Category: College Football

Like other coaches of 10-win teams pounding the table to reach the College Football Playoff this season, Vanderbilt’s Clark Lea is flabbergasted as to why the 14th-ranked Commodores are on the outside looking in entering Tuesday night’s penultimate rankings.

Lea feels Vanderbilt has done enough to make the field and believes there’s a “bias” against the Commodores.

“I don’t know a world that exists where this team doesn’t belong in that field,” Lea said Monday on SEC Network. “I’m learning right now about all the flaws about how we determine who’s in, who’s out. I’m very interested in fighting against any perception. I think there’s a bias against Vanderbilt. I think we’ve been ignored earlier in the season and we were not given a chance. It took us winning our way into the conversation. All we’ve done is line them up and knock them down.” 

Bowl projections: Miami shines as bubble team in focus, Texas joins College Football Playoff discussion

Brad Crawford

When the College Football Playoff expanded to 12 teams ahead of the 2024 season, most assumed 10 wins would be the magic number within the SEC based on schedule toughness, especially after the “record strength” metric was added in August. New metrics even spurred commissioner Greg Sankey and league athletic directors to move to a nine-game conference schedule for 2026 and beyond to balance competition and…

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Oklahoma leads Missouri, 17-6, in 3rd quarter: Score, live updates of important SEC game with potential College Football Playoff ramifications originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

Following two clutch road wins at generally hostile Southeastern Conference venues, Oklahoma returns home with a chance to grab destiny.

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The Sooners are at Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium for the next two games, and should OU win both, the Sooners can wrap up a berth in the College Football Playoff. First up is a Saturday morning kickoff against former longtime Big 8/Big 12 foe Missouri.

MORE:Oklahoma-Missouri rivalry back in Norman, 50 years after peace pipe trophy vanished

Oklahoma (8-2) comes in ranked No. 8 in the latest College Football Playoff poll. The Sooners won on the road at Tennessee earlier this month; then last week, upended Alabama for the second straight year, this time a hard-fought 23-21 win inside Bryant-Denny Stadium.

MORE:Oklahoma stuns Alabama in Tuscaloosa: A statement win for the Sooners 

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And now OU, which lost to Ole Miss in its previous last game at home, can continue its late-season charge.

The Sooners can also gain a measure of revenge after perhaps the most perplexing loss of their ill-fated 6-7 finish a year ago. Trailing in the fourth quarter, OU rallied to take a 23-16 lead, only to give up two touchdowns to Missouri in the final 1:03, the latter a fumble return with 22 seconds left that gave the Tigers a 30-23 win.

Missouri comes into Saturday’s game at 7-3 overall, and the Tigers are No. 22 in the latest CFP rankings. Last week, the Tigers rolled past Mississippi State, 49-27, breaking a two-game losing streak.

This will be the 98th meeting in the series between Oklahoma and Missouri. OU is 67-25-5 all-time,…

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The Week 13 college football schedule is here, and Saturday’s games are set to draw a lot of betting interest, including a historic SEC rivalry featuring the Florida Gators and Tennessee Volunteers at 7:30 p.m. ET. The Gators have won 10 consecutive home games against the Vols, and 17 of the last 20 meetings overall. However, according to the latest Week 13 college football odds, the Volunteers are favored by four points on the road, while the over/under for Tennessee vs. Florida is 57.5 points. SportsLine’s advanced computer model is backing Tennessee, which is 13-5 in its last 18 games overall, to cover the spread in 57% of simulations. 

The model is also backing Duke (-6.5) to cover the spread on the road against North Carolina, while the Over (59.5) hits 59% of the time in USC vs. Oregon. Before locking in your Week 13 college football picks, be sure to check out the top college football betting picks from SportsLine’s advanced computer model. 

New users can also target the all-new DraftKings promo code, which offers $200 in bonus bets and three free months of NBA League Pass:

The model simulates every FBS game 10,000 times, and it is profitable on its top-rated money-line and over/under picks since the beginning of the 2024 season. Anybody following those college football betting picks at sportsbooks and on betting sites could have seen strong returns.

New users can also target the BetMGM bonus code, which offers up to $1,500 in bonus bets if your first bet loses:

Week 13 college football best bets for Saturday, Nov. 22 (odds subject to change): 

Tennessee (-4) vs. FloridaDuke (-6.5) vs. North CarolinaUSC vs. Oregon: Over 59.5 points

Combining the model’s three picks into a Week 13 college football parlay would result in a payout of +581 (risk $100…

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Lane Kiffin rejects questions about rumors, focused on Egg Bowl originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

Lane Kiffin pushed back against growing speculation about his future, insisting he remains focused on No. 6 Ole Miss as the Rebels prepare for next week’s Egg Bowl.

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“I’m not getting in on any speculation or stories that have to do with other jobs,” Kiffin told reporters on Wednesday.

Despite his words, questions about his family’s recent visits to Gainesville and Baton Rouge are front and center. Both Florida and LSU have head coaching vacancies, which have driven rumors about Kiffin emerging as a top target.

Kiffin has also been loosely linked to the NFL openings earlier this month. But the Ole Miss coach has repeatedly framed the buzz as a byproduct of the program’s success rather than any intent to leave.

That success is historic in Oxford.The Rebels are 10-1 and riding their third straight double-digit win season, which is the longest such streak in school history. Kiffin’s current contract pays him $9 million per year, putting him tenth nationally.

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Reports have also suggested Kiffin might not coach the Egg Bowl if he plans to depart. Kiffin has dismissed that notion, reaffirming he will be on the sideline against Mississippi State on Nov. 28.

More college football news:

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Talent acquisition on the West Coast almost always starts and ends with two schools, Oregon and USC. The recruiting powerhouses pump out pro prospects on an annual basis, and they are stacked once again in 2025, accounting for 12 of the top 100 players in Mike Renner’s NFL prospect rankings.

The No. 7 Ducks host the No. 15 Trojans Saturday at 3:30 p.m. ET on CBS and Paramount+ Premium in a key Big Ten showdown that not only pits some of the most outstanding individual players in the country against each other but could also determine whether one or both teams will reach the College Football Playoff.

Lincoln Riley put in an immense amount of work over the last year to reestablish USC as a premier destination for high school recruits. After emphasizing the transfer portal in the first three seasons of his tenure and seeing diminishing results, the Trojans now boast the No. 1 high school recruiting class in the country, per 247Sports. Riley’s efforts on the trail produced three top-100 NFL prospects for 2025, and more are on the way.

Dan Lanning, meanwhile, has been nearly unstoppable in bringing blue-chip talent to Oregon both through the transfer portal and from the prep ranks. He continues to stack NFL-bound stars like no Ducks coach before him, and this year he has nine top-100 prospects on his loaded roster.

Below are the 12 most prominent NFL prospects who will take the stage this week on CBS.

Prospect ranking: No. 13 overall | No. 3 QB

There were multiple points this season at which Moore was the betting favorite to win…

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The bizarre and brazen story of the Big Ten trying to financially fleece itself

Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti greets fans at Beaver Stadium

After the Hoosiers dramatic road win against Penn State, IU coach Curt Cignetti exits the stadium to a line of fans waiting to congratulate him.

I don’t have the time or bandwidth to deal with the internal machinations of the Big Ten’s financial fleecing of itself. So let’s begin with the obvious.

Is Tony Petitti trying to kill the Big Ten all by himself?

Just when you think it couldn’t get worse than the last dolt of a conference commissioner asking players to run two seasons in nine months during a global pandemic, who ruined the Big Ten’s reputation with something called the Alliance before bolting for the NFL, Petitti has decided to hang his tenure as Big Ten commissioner on allowing the Wolf through the door.

The Wolf of private equity. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you financial stupidity: the Big Ten, the richest and most financially secure conference of all — by a wide margin — desperately trying to jump in bed with private equity in exchange for a piece of each school’s valuable, and ever-increasing, media rights. 

And by jump in bed, I mean sell its soul. 

Because once those private equity sharks, whose entire reason for being is — how can I say this? — making money above all else, are allowed one foot in the door, the Big Ten will cease to exist as we know it. One foot becomes one more favor, and then another, and the next thing you know, the sharks are swimming in what was once an oasis.

And for what? To win games? 

Look, if the 16 Big Ten athletic departments who receive full shares of media rights money can’t exist on a projected $75 million in fiscal 2025 (increasing every year of the deal that ends in 2030), there are more than 100 FBS…

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It’s the end of the line for Brian Daboll in New York. In the wake of another fourth-quarter collapse, this time blowing a 10-point fourth-quarter lead to the Bears in Week 10, the New York Giants have fired the head coach. 

This ends a turbulent tenure for Daboll and the Giants, owning a 20-40-1 regular-season record, which includes their 2-8 campaign in 2025. With Daboll shown the door, the next question is who’ll replace him. Offensive coordinator Mike Kafka will serve as the interim head coach, but a larger search is upcoming this offseason. 

If you are hoping that it could be current Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin, however, you might not want to get your hopes up. Given the emergence of rookie sensation Jaxson Dart as a franchise cornerstone at quarterback, folks have drawn the logical line to giving Kiffin a call to see if he’d want to reunite with his former quarterback and return to the NFL. 

While it makes sense on paper, judging by what Brandon Dart, Jaxson’s father, had to say about that possible reunion, it doesn’t sound like a realistic option. 

“As we were texting on our Kiffin-Dart family text thread, because I think Boomer Esiason had said something in the media today that maybe they should throw out a potential coaching (offer) to Kiffin, and he just sent it over with a smirk and just said, ‘It’s too cold in New York for me.’ It’s just kind of funny,” Brandon Dart recently told the “Bleav in Ole Miss” podcast, via the New York Post. 

“But we have our weekly interactions with him and his family, and Jaxson holds high regard. I think Kiffin is one of his most trusted allies, and I think he uses him for advice in a lot of different ways, so there’s constant communication between them, even today, and there’s a lot of…

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Notre Dame is hurting all sorts of feeling out there in the college football world. When the Irish debuted at #10 in the College Football Playoff rankings, some people lost their minds as if the rankings were going to be wildly different from what the AP Top 25 and Coaches Poll already posted. They weren’t, and now the fun begins.

On Sunday, the AP and Coaches released their latest set of rankings. Notre Dame moved up one spot to #9 in both polls.

BYU’s loss to Texas Tech and Notre Dame’s dominating win over Navy was enough to put the Irish up one notch, and I expect the same when the CFP rankimngs are released on Tuesday night.

Maybe Texas Tech’s head coach does too, and is peeing down his leg a bit. How else do you explain him talking trash about Notre Dame this week? While when it’s all said and done, I don’t expect Notre Dame and Texas Tech to be paired up in the playoff — it looks that way as part of today’s reflection.

There are three games left in the Notre Dame regular season. It’s been a slow rise back up the rankings since the 0-2 start, but if the Irish finish 10-2 — they will likely host a playoff game (slow rise or not).

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