College football bottom 10 after Week 6: Gloomy times in Happy Valley
Inspirational idea for the week:
We are taking the train to Happy Valley
Wouldn’t come along there either
It’s beautiful there in Happy Valley
With great things to do
The sun shines brightly all day
Each bird sings a different song
Don’t worry, there are indescribable joys
In Happy Valley you never grow old
– “Happy Valley” by Rod and The Cavaliers
Here at Bottom 10’s headquarters, which sits behind the giant lake of tallow stored in a secret location in metro Dallas until the State Fair of Texas starts and it’s time to cook up balls of butter and funnel cake burgers, we’ve grown accustomed to rolling our eyes at the term “unprecedented times.” Why? Because we once believed that all times have precedent. As William Shakespeare once wrote, “Past is prologue.” As my Uncle Willie once said to me, shaking a spear of asparagus, “Don’t get too worked up, Reno. Nothing’s going to happen that hasn’t happened before.”
So, what has changed in our opinion? Penn State went to the Rose Bowl Not The Rose Bowl to play UCLA.
We’re trying to get through #Bottom10 A media guide to whether the coveted fifth-place team, which isn’t actually supposed to be bad, lost before today to an actual top-10 team. But the pages are stuck together. pic.twitter.com/eJf6vwnbbh
-Ryan McGee (ESPNMcGee) October 5, 2025
So what do we do now? A coveted fifth-place team that earned a coveted fifth-place finish by losing a game in overtime to a top-5 team, so we know the team isn’t actually that bad, turns around and loses to a top-10 team that we know is actually that bad. Does that mean the team should go back to the coveted top 5 because it’s not actually that bad… or does it graduate from the coveted top 5 to the actual bottom 10 because it’s actually that bad? What about the team that was definitely bad but beat that team? Does it drop out of the bottom 10…or does it stay in the bottom 10 because maybe the team we thought wasn’t bad is actually bad?
In the words of Cal Naughton Jr., a NASCAR driver who thought he was bad only because his teammate Ricky Bobby wouldn’t let him win, which made him think he was bad: “My head’s tied up like a pretzel. I’ve got a pretzel in my head!”
And do you know where they make the best pastries? Pennsylvania.
With apologies to former SMU receiver Happy Nelson, former Florida State Happy Fick, Kentucky D-lineman Nic “Happy” Smith and Steve Harvey, here are my post-Week 6 rankings from the bottom 10.
The Bearkats were crushed by New Mexico State, and now, after no home contests in September, they can roam most of October in the friendly confines of Huntsville, Texas.
The Beavers are the only team in the country to give up by six after traveling 4,477 miles round-trip to lose a heartbreaking one in Boone, North Carolina, to Appalachian State. Now they host Wake Forest, which will make a 4,624-mile round trip from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to Corvallis and back. FWIW, Wake and App State are separated by 86 miles. The Beavs should have stayed in North Carolina and spent the week in the foothills eating barbecue, drinking moonshine, and watching the leaves turn orange and black, the colors of Oregon and the colors your liver turns after drinking real Carolina moonshine.
It was the actual Minutemen who sat on Bunker Hill, holding firm on top of Boston as the British got closer and closer, but they refused to engage because their commander ordered them, “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes!” That’s been the case for the first six weeks of the season, as we couldn’t wait for Saturday’s Mega Bowl of the Century week game, pitting UMass against…
“Don’t shoot until you see the flashes of their golden eyes!”
“But sir, we can’t see their eyes!”
“Why not?”
“Because their eye sockets and cheeks are badly bruised and swollen from their trips to Florida and Oklahoma!”
So, the answer to the question we started with the word “so” at the top of these rankings is that, yes, you can be a highly regarded team in fifth place. And all Texas Longhorns fans can present a check of thanks to the Ryan McGee Key West Retirement Fund.
Last week, I failed to get the Woof Pack in these rankings and I heard from a lot of people in Reno about it, who were angry that their hometown team wasn’t included. But they didn’t see the comments I’d received over the previous weeks from people upset about its inclusion. One of them was tied around the neck of a horse’s head that was in my bed, signed by a guy called “Tahoe Tommy.”
I’ve also heard from a lot of people in Middle Tennessee, wondering why I didn’t have the mob from Murfreesboro in these rankings more, especially since their only win this year was over Nevada, and that was by just one point. One of those papers was tied around the neck of the possum head that was in my bed, signed by someone named “Chevy Tahoe Tammy.”
Oklahoma State’s leading passer, rusher and receiver all combined for a zero-touchdown. The last time there was this little registry in Stillwater was when I visited town for a Beanie Babies resale convention.
Let’s give credit to the Niners, who played games seemingly every day of the week except Saturday to get national television exposure. It’s the perfect horror programming for Halloween.
The emus barely edged out the bad Northern Noise in the #MACtion showdown for an unwanted 10th place finish. But that was just a hypothetical encounter. They’ll meet this weekend in an actual showdown, starting an hour and a half before the UMass-Kent State game. Let’s call it the pillow fight of the week, because it’s the slightly smaller pillow we have to move to get to the actual pillow.
waiting list: UCLA Boo-ins, Northern Ill-ugh-noise, UTEPid, Bah-stan Cawledge, UNC Chapel Bill, Georgia State Not Southern, Stanfird, My Hammy of Ohio, South Alabama Redundanancy, Give Me Liberty Or Give Me 1-4, catch definition.