This Week in Our Dumb, Beautiful Sport: Ohio State Ascends, Lane Kiffin Saga Ends, and College Football Playoff Chaos Awaits

By Ryan Ginn on December 1, 2025 at 9:05 am
Mississippi State fans mock Lane Kiffin leaving Ole Miss
Ayrton Breckenridge/Clarion Ledger / 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.

There are too many teams for not enough playoff spots and not enough coaching candidates for too many openings. Our dumb, beautiful sport is as chaotic as ever. 

WHO'S GETTING LEFT OUT?

It feels fair to assume that the following playoff spots are locked up no matter what: No. 1 Ohio State, No. 2 Indiana, No. 3 Texas A&M, No. 4 Georgia, No. 5 Texas Tech, No. 6 Oregon, No. 7 Ole Miss, and No. 8 Oklahoma. There will also be two more conference championship spots. One will almost certainly go to whoever wins the American (North Texas or Tulane) and the other will go to Virginia if it wins the ACC and either James Madison or 7-5 Duke if the Blue Devils beat Virginia. BYU could also take away an at-large bid by beating Texas Tech in the Big 12 Championship and converting the Red Raiders' spot from a conference champion to at-large selection. 

That means there are at most two spots left for the following teams: No. 9 Notre Dame, No. 10. Alabama, No. 11 BYU, No. 12 Miami (Fla.), No. 13 Utah, No. 14 Vanderbilt, and No. 16 Texas. I assume that those will go to Notre Dame and Alabama barring something crazy, especially since the closest team to them doesn't really factor into the equation: BYU will either automatically qualify or take another loss. With that being said, I think the committee has gotten it wrong -- with an assist from the weekly rankings, which do far more harm than good and seem to prevent the committee from being flexible and making changes even as we learn more about teams throughout the season. 

For example, there's no justifiable reason to rank Notre Dame ahead of Miami. Notre Dame has slightly "better" losses, but one of them is to the Hurricanes! Also, Notre Dame's best win is a soft 9-3 USC team. I don't think it's crazy to say that there's probably at least 30 teams that also could have gone 10-2 against that schedule. Is this what we want to reward? Playing a schedule almost entirely composed of bottom feeder Power Four teams? Losing to the only two good teams you played? It's a no for me.

Alabama and Oklahoma look pretty mediocre to me, as well, but they do have some good wins that will likely save them. I think it would have been a better and more interesting playoff if both had lost on Saturday, and they probably both would have if they weren't each playing a terrible team an with interim head coach. Instead, Alabama gets an SEC Championship shot thanks to the fact that its heinous loss to Florida State was out of conference. 

I've accepted the fact that Texas will be left out, because there's only so many spots for so many teams, but I think two arguments in support of the Longhorns are extremely valid. First, there is simply no question that they would be in if they had scheduled Akron instead of Ohio State. Again, is this what we want? It's objectively insane to design a system that favors a win against a MAC team over a 14-7 road loss to the undefeated No. 1 team in the country. (Just to distinguish this from what I just said about Notre Dame -- Texas' resume isn't exclusively close losses. They also have very good wins. Notre Dame does not. They lost to the only two competent teams they played.)

Texas shouldn't have lost to Florida. Obviously. But -- and here's the second argument I agree with -- last year's national runner-up got into the playoff despite losing at home to Northern Illinois. Texas has wins against Oklahoma, Vanderbilt, and Texas A&M, and I prefer to reward wins against good teams more than punishing losses to bad teams. I said the same thing whenever Ohio State lost to Iowa in 2017 or Purdue in 2018. 

With all that being said, let me know in the comments which two at-large teams you think should round out the CFP field (assuming BYU doesn't steal a spot by beating Texas Tech). 

GOLD PANTS ARE BACK

Ohio State suffocated Michigan in a 27-9 win on Saturday, a cathartic win that restored order to the rivalry after four straight Michigan wins. The highlight -- at least to me -- was a 20-play drive that ate nearly 12 minutes of clock. Despite ending in a field goal, it reminded me a lot of the way those early 2010s Alabama teams used to break the will of their opponents in the second half by running it down their throats. 

Buckeyes coach Ryan Day somehow resisted the urge to cut a WWE-style promo in the postgame press conference and took the high road, which is a real shame. I was dying for a Michigan version of "I'd like to know where Lou Holtz is right now."

Speaking of Michigan... what exactly was the plan? As best I can tell, it was to spend four quarters playing more physical after the whistle than during the actual plays in some sort of misguided hope that they could bait Ohio State players into ejections. Instead: three field goals, no touchdowns, zero second-half points, and -1 offensive yard in the fourth quarter. 

LANE KIFFIN OFFICIALLY LEAVES FOR LSU 

Lane Kiffin's standoff with Ole Miss is over, culminating with Kiffin leaving Oxford prior to the College Football Playoff to become LSU's next head coach. I made my position clear in last week's DBS, so I'll try not to rehash it too much, but it really feels like all parties could have done better. I think it's objectively insane to leave when you're likely to host a playoff game and have a legitimate shot at a deep playoff run. I also think Ole Miss should have ended this 10 days ago and told Kiffin to hit the bricks in order to give itself a shot at hiring a better coach instead of circling the wagons and promoting a coordinator from within (which almost never works -- it's how you end up stuck with Sherrone Moore). LSU should also ask itself how it's going to feel if Kiffin eventually does the same thing to them that he did to Tennessee and Ole Miss. 

All that being said, it's wild to see the double standard from national columnists who are giving a pass to Jon Sumrall and Eric Morris while taking their pound of flesh from Kiffin. The only difference between what Kiffin did and what those two coaches did is the response of the schools they worked for. All three asked to coach in the playoff after taking better jobs. Two schools said yes, one said no. If you ask me, all three should have said no. You can say there's a difference between leaving a G5 school for a P5 school and leaving one SEC school for another. As ESPN writer David Hale noted, would be right, just not in the way you think. Sumrall and Morris are going to spend the next week or two trying to recruit half their roster to join them in Gainesville and Stillwater, but unlike Ole Miss their former team won't have the resources to recover as quickly. 

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES

Eleven and a half months ago Tennessee fans were convinced that they were about to embarrass Ohio State and an embattled Ryan Day in Ohio Stadium. Since then, they lost that game 42-17, their quarterback left for UCLA after his extortion attempt hilariously backfired, and they will not be back in the playoff after an 8-4 regular season that ended with them getting run off the field by Vanderbilt and its 37-year-old quarterback Diego Pavia. 

Ryan Day, on the other hand, has not lost a football game in that same time span. 

COACHING CAROUSEL UPDATES

Here's the latest on the college football's hirings and firings:

RIVALRY WEEK TROLLING

Here are some of the best and wildest moments from rivalry week.

In the final seconds of its 27-17 win, Texas played a video of Texas A&M coach Mike Elko calling A&M the flagship university of the state. 

Brutus Buckeye crossed out the M in the end zone and wrote script Ohio into the snow-covered field. 

Lane Kiffin confronted an Ole Miss beat writer who quoted some interesting lyrics on a podcast earlier in the week. 

HAWAII KICKER TIES RECORD BEFORE MISS

One of the best -- and wildest -- stories of the year is Hawaii kicker Kansei Matsuzawa, a native of Japan who taught himself how to kick field goals from watching YouTube videos. Matsuzawa made his first 25 field goal attempts of the season, tying an FBS record for the most consecutive field goals to start a season. Just as improbably, his first miss of the season came on a 30-yard field goal that would have broken the record. 

Regardless, it's still an amazing story and Matsuzawa is a Lou Groza Award finalist. 

NO. 1 VS. NO. 2 AWAITS

I can't believe this sentence is real, but undefeated No. 1 Ohio State is set to face undefeated No. 2 Indiana in the Big Ten Championship Game. The teams didn't play in the regular season but shared five common opponents, with the Hoosiers having a better margin of victory against Illinois, Purdue, and UCLA and the Buckeyes winning by more against Penn State and Wisconsin. 

"It's been a long time since we've been to Indy and we want to win this thing," Ohio State coach Ryan Day said. 

Given that voters have started treating the Heisman Trophy more like the Best Performance In A Conference Championship Game By A Quarterback Award, it's also worth noting that this game will matchup two Heisman contenders in Buckeyes quarterback Julian Sayin and Hoosiers quarterback Fernando Mendoza. 

Lastly, it's hard to imagine this happening because the CFP committee has never consistently demonstrated critical thinking skills, but I would argue that unless it's an especially bad blowout loss the loser of this game shouldn't fall below the No. 2 seed. Ohio State has a great case to remain above Georgia (assuming the Bulldogs beat Alabama) even with a loss, and I'd argue the Hoosiers do as well. If you believe Ohio State is the No. 1 team in the country, the No. 2 team should lose to the No. 1 team when they play. Hard to argue that's worthy of getting moved down unless something especially humiliating is involved, especially since everyone below them already has a loss.

WHAT A COMEBACK

The Ivy League allowed teams to compete in the FCS playoffs for the first time ever this year, and it did not get off to a great start with conference champion Yale down 35-7 to Youngstown State at halftime. However, Yale scored 36 second-half points to cap a wild comeback and beat the Penguins 43-42.

Their reward? A trip to Bozeman to face No. 2 seed Montana State in the round of 16. 

PLAY OF THE WEEK

Tied 20-20 with Auburn with less than four minutes remaining, Alabama faced fourth-and-2 from the Auburn 6-yard line. Rather than kick the field goal, Crimson Tide coach Kalen DeBoer kept his offense out there. It paid off when wide receiver Isaiah Horton caught his third touchdown of the game, which ended up being the game winner. 

IDIOT OF THE WEEK

This week's winner is every college coach who begged for an early signing period so that they could get players on campus earlier and have two months less of recruiting seniors, only to turn around and complain that the calendar they helped create is ruining their ability to leave jobs without making a giant mess. It's legitimately one of the worst things to happen to the sport in my lifetime. Not only did it ruin one of the most fun days of the year, the original National Signing Day in early February, but it also turned the coaching carousel insane and also led to a drastic increase in early enrollees, to the point where it's basically a given that recruits are going to give up their last semester of high school instead of being something reserved for select special circumstances. 

So yes, it should change. But the last people I want to hear about it from are the guys who are the reason it exists in the first place. You fished your wish, now be quiet and suffer the consequences until the adults in the room fix it. 

REF JAIL INMATE OF THE WEEK

Have some self respect and eject a player who headbutts you. It's the most clear-cut ejection I've seen all season and somehow Michigan linebacker Jaishawn Barnham stayed in the game. 

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:

Indiana 56, Purdue 3
Georgia 16, Georgia Tech 9
Kansas State 24, Colorado 14
Boston College 34, Syracuse 12
Penn State 40, Rutgers 36
NC State 42, UNC 19
Hawaii 27, Wyoming 7

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