That was one fun Saturday in college football, and Alabama fans, stop that blubbering. Y'all are part of a larger tapestry here, and besides, haven't you won enough?
The larger tapestry celebrates college football in general, and last weekend it was predominantly orange. Tennessee got Nick Saban's mighty legions down there in Neyland Stadium, and Hendon Hooker threw five touchdown passes, and the Vols strapped half-a-hundred on the Crimson Tide in a 52-49 win.
It was the first time Tennessee had beat Alabama in 22 meetings, and that they did in the best game of the season so far only added to the wonderfulness. The students stormed the field, chaos reigned, and then shenanigans happened when they tore down the goalposts and paraded them in pieces through the streets of Knoxville.
Meanwhile, No. 7 USC was beaten for the first time this season, losing to Utah. TCU upended No. 8 Oklahoma State in two overtimes. Four other lower ranked teams beat their presumed betters.
Oh, yeah. And 1-4 Stanford beat Notre Dame 16-14 in a game that echoed down through the mighty halls of Irish lore for as long as it took the Domers to get back to their tailgates and start slamming beers again.
This was a bad Stanford team the Irish lost to, and there was no papering over that. The Cardinal hadn't beaten an FBS school in over a year. It's only win this fall, going into Saturday, was against Colgate in the season opener. And it came to South Bend with the 111th-ranked scoring defense in the nation, giving up a generous 32.6 points per game.
And yet Notre Dame, which had won three straight seemed to have found an identity with its three-headed ground-and-pound running game, managed just 14 points, all in the second half. In Notre Dame Stadium.
Which doesn't seem to intimidate anyone anymore, given that the Irish also lost to Marshall from the Sun Belt Conference there this season. And the next week, they escaped 24-17 against a Cal team that's 3-3 and seventh in the Pac-12 right now.
Notre Dame is also 3-3, with no indication it's going to get a lot better this fall. As Marcus Freeman is discovering, the learning curve is steep in the higher elevations of college football.
But as Tennessee could tell the Irish right now, the view from there is stupendous. And very orange.
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