playDavid HaleNov 11, 2026, 07:00 AM ETCloseCollege football reporter.Joined ESPN in 2012.Graduate of the University of Delaware.Multiple AuthorsOpen Extended ReactionsOregon was first admitted into the College Football Playoff intensive care unit in Week 2 when Oklahoma State, fresh off an opening-week loss to Tulsa, upended the Ducks in one of the season’s first big upsets.In the four-team playoff era, this would’ve been a fatal blow. A year from now, it’ll be little more than a paper cut.But we still have a 12-team playoff this season, which meant Oregon’s heart was still thumping and, though the Ducks required some round-the-clock monitoring, their playoff hopes were still alive.Then came the Dante Moore injury.Then came a home loss to UCLA in which the Ducks looked entirely lifeless.Then came what surely was the kill shot, a meandering performance against Illinois in which Oregon looked like the guy in “Weekend at Bernie’s” — oddly ambulatory but nevertheless dead as a doornail.And that was the end of Oregon’s story.Or so we thought.The first playoff rankings of the season offered plenty of surprises, but perhaps the biggest could’ve been summed up easily by simply reenacting one of the tropes of all great horror movies — only this time, it would be a duck wing lurching up through the dirt as the tombstone that read “Here lies 2026 Oregon” crumbled to the ground.To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Oregon’s death were exaggerated.But the Ducks are not alone in college football’s zombie class for 2026.After all, it was Oregon that appeared to deal USC its death blow, and, it seemed, another nail in Lincoln Riley’s coffin. When USC could barely muster a wheeze and a cough against Wisconsin, it seemed the kindest thing the committee could do was to give the Trojans the Old Yeller treatment. No sense prolonging the inevitable.
Yet, here we are, with USC arguably underranked at No. 18 with winnable games against Indiana and UCLA to go, a playoff spot still well within reach.Texas was dead and buried after three quarters against Ohio State, rallied, then stumbled into a plate glass window and got caught in a bear trap before bleeding out against Florida and Oklahoma. Two losses to unranked teams surely meant the Longhorns would be circling the drain, right? Nope. They’re the No. 6 team in the country.Ole Miss, Ohio State, LSU — they’ve all got three losses, records that in past years would’ve been enough to require the Jaws of Life to salvage any faint hint of playoff aspirations.
But this season, who’s to say?In 2026, ending a team’s playoff hopes is like trying to get sand out of your sneakers after a walk on the beach. There’s always just a little more in there. Even the most egregious of mishaps — Oregon’s loss to Illinois, USC’s to Wisconsin, BYU’s to UCF — aren’t fatal.Even Oklahoma State, which has losses to Tulsa and Iowa State is, as Billy Crystal explained in “The Princess Bride,” just “mostly dead.” The Pokes still get a No. 25 ranking and a shot at Texas Tech this week.Now just three weeks from the finish line of the regular season, there are still a dozen or so schools that are lurching forward like Monty Python’s black knight — missing limbs and bleeding out, pronouncing it all “but a flesh wound.”And so we get the Trojans’ showdown with Indiana — a game that could put the once-doomed USC back into the Big Ten driver’s seat. The Hoosiers certainly haven’t looked healthy either, with Josh Hoover struggling like a toddler trying to get the straw into a Capri Sun and an offense that hasn’t topped 23 points in a month.
Hoover could sit out the game, another fortuitous twist for the Trojans. If USC can pull off the win in Bloomington, it could go from DOA to LOL in just three weeks. That’s college football in 2026.Heck, can we even write off Michigan (which travels to Oregon this week) and Oklahoma (which hosts Ole Miss)?Neither has much of a shot at the playoff, but a few flickers of life in Week 11 could be enough to doom their opposition.Fresh off an embarrassing loss to rival Michigan State, the Michigan fanbase is apoplectic, utterly shocked at the state of a program that has looked utterly lifeless. Thankfully, Kyle Whittingham isn’t worried.
He’s just going to drive his Cybertruck out to the next LIV Tour event, down a couple of Crystal Pepsis and clear his head a bit before figuring the whole thing out. He’ll post the answers on his MySpace page.Nevertheless, are we sure Michigan can’t summon up just enough energy to deal one final blow to Oregon? Can the Wolverines’ defense — still stout, if exhausted — rattle the suddenly resurgent Dylan Raiola? And would the playoff committee even notice if it did?Or how about those Sooners, a team that actually lost to Michigan in Week 2.
Looking back now, that feels like watching a Labrador try to parallel park. But Oklahoma keeps defying the odds, putting an offense together with duct tape and twine, and somehow still knocking off the likes of Texas and Florida. Who’s to say the Sooners can’t do the same to a reeling Ole Miss team still recovering from an all-out whooping at the hands of Georgia?And then there’s the ultimate test case for waking the dead: LSU.The old trope suggests no real horror villain can be killed by conventional means, and there’s no debate about who college football’s ultimate villain is. Anyone ready to write Lane Kiffin’s epitaph before a three-game finish hosting Texas, traveling to Tennessee and capping the regular season with a trip to Arkansas?
If LSU can still knock off two top-10 teams, it’s hard to fathom the committee being too concerned with those three losses that supposedly proved what a failure Kiffin was already.Sure, some of Week 11’s headliners look a bit like Jon Snow, sword drawn, ready to fight an army single-handedly. The odds are not in their favor.But if 2026 has proved anything, it’s that even a death certificate signed and notarized by the most insightful of pundits doesn’t mean a team is done for good. And as we start to grapple with the implications of what a 24-team playoff looks like in the future, those moments that once delivered the ultimate emotional gut punch as we watched our heroes collapse to the ground and accept their fate, soon will be little more than brief diversions. There will be a prolonged beat just to ramp up emotion before the big reveal that every blue blood in the country is wearing a bulletproof vest, drank the antidote and has a wizard on speed dial just waiting to conjure them back to life.Jump to: Top games | Under the radar Upset alert | Power rankings Heisman five | Two-minute drillBest of the rest of Week 11Duke at MiamiImagine what this week is like for Duke coach Manny Diaz, seeing his former star QB, Darian Mensah — the one who was under contract for $4 million a year until bolting just before the transfer portal window closed in January — and his former star receiver, Cooper Barkate, now playing at Miami, the school that unceremoniously fired him as head coach five years ago.It’s the equivalent to bumping into your ex on the street only to find they’re dating your middle school bully.”Oh, Darian, you’re looking well.
And I see you’re with Miami now? Oh, and you’ve booked a trip to the Heisman ceremony together?”But if 1980s rom-coms have taught us anything, it’s that the underdog who was left at the altar always finds happiness in the end. Well, that and playing Peter Gabriel on a boom box can solve a lot of problems.Duke has handled the breakup pretty well by handing the ball to Nate Sheppard 25 times a week. Sure, there have been some slipups, like losing to Georgia Tech, but the Blue Devils have turned the page and moved on.
Walker Eget is not Mensah, but he’s not so bad. And maybe Miami isn’t the bully anymore either. Without Malachi Toney, the Canes’ offense sputtered for long stretches against Notre Dame last week, and the hangover of their first loss of the season could certainly open the door
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