The college football season still has a full month left, which means that the teams regarded as surprises at the end of the season might not be the teams we choose right now. However, before the first weekend of November, these are the best answers for the most pleasant surprises of the 2016 season.
Colorado Buffaloes
The Buffaloes won Thursday night against UCLA to move to 5-1 in the Pac-12. The game wasn’t well played, but Colorado won it, which is something the Buffs didn’t do much of in the past several years. The last time Colorado made a bowl game was in 2007, and the last time Colorado put together a winning season was in 2005. The program once knew a period of great prosperity, when a bowl game was an annual occurrence, but over the past decade, it’s been anything but.
Coach Mike MacIntyre has changed the culture in Boulder. He has changed the way this team is organized and goes about its business. He hired Jim Leavitt as his defensive coordinator and gotten great results from that move. Colorado has been able to win games with a backup quarterback this season, and it has managed to win road games against teams which have been historically difficult to beat in their own stadiums.
This is a college football team who enters Saturday’s affair with Arizona as having already clinched a bowl berth and on a three-game winning streak. They’ll have a tough slate to end up the year as No. 25 Washington State and No. 16 Utah visit, but this is a team that’s now good enough to win those games.
Washington Huskies
The Huskies were supposed to be good, but a lot of people didn’t think they’d be undefeated after two months. It’s true that Stanford and Oregon have been a lot worse than expected this season, with Washington merely taking advantage of these developments. However, Washington had to go out on the field and prove it is superior, and that’s exactly what it did. It beat Stanford by 38 points and Oregon by 49. When Washington went on the road to play a legitimately good Utah team, it managed to win. This team hasn’t been tested in every way possible, but when it has been tested, it has passed every test to this point. If Washington beats California this Saturday, the Huskies won’t have to leave the state of Washington the following three weeks. They should be able to at least go 11-1, which is something very few people anticipated before the college football season.
Texas A&M Aggies
It’s true that Texas A&M had a chance to be good this season but for the most part, the news coming into the season was pretty negative. All we heard was that head coach Kevin Sumlin is on the hot seat and that the team could be falling apart with so many top quarterback recruits leaving for other programs. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth as it was another quarterback transfer has delivered strong results.
Trevor Knight is a transfer quarterback who wound up becoming important to the Aggies with his combination of speed and passing skill. However, a lot of analysts worried about the ability of A&M’s offense to be consistent enough to survive in the SEC West. The Aggies rolled in the fourth quarter against Arkansas. They contained Auburn at a time when the Tigers had not yet learned how to utilize personnel on offense. A&M has taken advantage of playing its opponents at the right time. This team could go 11-1 and remain in the College Football Playoff race.
Auburn Tigers
This college football team lost to Texas A&M and looked dead in the water, and even when it beat LSU, things still didn’t seem very optimistic. Auburn did not score a touchdown at home against LSU, which deepened fears that the Tigers would never learn how to play well on offense this season. That changed in October. Auburn breezed past Mississippi State and then took that crisp performance into a hyped game against Arkansas, in which it scored more than 50 points. This team’s abrupt turnaround from September to today is what’s so surprising about the Tigers.
