Quick Reads

That midnight train to Georgia picked up three passengers this week, and the Bulldogs didn’t even play a game. Fellow Associated Press pollsters Gene Henley (Chatanooga Times/Free Press), Nathan Baird (Cleveland.com) and Tom D’Angelo (The Palm Beach Post) joined me with UGA at the top of the ballot. Georgia’s win over Notre Dame is still the best win of the season, by anyone. But that’s just one butterfly effect aspect of Clemson’s 21-20 victory over North Carolina, salvaged only by […]

This week I’m out on an island. OK, yeah, that’s true every week; I live on Oahu. So unless I’m traveling or swimming in the ocean, I’m literally always on an island. But this week I’m on one figuratively, too, when it comes to the Associated Press College Football Poll. Clemson had received my first place vote from the preseason up until this week. After Georgia beat Notre Dame 23-17, I pulled the trigger after some thought and put the […]

Melquise Stovall, like the rest of the University of Hawaii football team, was not intimidated by UH’s first two opponents just because they come from a so-called “Power Five” conference, and UH plays in a “Group of Five” league, the Mountain West. In fact, in Stovall’s case, as a freshman he played for Cal, another school from the same conference as Arizona and Oregon State. Hawaii vanquished the latter two Pac-12 teams to get off to its third 2-0 start […]

Some people — especially coaches — will tell you that statistics mean nothing. And they’re right. Sometimes the best teams don’t have fancy numbers, individually or as a team. And sometimes those with great stats are losers. But just a couple of weeks into the season, the University of Hawaii football team leads in the stat provided on the NCAA web site that does mean something: UH is tied with 51 other of the 130 FBS squads with best winning […]

Hawaii did not receive any votes in the Associated Press Top 25 College Football Poll this week. If you were told that the Warriors beat two Power Five conference teams to start the season and knew nothing else about their schedule, you might think they deserve a ranking. But those two teams, Arizona and Oregon State, are far from the cream of the crop of the Pac-12 — a conference that has been on a down cycle for several years. […]

For the Top 25, it was a relatively unremarkable first week. Of course there was Jalen Hurts’ superb performance (508 yards of offense, three touchdowns passing and three MORE rushing) as No. 4 Oklahoma beat Houston 49-31 on Sunday. Only time will tell if the Alabama transfer can become the third consecutive Sooners quarterback to win the Heisman Trophy after Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray. After the first week, Hawaii’s Cedric Byrd is flying above the rest, with his 224 […]