College football Week 9 recap: 4 teams playing like national champs - ESPN

Almost every football coach in the known universe professes a desire for perfect balance, the desire to be able to run and pass in equal proportion and with equal quality.

Week 9 of the college football season created balance of a different sort: It gave us a particularly interesting mix of lovely, close games and huge statement performances. (It also gave us a few potentially season-altering quarterback injuries, but I guess that comes with the territory.)

The SEC alone gave us four one-score finishes, five fourth-quarter comebacks and a Hail Mary completed at about the 1-inch line. It also gave us Texas A&M's resounding second-half surge against LSU that both erased the aura of Tiger Stadium at night and put LSU's Brian Kelly on the hottest of hot seats. (Editor's note: Kelly has been fired, LSU announced Sunday night.)

The Big Ten gave us tense, down-to-the-wire affairs with Rutgers-Purdue and Nebraska-Northwestern and blowouts with Indiana over UCLA and Iowa over Minnesota. The ACC gave us a pair of overtime thrillers, a last-second field goal stunner and two top-10 teams winning by a combined 60. The Group of 5 gave us a playoff plot twist (Memphis 34, USF 31), four overtime epics and a 600-yard passing game, and a 37-0 run from North Texas. The smaller-school ranks gave us a (nearly) walk-off pick-six, a great Anchor-Bone Classic and an FCS No. 1-versus-No. 2 game decided by 31 points and 344 yards.

I mentioned in last week's preview that Week 9 tends to declutter things for us, shutting down some upstart stories and laying out some pretty clear stakes as we head into November. A lot of upstart stories continue, but even in a sea of parity talk and close games, one thing Week 9 did do is clarify which teams are