When five of the top 11 teams in the Associated Press top 25 lose on the same day, it’s a notable weekend of college football. When four of the five fall to unranked opponents and do so nearly halfway through the season – at a point when we begin to assume we know things about these programs and the trajectories of their seasons – it creates a level of uncertainty most find uncomfortable.

College football is a lot like organized religion: You need to show up every week, but hold on to your beliefs loosely. If you do that, you’re going to find fulfillment. And if you can’t uphold either one of those practices, good luck making sense of the universe.

Arkansas held star Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava without a touchdown. Vanderbilt allowed fewer yards to Alabama than it did to Georgia State. Minnesota shut out USC in the fourth quarter. Washington threw for over 300 yards against Michigan. Separately, these events are standard-issue hiccups pocking the run of any normal season.

Together in a single weekend, and concurrent with a lopsided beatdown such as No. 25 Texas A&M blowing out undefeated No. 9 Missouri, 41-10, the volume of upset wins seems to demand a narrative. At least it does if you struggle to achieve Zen in the unknowing (or just realize the dubiousness of rankings determined by a consortium of sportswriters).

The truth, inconvenient and incomplete though it may feel, is that these things happen. Five teams ranked in the AP top 11 once lost to unranked teams on the same weekend in November 2016. College football combines highly combustible factors in a goofy ligature of cross-country games and wonky kickoff times. Things go boom sometimes.

If we must seek contextualization, I can only provide rebukes, because this past weekend’s results do not portend a new or different emerging landscape. Nor does one weekend make a season.

1. IT’S NOT THE NFL

After Saturday’s round of upsets, the knee-jerk reaction among purists is that college football is mimicking the NFL. While that statement could pertain to any number of pearl-clutching jeremiads from a consort who thinks paying players and ignoring the Rose Bowl committee are bad things, in this particular instance, it’s regarding the idea that an eventual champion will carry too many losses.

(Before we go further: If you encounter someone who thinks a postseason bracket is inferior to any of the byzantine, woefully corrupt and laughably arcane bowl-based “systems” for determining a champion that dominated this sport, back away slowly while complimenting their garishly colored sport coat.)

It’s true that pro football champions carry losses, and the past 10 Super Bowl winners averaged 4.1 losses in 16- and 17-game regular seasons.

The NFL just expanded the regular season in 2021, so if you equate 4.1 losses in the traditional NFL model of 16 regular-season games, it would equal 3.075 losses in college football’s 12-game regular season. Round that down to three, and it’s still highly unlikely the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff will crown a three-loss champion.

The only realistic way that could happen is if the top end of the Big Ten or SEC frayed spectacularly, and every program started trading multiple losses in November. That’s the kind of chaos this sport spiritually yearns for but hasn’t manifested since 2007. And no…

2. IT’S NOT 2007

Yet. Bowl purists seem to forget the time college football crowned a two-loss national champion with nary a bracket: In 2007, two-loss LSU defeated Ohio State in the Bowl Championship Series national championship game after the weirdest regular season in modern history.

Within a 56-day span between October and December, 11 teams ranked No. 1 or No. 2 lost, and on three separate weekends, both No. 1 and No. 2 lost. 2007 was a year that saw top-five runs from programs such as South Florida and Kansas, and entering the final Saturday before the BCS selection, West Virginia and Missouri were set to meet in the national title game (both lost that day).

But 2024 is not yet 2007. For that to happen, Saturday’s bloodbath of ranked losses would need to persist over and over again, week to week. For instance, this coming weekend will guarantee at least one loser in the AP top five when No. 2 Ohio State plays No. 3 Oregon, but you’d still need a glutton’s layer of anarchy, such as No. 1 Texas losing to Oklahoma or No. 4 Penn State losing at USC, which actually … isn’t impossible. Which brings us to…

3. IT’S NOT THE TRANSFER PORTAL’S FAULT

We think. Yes, the Vanderbilt team that felled mighty Alabama is largely the product of a single offseason of transfers (namely the arrival of New Mexico State quarterback Diego Pavia and his former head coach Jerry Kill joining the staff). But Alabama’s loss is still more a statement about Nick Saban’s departure and the subsequent return of the Crimson Tide’s vulnerability to human emotions, such as the lingering high after a big win against Georgia the previous week.

We’re a far, far cry from adopting the NFL’s “Any Given Sunday” ethos in college football. But it’s worth exploring whether the dynamic among national title contenders, programs currently performing well, programs currently not performing well and have-not bad teams is compressing.

It’s feasible to argue that Arkansas’ upset of undefeated Tennessee falls into the category of a portal-affected result because the Razorbacks, who finished 4-12 in SEC play the previous two years, took in more than 20 transfers this offseason and changed offensive schemes. That means something, certainly, but we still don’t have enough data on what’s causation and what’s correlation in the NIL and transfer portal time frame. After all, Tennessee itself took 10 transfers this offseason. How does that factor into Saturday’s game?

The more you push at one idea as the root cause of college football chaos, the harder it becomes to defend your work. The sturdy old explanation for these memorable Saturdays is still applicable, if not maddening – they just happen, and not solely because of external factors. Chaos in college football appears with enough regularity that it is safe to deem it part of the inherent structure. It’s a ghost haunting the house for so long it’s got more claim to the deed than any modern owner, no matter how many times you repaint the outside.