The Tuesday Notebook: Colorado’s Playbook Saga, the Big Ten’s Rough Weekend, and Georgia-Alabama Week

LAS VEGAS — Start with the strangest thing you will read in college football this week, because it only gets stranger from there. Before No. 12 Texas Tech beat Colorado 29-7 at Folsom Field on Saturday, a poster on an On3 Texas Tech message board claimed fans found what looked like Colorado’s playbook — roughly 25 pages, opening plays, red-zone information, Texas Tech tendencies — sitting at the Colorado team hotel bar. Former NFL lineman Geoff Schwartz saw it and called it “WILD.” A West Texas podcaster, Jody Slaughter, compared the pages to the Fox broadcast and said the first six plays of the first half and the first two plays after halftime matched what Colorado ran. One of the listed plays was labeled “JOJO PASS.” In the third quarter, Colorado receiver Joseph Williams attempted a trick-play pass that Texas Tech cornerback Brice Pollock intercepted. Colorado has not publicly confirmed the document is authentic. Read that paragraph again. It does not get more normal on the second pass.

That is the lead story of the day, and we went deep on it here — the bye-week fork, the quarterback problem, the criticism coming from inside the building. This notebook is everything else that happened in the last 24 hours.

The Big Ten said the quiet part out loud

Conferences do not admit officiating errors. They issue statements about “mechanics” and “the process.” So credit the Big Ten for this much: on Oct. 5, the conference confirmed that the officials got it wrong in Nebraska’s 48-23 win over Maryland. With 6:35 left in the fourth quarter, a Nebraska extra-point attempt missed — plainly missed — and the crew counted it anyway after a roughing-the-kicker flag. The point stood. The conference said it should not have.

It did not change the outcome; the Huskers won by 25. But Matt Rhule handled it the way coaches are supposed to handle it. “It’s poor by me, I should have seen it didn’t go through the uprights,” he said, owning a missed call that was not his miss. Maryland did not need the help of a bad call on Saturday, and the Terrapins’ bigger problem is the one Josh Pate put on the table: at 2-3, Mike Locksley’s seat is heating up, and nobody in College Park is pretending otherwise.

The Big Ten’s other Friday story came from Evanston. Northwestern beat Penn State 34-13 on Friday night — a throttling, not a fluke — and David Braun used his platform to ask why 59 AP votes still have the Wildcats on the outside looking in. He has a case. Northwestern keeps beating name-brand teams and keeps getting treated like a program the voters are waiting to disprove. The poll comes out; the Wildcats stay unranked; the cycle repeats. Wins like Friday’s are supposed to break the cycle. We will see if this one does.

The poll’s biggest movers

The Week 6 AP poll’s loudest storyline belongs to Missouri: up eleven spots to No. 14 after a 45-17 dismantling of Florida at Faurot Field. That is the Tigers’ first ranked win in nine tries and their first win over a top-10 team since the 2023 Cotton Bowl, and it answers the only question anyone was asking about Eli Drinkwitz’s team after the Week 4 loss to Mississippi State. Missouri did not just beat Florida. It reintroduced itself.

The Gators paid for it: down eight spots to No. 16 at 4-1, a record that says contender and a film reel from Columbia that says otherwise. Texas Tech climbed to No. 11 at 5-0, the best start in Lubbock in years, and the Red Raiders did it on the road in a game they controlled from the second quarter on. And Pitt entered the poll at No. 25 at 5-0 — the program’s best ranking of the season, arriving the same weekend its season changed. Mason Heintschel’s torn ACL ended his year on Friday night at Virginia Tech; the 5-0 record is real, and so is the crater at quarterback. Fifth-year senior Holden Geriner gets the ball Friday night against North Carolina, and every Pitt fan is doing the same math: the record says playoff, the depth chart says wait.

Saturday’s box scores, briefly

Ohio State went to Iowa City and left with a 31-14 win that was really about one player. Jeremiah Smith caught 11 passes for 206 yards and two touchdowns against Iowa — the kind of road performance at Kinnick that ends up on a Heisman reel. The Buckeyes did what they were supposed to do in a building where they have not always done it.

Indiana’s 47-15 win over Rutgers was the Hoosiers’ 21st straight victory, and Josh Hoover’s four touchdown passes keep pushing the question the rest of the country has not fully asked yet: what do you do with a program that just does not lose? The answer, eventually, is that you rank them like it.

Then there is Saturday

No. 2 Georgia (5-0) at No. 6 Alabama (5-0). Saturday, 7:30 p.m. ET on ABC. College GameDay on site. The 77th meeting, and the stakes have not been this clean in years: the inside track to the SEC Championship Game, a top-two playoff seed, and a Heisman race that has both quarterbacks in the conversation. ESPN’s FPI gives the Tide a 52.6% edge — a coin flip with a stadium on it. Georgia has not won in Tuscaloosa since 2007. Gunner Stockton threw for 295 yards and three touchdowns against Vanderbilt; he has not trailed in a game all season. We broke down the whole matchup yesterday.

One more Saturday note, for the romantics: Army lost 21-19 at Louisiana Tech over the weekend and gets the bounce-back treatment at home — the Black Knights host Tulane on Saturday at noon ET as a 3-point favorite. It is the kind of noon game that ends up deciding whether a season feels like a recovery or a slide.

What comes next

The week is a runway. Georgia-Alabama on Saturday night, Pitt’s first game of the post-Heintschel era on Friday, Missouri’s chance to prove Columbia was a statement and not a spike, and a Colorado program sitting on a bye week with its playbook — allegedly — already in someone else’s hands. Tuesday notebooks are supposed to be quiet. This one is not.

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