CLEMSON -- Two hours from South Bend, Ohio State played a game at Northwestern on Saturday and looked like a pretender for most of the game.
Take a look at the higher reaches of the preseason AP Top 25 and you'll see that, for all the complaints about the top level of college football being boring and predictable, 2022 has been especially ruthless in punishing conventional wisdom and bringing us startling developments.
Notre Dame, ranked No. 5 entering the season, has suffered home losses to Marshall and Stanford.
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Oklahoma, ranked No. 9, is now 5-3 and unranked.
Texas A&M was No. 6 and has looked worthy of No. 2 (the kind you find in a toilet).
The four programs that supposedly were far-and-away ahead of everyone else have all shown varying degrees of fallibility that were not expected entering the season.
Alabama woke up this morning with two regular-season losses.
Ohio State woke up trying to figure out why it can't run the ball against Northwestern.
Georgia, which not long ago had to scratch and claw to beat Missouri and Kent State, woke up as the clear supreme being after its complete destruction of Tennessee.
That last part, if we're being honest, probably figures into the torment Clemson fans are experiencing right now as they're trying to process the golden doom that befell their team last night in South Bend.
Not long ago, it felt like Clemson was the program most qualified and equipped to eclipse the Nick Saban dynasty if the Crimson Tide ever started to slip.
Well, the Tide is slipping in a way it hasn't in some time. And Kirby Smart's Georgia machine, 10 months after winning the whole thing, is making a strong case that it is the new Alabama.
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That idea alone is hard enough for Clemson fans to take. But the fact that the idea is ruthlessly and relentlessly reinforced in Athens on the same day that an unranked Notre Dame makes Dabo Swinney's team look like paper Tigers?
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It's a brutal convergence that all those orange-clad fans are undoubtedly considering as they make their way back from the Midwest.
These hands spend a lot of time typing about the greatness of the college football regular season, the regular zaniness and unpredictability that basically amount to a three-month version of March Madness.
In this vein, it's natural to point out how many other fan bases out there are trying to figure out their teams. Natural to point out how many other schools would give anything to be experiencing the problems Clemson is experiencing right now as it is looking back on its first loss since (checks notes) Oct. 23, 2021.
But it would be a terrible job of reading the room for us to try to sell a bunch of passionate, decidedly partisan fans on the objective idea that what is good for college football -- as in, one of the most bonkers seasons in memory producing tumult and parity -- is something you should somehow be treasuring.
You don't give a rip about what happened up the road in Evanston. And If you did, you're probably rightly pointing out that the Buckeyes, for all their flaws and seeming disinterest, did manage to pull away to a two-touchdown victory.
You don't care that Saban has been brought to his knees this year by a stunning mix of lack of discipline, pedestrian receiver play and inconsistency on defense.
No amount of Jimbo Fisher punchlines is going to make you feel any less angry about what you saw last night.
We've spent a lot of time not just this season, but in past seasons, advising you to look around elsewhere as a reminder of how good you've had it in these parts.
But sometimes not everything is relative. Sometimes it would be an insult to your fandom, if not your intelligence, to point out that other teams have looked bad too.
Sometimes every person in your football program, from the head coach on down, needs to look squarely in the mirror and ask serious questions about the physical and mental makeup of a team -- not just the players, but the coaches too.
Bad games happen. But you could argue this was the worst loss in Swinney's 195 games as a head coach. Certainly the Tigers' worst look of the CFP era, during which they have aspired to a standard of best.
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And this after last year's decline to three losses, no division title and no trip to the playoff made 2022 such an important and telling examination.
In his manner and in his words, Swinney seemed to embrace the gravity of the big picture head-on after the game.
If there was a positive, it was that and not what some other team looked like somewhere else.
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