ESPN Analyst Josh Pate Calls Week 10 the Best College Football Weekend in a Decade

College football host Josh Pate is not easing into Saturday. He said Friday on “Bussin’ & Pate on Campus” that Week 10 is the best weekend the sport has seen in the last 10 years, and he did not leave much room for debate.

“I’m on the bus with it, man. I don’t remember games stacking up like this,” Pate said. “And the great irony of it all is we knew sitting in August, man, like South Bend, Indiana, that’ll be one of the big epicenters of college football that Saturday. But we thought Columbus, Ohio, may be that.”

Bold claims are easy to make on a Friday, and Pate’s holds up better than most once the numbers come out.

The numbers back up Josh Pate

Saturday has seven games between teams ranked in the College Football Playoff top 25, and the last time one day had seven of those was nine years ago. Pate rounded up by a season, which is about as close as a Friday prediction gets.

The quality runs deeper than the count. Eight of the committee’s top 10 teams play ranked opponents, with only Indiana and UCLA left out, and the 14 teams in those seven games have a combined record of 91-21.

Better yet, three of the games match up two teams that would be in the 12-team field if the season ended today. BYU visits Utah, Miami visits Notre Dame, and Georgia goes to Oxford with its case for the top spot on the line against Ole Miss. Somebody in each of those games walks off the field with a playoff spot in real danger.

The matchups carry their own history, too. Georgia beat Ole Miss 43-35 last season before the Rebels won the Sugar Bowl rematch 39-34, and Ole Miss brings a 16-game home winning streak into Saturday night. Utah averages 6.9 yards per play on offense, and even the noon game in Columbia has teeth, since the loser of Texas and Missouri will likely need to win out to stay in the playoff conversation.

“It just sort of all came together perfectly,” ESPN senior director of programming and acquisitions Kurt Dargis told Front Office Sports this week. ESPN and ABC carry five of the seven ranked matchups.

Columbus lost its spot on the marquee

The irony Josh Pate described is real. Ohio State and Oregon opened the season No. 1 and No. 2 in the preseason AP poll, and their meeting in Columbus looked like the centerpiece of November. Now Ohio State is 12th in the CFP rankings at 6-2, Oregon is 23rd at 5-3, and the game barely made room for itself on the show’s graphic of ranked matchups.

“But Kentucky steps up and now that game at Tennessee is incredible. Ole Miss has come through,” Pate said. “We got Alabama on the road in sort of a prelimination game instead of an elimination game down in Baton Rouge.”

Prelimination is a made-up word, but it fits. Alabama is fifth in the CFP rankings, and Alabama could likely survive a third loss and still reach the playoff, although another loss would make a home game a much tougher ask.

The 12-team field makes every loss count

Josh Pate’s co-hosts took the debate in two directions. One argued that the weekly CFP rankings will make every remaining Saturday feel this big, while another went further and said it might be the best weekend ever, because the playoff is still 12 teams this season and officials are considering a move to 24 teams that would make these losses easier to survive.

The second point is the one that sticks. A 12-team field is big enough to keep a long list of teams alive in November, and small enough that one bad Saturday still costs something, and a 24-team bracket would soften that cost for a lot of the teams playing this weekend.

The slate does not stop at the ranked games, either. Unbeaten UCLA visits a Minnesota team that took Indiana to overtime last week, South Carolina sits 21st in the CFP rankings and hosts Texas A&M, and Iowa visits Northwestern with both teams sitting at 6-2.

From the noon kickoffs to the final snap in South Bend, 14 ranked teams will play each other, and seven of them will go to bed with another loss.