Taking place on the weekend before Halloween, college football Week 9 delivered tricks and treats in equal measure. Which players and programs provided eye candy for our college football souls? Who was so terrifyingly bad that the grim reaper is a specter looming over the future of the team?
We’ve sifted through the good, bad, and the ugly of college football Week 9 to bring you the best and not-so-great moments from the past week.
College Football Week 9 | Winners
UConn Huskies
Do you want to know something horrifying this Halloween? UConn’s recent football history. Let’s start with some basic facts. The Huskies haven’t had a winning season since 2010 and haven’t won more than three games in a season since 2016.
Having sat out the 2020 season, the program has struggled to a one-win campaign in two of the last three playing seasons. They’ve been the whipping boys of college football. These are facts.
How about some more facts? Heading into their Week 9 clash with Boston College, UConn had never beaten the Eagles. Two scoreless ties in 1908 and 1910 were the closest they’d come to beating their New England nemesis. Twelve defeats spanning over 100 years, including 20+ point defeats in their last three encounters. Despite a difficult start to their season, Boston College was an eight-point favorite heading into the game.
This is not your father’s UConn. The Huskies made history in college football Week 9, heaping more misery onto a beleaguered Boston College team that had high preseason expectations. Over 100 years of hurt evaporated into the East Hartford sky as Jim Mora’s resurgent outfit engineered a famous 13-3 win.
While freshman QB Zion Turner threw the games only score, it was UConn’s formidable defense that forced five turnovers that helped seal an unlikely and unimaginable win. The Huskies are now 4-5 after recording the biggest shock in Week 9. Bowl eligibility isn’t out of the question, with another New England opponent in UMass up next before rounding out the season against Liberty and an under-par Army team.
Louisville’s Defense
Louisville’s defense terrorized the Wake Forest Demon Deacons and left Sam Hartman seeing ghosts after a treat-filled third-quarter performance that provided further ACC shocks in college football Week 9. Tenth-ranked Wake Forest was a 4.5-point favorite ahead of the game, but they were left paralyzed and traumatized by a third-quarter haranguing that ranks as one of the most one-sided one-quarter performances in the nation this season.
Despite falling behind to two James Turner field goals and a by-now standard Malik Cunningham touchdown run, Wake rallied to a 14-13 halftime lead. Normal service appeared to have resumed, with the Demon Deacons looking set to kick on in the second half for a seventh win of the season.
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However, the Cardinals’ defense must have gotten fired up on Halloween candy at the half and came out with ferocious defensive gusto. Kei’Trel Clark’s 46-yard pick-six set the tempo for what was to come, with touchdowns from Tiyon Evans, Cunningham, and Jaelin Carter, sandwiched in between a delightful 90-yard pick-six from Quincy Riley.
While the 48-21 scoreboard will show four offensive touchdowns, it was the six third-quarter turnovers that really laid the foundations for the Louisville win. In total, they tallied eight turnovers, adding further defensive dominance with eight sacks. While putting the team on the brink of bowl eligibility, the Cardinals also gave head coach Scott Satterfield his first ever win over an AP Poll Top 10 ranked team.
Chris Reynolds
It’s been a rough season for the Charlotte 49ers. Heading into Week 9, they’d recorded just one win and parted ways with head coach Tim Healy — the architect of the program’s only trip to a college football bowl in 2019. A new head coach for their Conference USA clash with Rice achieved the desired result, but as always, when the 49ers are hot, it’s because quarterback Chris Reynolds is playing out of his mind.
Such was the case on Saturday, when Reynolds engineered a second win of the season for Charlotte over a Rice team who has bowl aspirations and was even shaping up as a conference contender early in the season. The Charlotte QB completed a ludicrous 16 of 19 pass attempts, throwing for 254 yards and five touchdowns.
The TD total tied a career high — set earlier this season against Georgia State — while Reynolds’ 84.2% completion rate goes into his personal record books as a single-game best. While Elijah Spencer snagged three of his touchdown passes, Reynolds sprayed the ball around. Victor Tucker and Grant DuBose had TD receptions, while five different pass catchers got on the end of his 16 completions.
North Texas Mean Green
North Texas is no stranger to success under Seth Littrell. The Mean Green have been bowl eligible in all but one of his seasons at the helm. They posted consecutive nine-win seasons between 2017 and 2018. At the same time, North Texas has battled losing seasons for the past three years and their 2020 bowl eligibility was more a result of attrition than being successful in Conference USA competition.
The same cannot be said of the 2022 North Texas team under Littrell. Their success over Western Kentucky in college football Week 9 takes the Mean Green to five wins, with two winnable home games in their final three outings. Meanwhile, North Texas’ 4-1 conference record sets them on a collision course with UTSA for the Conference USA title game.
Prolonged season success doesn’t earn you a place in the weekly winners’ section. However, when you shut down a high-powered offense like North Texas did to Western Kentucky, you need to sit up and take notice.
Mean Green quarterback Austin Aune out-threw his namesake Austin Reed, and North Texas totaled 541 yards of offense to the Hilltoppers’ 466 total yards.
The North Texas defense put the “Mean” into Mean Green, tallying two sacks, five tackles for loss, an interception, and eight passes defensed as they stifled the Western Kentucky offense. Sophomore cornerback Ridge Texada added another two pass breakups to his résumé, leading the nation with 1.89 passes defensed per game.
College Football Week 9 | Losers
Boston College Eagles
Take everything positive that we said about UConn in the opening to this college football Week 9 winners article and flip it for Boston College. A first defeat to UConn in over 100 years. Failing to find the end zone against a team you routinely put up 20+ point victories over. Falling to a sixth defeat of the season. Forget Chestnut Hill, the program is beginning to resemble something like the House on Haunted Hill.
Jeff Hafley has done an impressive job in creating positivity around a program that had suffered through the Steve Addazio era. However, he’s staring down the barrel of the program’s worst performance since Addazio’s 2015 campaign.
As the offense flounders behind Phil Jurkovec — as it did against UConn in college football Week 9 — you wonder where the next win will come from. They’ve failed to put up more than 20 points in five of their eight games this season. Granted, they’ve dealt with offensive line injuries and departures, but this Eagles team has more than enough talent to compete. They just simply aren’t, and that showed in Saturday’s humbling defeat to the Huskies.
Bowl Eligibility for Multiple Teams
When the college football season begins in late August, it’s a time for hoping, dreaming, and wishing for a team that can compete for a national championship. While that’s not realistic for all 131 FBS teams, a conference championship is an acceptable dream to aim for. You’ve raided the transfer portal, you’ve recruited as well as you can, now it’s time for that offseason hard work to pay dividends on the field.
The reality for a lot of teams, however, is that bowl eligibility is the very best they can hope for. In multiple conferences, talent disparity is simply too vast for an outsider to challenge the accepted norm. But, bowl eligibility is a realistic aim. For multiple teams, college football Week 9 saw an end to that dream, that aim, for another season.
South Florida challenged Houston early on in their all-AAC clash, but the 42-27 defeat was their seventh of the season. Northwestern’s terrible run continued, with their 33-13 loss to Iowa marking a seventh — and bowl-season fatal — consecutive defeat. UMass’s bowl eligibility knockout blow came at home to New Mexico State, and Arkansas State won’t progress to the postseason after a 31-3 defeat to South Alabama.
After a disastrous season that saw the departure of head coach Karl Dorrell, Colorado racked up a seventh defeat of the season at home to Arizona State. The Buffaloes have failed to make it to bowl season for the second consecutive season. Meanwhile, the Mountain West conference lost two teams from bowl eligibility following Nevada’s 35-28 loss to San Jose State and Hawaii’s 27-20 defeat against Wyoming.
Rutgers Offense
It might be the birthplace of college football, but Week 9 showcased that Rutgers is far from being at the forefront of offensive football. The program might have taken a big step forward under Greg Schiano — and is still on track for its best record since 2014 if they can win two of their last four — but their offense against Minnesota set college football back to when the sport originated in Piscataway over 150 years ago.
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Zero points. 134 total yards. 20% third down efficiency. 37% passes completed. 3.6 yards per pass. 2.3 yards per carry in the ground game. Three turnovers. Just 18 minutes 58 seconds time of possession. It was an offensive humiliation made even more embarrassing by Minnesota running back Mohamed Ibrahim, who tallied more total offense on his 36 carries than the entire Scarlet Knights offense could manage across all four quarters.
Anyone at Virginia vs. Miami (FL)
At least Rutgers fans only had to sit through four quarters of their offensive ineptitude against Minnesota. Spare a thought for Miami Hurricanes and Virginia Cavaliers fans who had an additional four periods of overtime to endure before Miami emerged with a 14-12 victory that puts Virginia on the brink of failing to be bowl eligible this season.
As a special-teams purist, it was a joy to behold. For everyone else, this might have been the worst game in all of college football Week 9. Miami kicker Andres Borregales and Virginia counterpart Will Bettridge traded field goals, both nailing their four attempts flawlessly. Punters Lou Hedley and Daniel Sparks combined for 14 attempts, tallying 569 punt yards in a game with less than 600 total offensive yards.
While a terrible offensive spectacle as an isolated incident, the game was emblematic of the issues both programs have faced this season. Neither Jake Garcia nor Tyler Van Dyke have been regularly impactful for the Hurricanes, and Cavaliers quarterback Brennan Armstrong has struggled to replicate his form from last season, compounded by repeated issues with drops by his wide receivers.
To truly summarize the issues for a Miami team that had high expectations following the hire of Mario Cristobal, allow me to quote Pro Football Network Managing Copy Editor Eric Frosbutter — a long-suffering Hurricanes fan.
“Their games have been blacked out in my area for the past three weeks, and I’ve been grateful for it.”