THE MAIN CHARACTER, Week 11: The eyes are upon you, alright!

Each week on college football Twitter, there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.

Welcome to the weekly college football wrapup that recognizes this sport is about nothing but feelings, primarily about enjoying the bad ones suffered by people besides you.

It’s nothing but feelings, all the way down. Made-up polls determine which teams get the most attention and best postseason invites. Friendship clubs founded 100 years ago determine which teams get to call themselves “powers.” Recruiting is about the feelings of 17-year-old boys, and even head coaches can vanish because some booster gifted the wrong color BMW.

So the college football internet is a potent stew. One does not watch one’s team win and then log off. No. One must maximize the advantage, storming rivals whose teams did not win, because the actually impactful Feelings Market never stops fluctuating. And if one’s team loses, there’s always punching down on somebody who had a worse weekend. Almost always.

Stream live college football games every week this season from conferences across the country on ESPN+.

Let’s see which of this week’s cast members earned MAIN CHARACTER honors. Once again in this especially strange season, there were multiple valid candidates, along with some strong supporting players.

Washington

Days after suspending head coach Jimmy Lake for a sideline dustup, the Huskies spent the weekend falling to 4-6 and ending Lake’s remarkable tenure. Remarkable is a word that means there are things you can say. There sure are!

Miami

The Canes have played nine FBS games. Two were losses against top-10 teams Alabama and Michigan State. All seven others featured final margins of four or fewer points, now including three losses. Saturday, America’s most dramatic team lost to equally down-bad archrival Florida State thanks to one of the season’s most comprehensive final-minute meltdowns.

And while you’d think all of Miami Twitter would be nothing but this sorta thing …

… it seems both sides of the rivalry are finding rays of sunshine in these uncertain times.

Auburn

Everyone made the same 28-3 joke, but quadruple credit goes to those who made sure to note Auburn is arguably part of the state that originated 28-3, depending on what you make of the word arguably.

And considering the outlandish spectrum of outcomes that is the Auburn experience, how wild is it that the Tigers just suffered one of their worst days ever — yet this wasn’t even the worst loss of the weekend?

UMass

How much does head-to-head matter? This will be the 2021 College Football Playoff committee’s defining debate, with Oregon’s win over Ohio State, Michigan State’s over Michigan, and Cincinnati’s over Notre Dame all looming large down the stretch.

I think we should keep the bottom of the country in mind as well, though. On October 9, UMass beat UConn, thereby eliminating the Minutemen from contention for the title of worst team in FBS. Right?

Not so fast. The Huskies have two near-wins on the year, while UMass has been blown out in every other game, including a combined 70-32 margin in back-to-back games against middling CAA teams. The CAA is in the FCS.

This thing’s coming down to the wire, folks.

 

Florida

I really cannot believe the Gators’ performance against Samford, another middling FCS team, didn’t earn Main Character status. Nevermind Florida winning by 18. What happened in the first half is one of the wildest things in college football history.

Samford has almost never been good, with only two FCS playoff wins all-time, both in 1991. Florida has won three national titles since that year. None of that mattered on Saturday, when the Baptist Bulldogs sprinted up and down the field for 530 yards against a bunch of four-stars led by a seven-figure head coach.

North Texas fired head coach Dan McCarney for that performance! The Florida Freaking Gators just spent 30 minutes doing things considered unacceptable by the North Texas Mean Green of Conference USA!

A month from now, if anyone wants to use the transitive property to argue a two-loss Alabama doesn’t deserve to make the CFP (and/or to argue the Samford Bulldogs should get the No. 4 seed), please be my guest.

 

Oklahoma

An undefeated conference bully lost by double digits, and even that isn’t our Main Character of the week. Must be pretty good stuff still to come in this post!

First, let’s take a moment to thank Baylor for finally making OU’s record better resemble OU’s level of play so far this season.

And second, let’s enjoy Bears head coach Dave Aranda getting to run up the score and offer a perfectly good explanation, not that one is ever needed, because scoring points is good for the universe.

The Oklahoma Sooners! Mad about other teams running up the score! This is all Oklahoma has done for like the last decade! I’m sure OU’s new conference will be more decorous and merciful.

Texas

Let’s see those hands, y’all.

When the country’s richest athletic department loses at home to the Kansas Jayhawks for the first time in world history, it’s time to look at a long list of facts. Are you ready?

Longhorn fans, who’ve spent most of the last decade wondering whether their current coach is worse than their previous coach, at least have some closure now, maybe?

And I could’ve pasted a bunch of jokes about Oklahoma’s inbound SEC hazing, but that sorta thing’s a better fit for the Texas section.

Texas’ historic loss also adds a wrinkle to its off-field side quest. No, wait, not that one.

 

Yeah, the monkey one.

If Texas finds itself looking to rehome Sark, we might already have a place picked out. Alabama’s so non-perfect, it struggled with the team that gave up 100 billion yards to Samford, which means it’d certainly like to have its former Broyles Award-winning offensive coordinator back, right? Sark, wasn’t that job a lot more fun?

Here are two more good tweets, and then let’s get to the funniest post of the weekend.

And here we are, a tweet that made me shout so loud, I woke up my dog.

 

Previously in THE MAIN CHARACTER

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