College football Week 6 recap – Where conference races stand

Alabama hadn’t lost to Vanderbilt in 40 years and hadn’t lost in Nashville in 55 years. The Crimson Tide were coming off of a win in the game of the year, an incredible back-and-forth affair with Georgia that bumped them to No. 1 in the AP poll. The Commodores were three weeks removed from losing to Georgia State.

As players have been given more rights in recent years — fewer transfer restrictions, the ability to get paid legally — a countless number of critics railed against the progress, declaring that it would wreck competitive balance, that the best players would gravitate toward the best schools and that the also-rans would get left in the dust. This was always terribly disingenuous, of course, because college football has never had competitive balance and because the best players have always chosen the most historically awesome schools.

College football has almost never been a sport that allowed Vanderbilts to beat Alabamas. But because of Vanderbilt’s deft use of the transfer portal and some perfect bounces from a pointy ball, the Commodores turned the sport on its head Saturday. They got 308 combined passing and rushing yards from former New Mexico State quarterback Diego Pavia, who seamlessly segued from talking about “God’s plan” to dropping an F-bomb on live television during his postgame interview and has now beaten both Alabama and Auburn.

While Vanderbilt definitely needed said perfect bounces — a high deflection of an early Jalen Milroe pass that turned into a Randon Fontenette pick-six, a glorious Miles Capers sack-and-strip that fell into Yilanan Ouattara‘s hands to set up a late touchdown — the Dores always came up with the answers they needed. When Alabama cut an early 23-7 lead to 23-21, Pavia threw a 36-yard touchdown to Junior Sherrill. When Bama’s amazing Ryan Williams scored yet another physically improbable touchdown to make it 30-28, the Commodores kicked a field goal, forced the aforementioned fumble and scored again. And when Bama made it 40-35 with 2:46 left, it was easy to assume the Tide would force a punt, and score late to win. Instead, Vandy calmly moved the chains three times to run out the clock. And then Vandy students tore down the goalposts and marched them into the Cumberland River.

We’ve now had a pair of particularly monumental top-10 upsets this season: Northern Illinois over Notre Dame and Vandy over…