The tank job of Week 8 is USC, and nobody else is close.
Start with what happened in Madison. Wisconsin 24, USC 7. The Trojans, ranked No. 16 going in, managed one touchdown against a Big Ten defense that dared them to do anything. Lincoln Riley built his reputation on scoring points, and his offense put up seven. That's the worst scoring output of his head coaching career, worse than the 27-14 loss to Baylor back in 2021 at Oklahoma that was supposed to be rock bottom.
Look at how USC lost. The Trojans finished with minus-17 rushing yards. Jayden Maiava threw it 50 times, completed 31, two of them to Wisconsin, and all that work produced one touchdown. Colton Joseph went 12-of-14 for 58 passing yards and a score for Wisconsin, and that was plenty, because Wisconsin ran the ball down USC's throat and let the scoreboard take care of itself. A team doesn't need a passing game when the other side can't get off the grass.
USC showed its real floor on national television.
People want to hand this trophy to BYU. The Cougars climbed all the way to No. 2, then lost at UCF and fell to No. 8 in the new AP poll. Watch the game, though. BYU lost 39-31 in double overtime to a Scott Frost team that came in unranked and desperate, and they lost after hanging 31 on the road and trading blows into a second overtime. That's heartbreak. Scott Frost got Bear Bryant national coach of the week out of it. Nobody tanks and scores 31 in a double-OT track meet. Leave BYU alone.
Texas Tech is the other name people keep floating. The Red Raiders got beat 37-24 by an unranked Cincinnati and dropped to No. 13. Even so, Texas Tech lost a two-score game to a conference opponent. They didn't disappear. They didn't forget how to play their own sport.
USC did.
USC was one of the two schools that blew up the Pac-12, bolting for the Big Ten in a move that triggered the whole conference's collapse. They chased the money and the "stability" of the big new league. Three seasons into that marriage, the Big Ten sent a Wisconsin team that attempted 14 passes to physically dominate them in the trenches. It's the exact smashmouth, field-position football USC supposedly rose above when it had Pac-12 shootouts to hide inside. USC went looking for the biggest room in the country and got shoved into a locker in it.
Lincoln Riley built a program on fireworks. In Week 8 the fireworks didn't light, and without them there was nothing underneath. That's the tank job. Lincoln Riley owns it. The coin-flip in Orlando explains BYU. Nothing explains this.
