Alabama hadn't lost to Vanderbilt in 40 years and hadn't lost in Nashville in 55 years. The Crimson Tide were coming off of a win in the game of the year, an incredible back-and-forth affair with Georgia that bumped them to No. 1 in the AP poll. The Commodores were three weeks removed from losing to Georgia State.
As players have been given more rights in recent years -- fewer transfer restrictions, the ability to get paid legally -- a countless number of critics railed against the progress, declaring that it would wreck competitive balance, that the best players would gravitate toward the best schools and that the also-rans would get left in the dust. This was always terribly disingenuous, of course, because college football has never had competitive balance and because the best players have always chosen the most historically awesome schools.
College football has almost never been a sport that allowed Vanderbilts to beat Alabamas. But because of Vanderbilt's deft use of the transfer portal and some perfect bounces from a pointy ball, the Commodores turned the sport on its head Saturday. They got 308 combined passing and rushing yards from former New Mexico State quarterback Diego Pavia, who seamlessly segued from talking about "God's plan" to dropping an F-bomb on live television during his postgame interview and has now beaten both Alabama and Auburn.
While Vanderbilt definitely needed said perfect bounces -- a high deflection of an early Jalen Milroe pass that turned into a Randon Fontenette pick-six, a glorious Miles Capers sack-and-strip that fell into Yilanan Ouattara's hands to set up a late touchdown -- the Dores always came up with the answers they needed. When Alabama cut an early 23-7 lead to 23-21, Pavia threw a 36-yard touchdown to Junior Sherrill. When Bama's amazing Ryan Williams scored yet another physically improbable touchdown to make it 30-28, the Commodores kicked a field goal, forced the aforementioned fumble and scored again. And when Bama made it 40-35 with 2:46 left, it was easy to assume the Tide would force a punt, and score late to win. Instead, Vandy calmly moved the chains three times to run out the clock. And then Vandy students tore down the goalposts and marched them into the Cumberland River.
We've now had a pair of particularly monumental top-10 upsets this season: Northern Illinois over Notre Dame and Vandy over Bama. But Week 6 gave us even more. The teams ranked fourth (Tennessee), ninth (Missouri), 10th (Michigan) and 11th (USC) also lost to conference foes, and No. 8 Miami had to rally from 25 points down in the final 20 minutes to avoid falling as well. If you're a chaos seeker and wishcaster, I should mention that we've already seen eight top-10 teams upset by unranked opponents this season, only one behind the pace set in the first six weeks by the 2007 season, aka the granddaddy of all chaos seasons.
While we attempt to collectively will the chaos to continue, we should take stock. The SEC race certainly got flipped all around Saturday, but we also saw potentially impactful upsets in the ACC (SMU over Louisville), Big Ten (Washington over Michigan, Minnesota over USC) and Sun Belt (Louisiana-Monroe over James Madison), plus the race for the Group of 5's playoff bid (Syracuse over UNLV). Week 6 scrambled both odds and expectations. Using SP+ projected conference title odds, let's check in with each of FBS' nine conferences and see where each race stands, at least until Week 7 scrambles everything all over again.
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SEC | Big Ten
ACC | Big 12
Group of 5 conferences
Week's biggest surprises
Heisman of week
10 favorite games
