusting that this is a conference matchup. What are we doing?

PLAY OF THE WEEK

Purdue did not have much to smile about in a blowout loss to Notre Dame, but the Boilermakers did produce this mesmerizing touchdown.

IDIOT OF THE WEEK

Fear not, I didn’t forget about Dabo! I just had to save him for this section. Swinney spent the week explaining that Clemson fans should actually be grateful to be 1-2 and then got drummed by Syracuse, 34-21. This is the first time the Tigers have started a season 1-3 since 2004, when Tommy Bowden was in charge.

“If they want me gone, they’re tired of winning, they can send me on their way because that’s all we’ve done is win,” Swinney said in his Tuesday press conference after losing to Georgia Tech. “So if they’re tired of winning — we’ve won this league eight out of the last 10 years, is that not good? I’m just asking. Is that good? I don’t know if that’s good or not, to win your league eight out of 10 years. To go to the playoffs seven out of 10 years. To go to four national championships. Win it twice. Yeah we’re a little down right now, take your shots but I’ve got a long memory, in case y’all don’t know. We’ll be all right. We’ll bounce back.”

Clemson will obviously not send him on his way, because it would cost roughly $60 million to do so and there’s not as much oil money in South Carolina as there is in, say, College Station, Texas. But it would serve Swinney well to read the room and realize that Clemson fans probably aren’t super excited about going from No. 3 ranking to unranked by the middle of September. To then follow that up by losing to a team whose coach made them run wind sprints earlier this season? The timing could have been better, to say the least.

He still has two national championships, and he’s played for two others. But track records age like dog years in college football and Swinney is currently the coach who doesn’t understand the transfer portal, who hasn’t won a College Football Playoff game since 2019 (and I assume a lot of readers of this site would agree that one was a tad fortunate), and who is struggling to stay on top of a conference that might not even exist five years from now.

REF JAIL INMATE OF THE WEEK

I’m bringing this section back after giving up on it last week because it’s good to keep readers on their toes and because this week’s crime can’t go unnoticed. Without further ado, this week’s winner of a stay in ref jail is the officiating crew of Oklahoma vs. Auburn, who incorrectly allowed an Oklahoma touchdown in a game the Sooners ultimately won by seven points.

Here’s my biggest question, though: why does Oklahoma’s playbook even include something so blatantly against the rules? It obviously worked here, so maybe that’s a silly question, but this is a call that 99 percent of officials get correct and turn a touchdown into a 15-yard penalty. Had the zebras been even remotely competent, Oklahoma would have gone from the Auburn 22 to the Auburn 37 – no small impact on its odds of scoring that drive.

NO CONTEXT SCORES OF THE WEEK

Here are some scores that caught my eye for any number of reasons – randomness, outcome, unique matchup – that shall remain unknown:

Kansas 41, West Virginia 10
Duke 45, North Carolina State 33
Michigan 30, Nebraska 27
Ole Miss 45, Tulane 10
Iowa 38, Rutgers 28
USC 45, Michigan State 31
ULM 31, UTEP 25

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