College Football Week Three Winners and Losers

Week three of college football is in the books and in the words of Bill Belichick “we’re on to week four.” Well, not all of us as we at Beehive Sports are rolling out our week three winners and losers of college football for this past weekend’s slate of games, so let's get to it.

Winners

Kalani Sitake and BYU

We are going to dive deeper into this BYU vs USC game on this week’s Off-Field Generals Podcast (like, subscribe and review) but holy cow, what a game. BYU entered this weekend’s matchup with USC without having beaten a ranked team at home since 2015, but that all changed as the Cougars upset the 24 ranked Trojans in overtime.

The win was BYU’s second consecutive win over a Power-5 program in overtime and it may have been the one to clinch an extension for head coach Kalani Sitake. Sitake entered the 2019 season with his future at BYU unknown as the program had chosen not to extend the fourth-year coach. But now Sitake holds all the cards as he is set to enter negotiations this off-season. Sitake has BYU 2-1 to start the season, despite most people expecting the Cougars to start off 0-4 as a result of taking on four P5 programs. The Cougars are overachieving and may have just gotten a building block victory, and Sitake may be a very rich man here soon.

Virginia

The ACC is a mess. Boston College fell at home to Kansas. Yes, Kansas. Virginia Tech struggled with Furman at home. Georgia Tech lost to Citadel. NC State lost to West Virginia. And North Carolina fell to Wake Forrest after their hot start. That leaves Virginia as the clear cut number two in the ACC.

Everyone and their mom knows that Clemson should sleepwalk through the ACC. I said it last week, Clemson has the easiest path to the CFP I have ever seen. But while Clemson is the consensus number-one in the ACC, there was some debate as to who was the second-best team, and after three weeks it has become clear that team is Virginia. Yes, they probably should have beaten Florida State by more than 7, but the Cavaliers found ways to win and came out with a 31-24 and start the week with a 21 ranking in the AP Poll. Don’t look now, but Bronco Mendenhall may have his guys playing in Charlotte come December.

Pac-12

The Pac-12 was on my list of losers last week and for good reason. The conference itself has one good shot at making the CFP and that remains the case, but the Pac-12 conference can still turn some heads even if they don’t send a team to the playoffs.

The Pac-12 has its bad teams - and man, are they some bad teams - but the top of the conference looks stronger than it has in the past, with six teams making an appearance in the AP Top 25 this week. Utah, Oregon, Washington State, Washington, Cal and Arizona State all find themselves ranked as we enter week four. You could probably argue that the conference doesn’t deserve to have half of its members ranked in the Top 25 but here we are. The Pac-12 won’t continue to have this many teams ranked as Washington State, Cal, Washington and Oregon all have play each other while the Utes will take on the Sun Devils later in the season, but for now, the Pac-12 is riding high.

Losers

Clay Helton

For six days it looked as if the USC Head Coach had saved his job following the Trojans big win over the Stanford Cardinal. But then the Trojans fell on the road to Zach Wilson and the BYU Cougars, while Stanford went on to get blown out by UCF, and suddenly USC finds themselves in a much different situation than they originally thought.

BYU’s win over USC may have gotten one coach an extension while simultaneously getting the other coach fired. I would be shocked to see Clay Helton finish this season as the head coach of USC. With Lynn Swann stepping down as AD, it looks as if a rehaul of the entire football program may be imminent.

Willie Taggart

Oh boy, where to start on the Florida State head coach. Taggart may be the worst coach in the country, but then again, Charlie Strong is still chugging away in South Florida. Florida State started the season blowing a huge lead to Boise State at home and then blaming on the lack of hydration of the team. That in itself should have been enough to make Taggart clean out his desk. Then the Seminoles almost fell to Louisiana Monroe and only came away with the win because they missed an extra point in overtime.

But this may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. In what was probably the worst clock management I have ever seen, the Seminoles chose to run a direct snap to their running back just yards away from the game-tying touchdown, rather than spike the ball and run a regular play. Here, just watch for yourself.

I’d normally have a third loser here, but Willie Taggart and Clay Helton are such gigantic losers that adding a third would either minimize their ‘loserness’ (its a word, okay) or would be an insult to whoever I chose to add to the losers list. So instead just rewatch the end of the FSU-Virginia game.