SEC's crazy, history-making Week 7 weekend is the latest example of college football's new era

Week seven of the was everything fans love about the sport. Chaos. Rivalries, like Tennessee-Alabama and Auburn-Georgia. Upsets, with BYU taking down Notre Dame in front of an exuberant home crowd in Provo. And debate over what it all means for the rest of the year.

Not one team ranked in the AP Top 25 poll in week six stayed in the same position in the week seven poll. 12 spots. Florida gained 12. Multiple other schools moved up or down at least six positions, with Missouri falling a whopping nine places after their blowout loss to Ole Miss.

But no stat better exemplifies the chaos of week seven better than this one. Tom Fornelli from CBS Sports posted on X this week that, "The SEC is the first conference this century to have 5 AP Top-20 teams lose in the same week."

WEEK 7 AP TOP 25 POLL FEATURES A COMPLETE SHUFFLE AFTER CHAOTIC WEEKEND, WITH MIAMI TAKING OVER THE TOP SPOT

We're just a few months away from completing our 26th year in this century, somehow, and the SEC was the first conference in that time frame to have five teams rankedin the top-20 lose in just one weekend. That's pretty remarkable. And it's also a sign of things to come.

We've known for some time that the advent of NIL and the transfer portal would change college football. But it doesn't seem like we've come fully to grips with just how quickly that change would happen and how much of an impact it would have on the sport.

The reasons for this, and the results from it, are obvious. In decades past, a say, four-star recruit might choose to commit to Nick Saban's Alabama, or Pete Carroll's USC, hoping to play for championships and reach the NFL. Then find themselves losing out on a starting role to an even more highly regarded five-star player. With little recourse, short of transferring to sit out an entire season, that player likely would stay put, wait their turn, and hope they get their chance on the field.

Now though, many of those players don't pick Georgia, Alabama, or USC in the first place. NIL has allowed smaller programs to compete for recruits they'd previously have missed out on. They might not offer the same coaching or championship aspirations, but they can offer something more immediately valuable: money.

It's the same with the transfer portal. Lose out on a starting job? Hit the portal, go start elsewhere. Suddenly that four-star backup for Alabama is now a starter at Auburn or Tennessee. Again, it's obvious, but this weekend's chaos shows the result of this new era in practice: the gaps between teams are smaller than they've ever been.

And we have the data to prove it.

ESPN's SP+ ranking system is an efficiency-driven rating that measures success on offense, defense, and special teams, adjusted for tempo and opposition. Essentially, trying to use the most sustainable and predictive parts of a team's resume to remove some of the randomness inherent in sports. These ratings generally track very closely to those used by sports books to set their lines. An