Ranking 3 Most Fraudulent College Football Teams After Week 8

The 2026 college football season has turned into a forum for preseason national championship contenders to disprove all the hype and completely reorder how and what we think about who can actually make a run.

While this past weekend wasn’t as chaotic as the Saturday that came before it, the Week 8 slate still provided us with plenty of evidence of who could emerge as a contender, and who is definitely a pretender more than halfway through the regular season.

Here are the teams we’re marking down as frauds moving into the last weekend of college football in the month of October.

Preseason Contender That Completely Collapsed

Ranking 3 Most Fraudulent College Football Teams After Week 8 — IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

All the talk this summer was how Oregon was the next logical national championship contender out of the streaking Big Ten. But after seven games, it’s clear that what was branded as arguably the country’s best roster is anything but.

A 21-10 loss at Illinois dropped the Ducks to 4-3 and effectively ended whatever fragile playoff hopes they may have still had. For a program expected to contend deep into November, this season has been a complete failure of expectations and execution.

Everything was going Oregon’s way coming into the season. Dante Moore was back, and Dan Lanning had compiled such a promising rotation on both sides of the ball. And while injuries explain part of the problem, they don’t explain all of it.

The Ducks’ offense has genuinely taken a step backwards, a hodge podge of mistakes and miscues, and a ground attack that is missing in action. They’re spending too much money on this program to get these kinds of results.

Why Are The Trojans Still Doing This?

All this time, it was USC’s defense that took the heat, but this week it was Lincoln Riley’s famed offense that hit a wall in a road game at Wisconsin.

Jayden Maiava threw 2 early interceptions and the Trojans were completely outmanned in the trenches, mustering an indefensible minus-17 rushing yards in a three-touchdown loss to the resurgent Badgers.

Again and again, it’s the same old problems. The defense can’t make the tackles when they have to. They can’t win consistently on the road. They can’t meet basic expectations of a team that should be in contention to win the Big Ten every year.

At this point, we’ve seen enough. USC needs to start consulting its accountants to design an exit strategy from the Lincoln Riley experiment. Improvements have been rare and short-lived, while the program’s regressions under his watch linger and worsen.

Big 12 Champion Looks Very Vulnerable

Coming into this season, there were persistent if somewhat muted concerns that the turnover on Texas Tech’s defense may conspire against its ambitions to win a second-straight Big 12 championship.

Coming out of this week, those fears look very justified. What was the fifth-best run defense in college football didn’t look the part at Cincinnati, particularly after allowing a 58-yard touchdown run that effectively iced the upset that sank the Red Raiders.

Now, they need considerable help, not only to make another run at the Big 12, but to contend for a place in the College Football Playoff. The cost of Saturday’s loss could go well beyond just one game as the season progresses.

Questions linger about an offense that started way too slow on the road, had three giveaways, and struggled to finish drives in the red zone.

They had a season-high 12 penalties and the Will Hammond-led attack didn’t even get into the end zone until the final minute of the game.

BYU and Utah now both sit in front of Texas Tech in the competitive Big 12 standings, and it doesn’t play either of them. Who else stands in their way? That would be Arizona, who the Red Raiders host in a massive test next Saturday.

Add us as a preferred source on Google