College football Bottom 10 after Week 1: UMass turns it upside down - ESPN

Inspirational thought of the week:

Upside down
Boy, you turn me
Inside out
And 'round and 'round
Upside down
Boy, you turn me
Inside out
And 'round and 'round

— «Upside Down,» Diana Ross

Here at Bottom 10 Headquarters, located in the triage tent where all the fan kickers from «College GameDay» come for treatment after whiffing and straining their groins, we have always embraced the idea of chaos. Even if that embrace feels like hugging a cactus.

No sooner than our ESPN.com servers had served up the 2026 preseason Bottom 10 with UMass atop the bottom of our rankings, that same team kicked off Week 1 by kicking the Rutgers Scarlet Knights right in that same area of the body being treated in that triage tent.

Inspired by the greatest effort by a group of Minutemen since the Lexington Green, we went digging through the Bottom 10 media guide archives for some historical perspective. Once we got the pages unstuck, we discovered that the first week that I was the author/pollster of these rankings was way back on Labor Day weekend of 2014, a dozen years ago this week. In those standings, I had Massachusetts ranked seventh after a season-opening loss to Boston College, the first game of the legendary Mark Whipple era.

In the dozen seasons since, over a total of nearly 150 weekly polls, UMess was UMissing from those rankings less than 10% of the time. Entering this season, the Minutemen were in the midst of a 16-game losing streak. So when they won last week, it was glorious. It was inspiring. It was a night that generated hope during these times that so often feel overwhelmingly hopeless.

Unless you live in New Jersey. I can't wait to hear the haunting acoustic reverb-y tune that Bruce Springsteen comes up with to memorialize