There are still six remaining unbeaten teams in college football.
No. 1 Ohio State, No. 2 Georgia, No. 3 Michigan, No. 4 Florida State, No. 5 Washington and Liberty are all 10-0 this season.
PODCAST: Week 11 Recap: Are things getting any clearer?
The Flames have won each of their past three games by double figures. Quarterback Kaidon Salter has 2,184 passing yards, 26 touchdowns and just four interceptions.
Here are some noteworthy quotes as focus turns from Week 11 to Week 12.
Ross Bjork, Texas A&M
Texas A&M made the decision to fire head coach Jimbo Fisher on Sunday, announcing the change in leadership.
Athletics director Ross Bjork spoke about the process and reasons behind the decision in a press conference. As the Aggies are 6-4 and 4-3 in Southeastern Conference play, Bjork said the program has been “stuck in neutral.”
“In my analysis I determined at this point, and for lots of reasons, our program is stuck in neutral,” Bjork said. “We should be relevant on the national scene. Something is not clicking, something is not working and therefore, something had to give in order for Aggie football to reach our full potential. As leaders every decision we make, or every decision we don’t make, has consequences. Consistency in how the program operates on a daily basis impacts the confidence level of every single person in the program and thus influences performance. Based on my experience, the best programs have confidence. The program has an established identity. The program maximizes the talent. The leadership is fully integrated in the university, the athletics program and its culture. I did not feel like we were meeting those standards of excellence and leadership.”
James Franklin, Penn State
James Franklin and Penn State suffered a 24-15 loss to the Wolverines, and it effectively dropped the Nittany Lions in the Associated Press Top 25 Poll to No. 12.
Franklin hasn’t performed well in top-10 matchups. He’s 3-18 in those games, and he’s 12-26 in ranked matchups during his 10-year tenure as head coach.
READ: Stat Pack: Week 11
The Nittany Lions tried a pair of two-point conversions at Michigan, one in the second quarter and another in the fourth. Quarterback Drew Allar failed both pass attempts, keeping it a 14-9 game with less than a minute to go in the first half and maintaining a 24-15 deficit with less than two minutes left in the game.
“We felt like points were going to be hard to come by,” Franklin said. “We were down by four. We wanted to put ourselves in a position to get it back to a field goal game. Again, those were all the numbers we work through from an analytic standpoint as a staff. Everybody was comfortable with that it was the right thing to do. Obviously, we didn’t pick it up.”
Lane Kiffin, Ole Miss
Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss suffered a top-10 defeat themselves at the hands of Georgia, dropping the game 52-17.
The Rebels were in the game 14-14 early in the second quarter, but then gave up four touchdowns and a field goal as the Bulldogs ballooned the score to 45-14. They were held to just three points in the second half.
Ole Miss’ record is 8-2 and good enough to be tied for second place in the SEC West Division at 5-2, right there with LSU.
But that’s not where Kiffin and the Rebels want to be. They want to be on the other side of the top-10 bouts and coming out victorious, but they have to figure out how.
“That’s a good question. I mean, we got to recruit at a higher level,” Kiffin said. “And I’m not blaming people, we got to coach better. But, you know, at some point whatever those stats are — we’ve signed one five-star, they’ve signed 24 or something. Those kind of do show up at some point. So we’d have to recruit it at a better level, do a better job on recruiting.”
