As we walk through this new world of college football together, it’s going to be more and more difficult to distinguish between the results we can chalk up to parity and those that are worth freaking out about.
It’s true, the differences between elite teams and the middle class are smaller than ever. The schedules, particularly in the SEC this year, are unforgiving. A team’s overall health matters. Fatigue, both physical and emotional, is hard to measure until you see it on the field. Nearly anyone can beat anyone on a given day. Like the NFL, margins are brutally small.
Things are so different now in college football that it’s tempting to show a little more patience and understanding.
Of course, that’s not what we do here at the Misery Index. We are about finding the pain that fans experience and telling them why it’s real and deserved. And the best way to do that is to look past the roller coaster of results we see on a week-in, week-out basis and focus on the things that fit within established patterns.
Which is really, really bad news for Texas and coach Steve Sarkisian.
Because if you look at what’s become of Texas this season, it’s hard to make a case that back-to-back losses to Oklahoma and Florida are the product of bad luck or an emotional hangover or exhaustion caused by too many physical games.
You can find a good explanation for plenty of the surprising results in the SEC this season. But losing to an inferior Oklahoma team coming off a bye week? Then turning around at home and blowing a 17-3 lead over Florida, only to lose 27-24?
Not only are there zero excuses for a Texas team that has tumbled from No. 1 to fighting for its College Football Playoff life, it isn’t even that surprising if you watch the Longhorns every week.
They are always less than the sum of their parts.
You know it, Texas fans know it and deep down Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte must know it: As long as Sarkisian is your head coach, you will always leave some food on the table.
That doesn’t mean Sarkisian is incompetent or that Texas would be better off with someone else. We’ve seen what bad Texas looks like, and Sarkisian has left those days in the rear-view mirror. He’s 39-10 over the last 3 1/2 seasons with a couple appearances in the CFP.
But how many times over his 13 years as a head coach have we ended a season saying that Sarkisian got the most out of his talent or exceeded expectations? Once, maybe? And yet how often do we have to rationalize why someone who made his reputation as an elite play-caller isn’t putting an elite offense on the field?
It’s almost a weekly occurrence.
This Texas team was one of the most expensive rosters and built to win it all. It got a massive Week 2 win over Ohio State. Its quarterback, Arch Manning, is still projected to be a first-round NFL Draft pick. And yet, if Texas got left out of the CFP for a second year in a row, there would be zero room to complain after today. That’s how much of a reputation hit Texas has taken by losing to an Oklahoma team that couldn’t score and a Florida team that hasn’t stopped anyone all season. Texas, in fact, is the only power conference team that hasn’t managed to crack 30 points against a Gators defense that ranked 131st in pass defense.
Yes, Manning is flawed, and maybe that makes it hard to do all the things Sarkisian wants to do. But the macro issue is largely the same as it was when Quinn Ewers was the quarterback: It’s harder for Texas to score points than it should be, which points directly to Sarkisian because he calls the plays. And Texas’ overall inconsistency, where it will just kick away one game per season that it can’t afford to lose, is a Sark staple going back to his time at USC and Washington before that.
With all the parity these days, it’s hard to tell the real problems from the temporary circumstances. But the things plaguing Texas right now are not new, making them America’s most miserable fan base in Week 7.
Conference Champions of Misery
ACC: The misery felt by Virginia fans should not just be about slipping to 4-3 this season after a 23-13 loss to SMU. Much of it, if not the bulk of it, should really extend back to last year’s ACC championship game when the Cavaliers blew it against Duke. Why does that game seem so relevant now? Because when you’re Virginia, you’re probably not going to get many cracks at making the playoff. Between 2005 and 2024, Virginia finished a season in the top 25 just one time — and that was 2019 when the final coaches’ poll ranked them … 25th. So when you have a chance to do something historic for your program, you can’t let it slip by against a Duke team that somehow got into the ACC title game at 7-5. If Virginia won that game, it would have been a playoff team. You can hang banners for that these days. Tony Elliott would have been just the second coach in program history to win a conference title. Despite some high hopes for what this season could be, former Missouri/Penn State quarterback Beau Pribula hasn’t worked out and Virginia is back to the middle of the pack. It’s hard to keep the faith that Virginia is going to have such a golden opportunity any time in the foreseeable future.
Big Ten: We’re going to make this very simple for Matt Campbell. At Toledo and Iowa State, you can recruit a bunch of guys with three-star talent but five-star hearts, win seven or eight games because you’ve got a really good culture and get a pat on the head at the end of the season. That’s not going to cut it at Penn State. Even the most pessimistic projections of Campbell’s first season were not as bad as the reality of being 0-4 in the Big Ten after a 21-18 loss at Michigan. And even if somehow Penn State crushes the soft back end of its schedule to finish 8-4 (which is certainly no guarantee given what we’ve seen so far), it will mean absolutely nothing other than a scorching hot seat for both Campbell and athletic director Pat Kraft heading into Year 2. Even if you were on board with Penn State firing James Franklin last year amidst a three-game losing streak, nobody signed up for going directly to the bottom of the Big Ten.
Big 12: The last time Kansas beat Kansas State in football, one of the players in the losing locker room was a freshman quarterback in the middle of a redshirt year named Collin Klein. That was 2008. The next season, Kansas State got revenge 17-10 in Manhattan. Now, fast-forward to 2026 and Klein is the first-year head coach at his alma mater. In other words, during his nearly two decades as part of the Kansas State program from player to assistant to head coach, Klein’s only loss to Kansas was his first year as a college student. That’s how brutal this rivalry has been on the Jayhawks, who fell to 2-4 after a 35-24 loss. Even though Kansas has had some good moments under Lance Leipold (though fewer of them lately, as he’s lost 14 of his last 21 in the Big 12), the Sunflower Showdown has trended toward bug-meets-windshield territory. And among those 18 consecutive losses, only four have been decided by one score.
Group of Six: If you’re trying to find this year’s hard-luck team, look no further than Navy. Leading UTSA 34-31 inside the final five minutes, two Midshipmen missed a tackle on A’Marion Peterson, who turned a screen pass into a 41-yard touchdown and ultimately a 38-34 win. Since beating Towson on Sept. 5, Navy has lost four one-score games — by eight to FAU, by four to UAB, by five to Air Force and by four to UTSA. What made Saturday’s result even more painful was that Navy quarterback Jackson Gutierrez didn’t get a celebrate a win in his hometown despite rushing for 139 yards and two touchdowns and throwing two more. After going 21-5 the last two years, this is a surprising step back for Navy, which was picked to win the American this year by most of the preseason publications.
Headset Misery
Marcus Freeman: No matter how good of a team we think Notre Dame is, we need to keep one important fact in mind. The Irish, quite simply, have not beaten a team that matters since the College Football Playoff semifinals on Jan. 9, 2025. That’s not an indictment of Freeman’s ability to win big games, which we have seen plenty of times in the past. It is, however, an indictment of Notre Dame’s scheduling philosophy of late. Sorry, but when you are watching college football week after week and how tough it is to survive week to week in the Big Ten, SEC or even the Big 12 in some cases, Notre Dame is doing itself no favors in terms of public perception by playing good teams so infrequently. No, a 28-24 loss to BYU in Provo should not be disqualifying. But if schedules matter, and they’re supposed to in this ultra-subjective playoff system, you can’t reward Notre Dame for scheduling two big games a year if they aren’t winning them. Going 0-2 last season against Miami and Texas A&M cost them a CFP bid. If the Irish don’t beat Miami on Nov. 7, they won’t have anything close to a high-quality win this year and shouldn’t be in the CFP.
Clark Lea: OK, so maybe Vanderbilt’s success was (mostly) due to Diego Pavia after all. That is the only possible takeaway from watching the post-Pavia Commodores, who are back to being the worst team in the SEC after a 31-21 home loss to Arkansas. With what’s left of their schedule, Vandy desperately needed this one to have hopes of making a bowl game. Instead, the Commodores’ defense gave up 438 yards and freshman quarterback Jared Curtis threw two interceptions. Lea secured a big contract extension after going 10-3 last season. But without Pavia, his record is 12-30. Yes, Vanderbilt is a tough job — arguably one of the toughest in the power conferences. But last year’s narrative was all about Vandy turning a corner and committing more resources to football, which included a massive NIL deal for Curtis to renege on his commitment to Georgia. It’s concerning that things have immediately returned to the historical norm in Nashville.
Mike Norvell: The last two plays of Florida State’s 43-35 overtime loss to Miami will haunt Norvell for awhile. Not because of anything he or his players did but because when things aren’t going well generally in a football program, it seems even the good plays get punished. Such was the case in the second overtime, as Florida State quarterback Ashton Daniels threw two Hail Marys — neither of which hit the ground — and yet saw both wiped out by rulings that Norvell will find hard to swallow. The first one, which Daniels completed from the 36-yard line, got wiped out by a fairly ticky-tack holding penalty. Backed up to the 46, Daniels again gave his receiver a great shot to catch the ball. Instead, it was ruled an interception as the Miami defender and Florida State receiver came down with it almost simultaneously. On replay, it was almost impossible to tell. But because the call on the field was an interception rather than simultaneous possession, which would have been a touchdown, the initial call withstood the review. Playing so competitively against the Canes may have bought Norvell more time, but a 3-4 record is still a 3-4 record.
Pat Fitzgerald: Though it’s unclear how much money got out of Northwestern in order to settle his wrongful-termination lawsuit, it was almost certainly in the tens of millions. And it probably wasn’t enough to completely soothe the pain he felt losing 24-21 to his alma mater, as Northwestern’s Jackson Kleather nailed a 34-yard field goal to beat Michigan State on the final play from scrimmage. For those who don’t remember, Fitzgerald was a star linebacker on Northwestern’s miraculous 1995 team that made the Rose Bowl, took over as head coach in 2006 following the tragic death of Randy Walker and led the program for 17 seasons, some of which were very good. But it all fell apart in the summer of 2023, several months after a 1-11 season, when allegations surfaced about a culture of locker room hazing. Fitzgerald denied any knowledge of it but was fired anyway. It was an ugly and personally hurtful end to a great relationship, and Fitzgerald’s motivation for coming back at another Big Ten school almost certainly revolves around revenge on some level. How could it not? But that will have to wait at least another year.
Moments of Misery
Gunner gacked one: If there’s one quarterback you wouldn’t expect to commit a horrible turnover at the worst possible time, it’s probably Georgia’s Gunner Stockton. With his maturity and experience in big games, it was absolutely stunning to see him cough up a fumble just past midfield with a minute to go against Auburn, setting the table for a 27-24 loss. At that point in the game, Georgia had just come back to tie it up and forced Auburn to punt. Despite how poorly Georgia played for much of the game, nearly everyone watching is probably thinking the same thing — that Stockton is about to lead his team into field goal range and Georgia will walk off the field 7-0. Instead, Stockton’s turnover handed Auburn the opportunity to pull one of the upsets of the year and the Tigers did not give it back.
Mora defense, please: When we last saw Colorado State a couple weeks ago, head coach Jim Mora was having a meltdown about how bad the Rams’ defense was, leading him to fire coordinator Tyson Summers mid-game. Shockingly (or not), that didn’t solve Colorado State’s problems on that side of the ball. In a 66-27 loss to Texas State, the Rams gave up 716 yards of offense, including 503 on the ground. It’s probably worth asking in retrospect why Mora hired Summers in the first place. They had never worked together before, and Summers’ defensive scheme has nothing in common with what Mora’s teams had done in the past. But Summers, who was Colorado State’s interim coach last season, was well-liked enough that Mora kept him around. As a result, this is pretty much a wasted year for the Rams, who have given up 222 total points in their last four games.
Mateer isn’t magic: Oklahoma is just painful to watch on offense at this point. Sure, it doesn’t help that the offensive line is banged up and isn’t playing very well. But the question Sooners fans will be asking for a long time to come is what the heck happened to quarterback John Mateer. Though Mateer has always had flaws, at least he was fun to watch last season. But this year has gone so poorly, it’s making Oklahoma fans pine for the days of Blake Bell. Though the Belldozer was not an elite quarterback by any means — he ultimately found his calling as a tight end — he didn’t make the crushing mistakes week after week that we’re seeing from Mateer. In a 21-13 loss to Kentucky, which all but eliminates OU from the playoff conversation, Mateer threw three interceptions. Two of them came on Oklahoma’s final two possessions, including a pick-6 when the Sooners merely needed a field goal to escape with a victory. Taking special teams and defensive scores out of the equation, Oklahoma’s offense hasn’t produced more than 14 points in any game besides the season opener against UTEP.
Fans gone wild: One week after an Alabama fan struck a Georgia player on the helmet during the postgame celebration, earning him a lifetime ban from attending games in Tuscaloosa, video surfaced of a Texas fan on the field taunting Florida players after the Gators’ 27-24 win in Austin. While the fan had the middle finger of his right hand raised, he was holding a cell phone in his left, suggesting he wanted this incident on camera and distributed on social media. Quite simply, this needs to stop. While it’s indicative of a much larger societal problem — young people seem to have fewer and fewer inhibitions about bringing bad online behavior into real-life scenarios — this is also something schools need to get control over. Between all the premium access being sold and sideline passes handed out, it just seems like there are more and more people finding their way to the field who simply don’t belong there. Security at football games is hard and unwieldy, but maybe it’s time to tighten things up and start issuing stricter bans for fans who directly engage players with malicious intent — even if it’s just trash talk. Figure this out before a truly regrettable and preventable incident happens