Oklahoma finishes 13-0, four conference titles settled, and Kewan Lacy goes back-to-back.
Thirteen weeks are in the books, four conference titles are settled, and the twelve-team bracket is set. Oklahoma finished 13-0 and never really looked threatened. Kewan Lacy won a second straight Heisman. And a CPU-controlled Memphis team is somehow in the field again.
Here's how the regular season closed, how the four title games went, and what the bracket asks of everybody.
Week 12 was quiet by comparison. Cell put 45 on Ice Man's Georgia, Bowzer handled Nebraska 41-14, States got past Washington 31-22, and Teeric beat Gooch 35-14.
Week 13 was where the seeding got decided, and four teams made statements:
Elsewhere: Work dismantled Cell 42-7, Polo took the rivalry game from Quan 33-7, and TV beat Teeric 28-7 in a Los Angeles game that finished USC's month at 1-2.
Two of these were over early. Two went to the wire.
Stew wasn't sharing the trophy. Forty-two points of margin in a conference title game, against a Florida team that came in 11-1 and had beaten Alabama and Georgia inside a month. Polo had been the story of the second half of the season; Stew ended that story in one night and finished 13-0.
The best of the four. States and Curt traded a four-point game for the Big Ten, seven days after Curt won the Michigan game by forty. States takes the title and the 3 seed; Curt takes a 9 seed and a first-round road trip. Two conference title games decided by 42 and by 4, on the same weekend.
LT's third straight win over Lute, and the widest of them. Clemson finishes 12-1 with the 2 seed and a bye.
TBO wins a conference championship and still has to play a road game in the first round. Arizona State comes out of it 11-2 but ranked 15th, which lands them at the 11 seed — the lowest-seeded conference champion in the field, and the clearest illustration of how much the poll weighs the Big 12 right now. KJ's TCU falls at 15.
Byes: Oklahoma (13-0), Clemson (12-1), Penn State (12-1), Oregon (11-1). Stew, LT, States, Bowzer — three conference champions and the Big Ten runner-up that wasn't.
First round:
It ends in New Orleans at the Caesars Superdome.
The bracket math is unkind to the defending champion's half in one specific way: Oklahoma's quarterfinal opponent comes out of Ohio State–Ole Miss, which is the only first-round game between two teams that finished with double-digit losses on nobody's ledger and a combined 20-5 record. The 8/9 line is the strongest in the field.
Ole Miss has now produced both Heisman winners in league history, and it's the same player.
Kewan Lacy: 2,342 rushing yards, 31 total touchdowns, 12.0 yards per carry. That last number is the one to sit with. Twelve yards a carry over a full season isn't a good year, it's a broken defense simulator. He beat his own precedent and made the vote unanimous well before the ceremony.
The three finalists behind him all have a case they'll never get to make:
Lacy's reward for the second trophy is a first-round home game against a Big Ten team that just lost a conference championship by four points. No rest for anybody.
Twelve teams left. One of them is a computer. Oklahoma has not lost a game all year, and the road to a repeat still runs through Norman.
