Can you be called for targeting for a hit on your own teammate? That’s a question for the college football rules committee to ponder after what transpired early in the second quarter of Boise State’s 34-7 loss at South Florida in Week 1.
There is no play that better encapsulates the Broncos’ rapid fall from the AP Top 25 into the CBS Sports Bottom 25 than a bit of Bronco-on-Bronco crime that turned out to be a harbinger of things to come. South Florida quarterback Byrum Brown broke through a series of tackles on a designed run early in the second quarter and was nearing the open field when Broncos safety Ty Benefield came charging into the play with a full head of steam.
But as Benefield tried to level the boom on Brown, he completely whiffed and crushed linebacker Marco Notarainni instead. Brown proceeded to elude a handful of more feeble tackle attempts before waltzing into the end zone. The play was called back due to a hold on South Florida, but it was emblematic of the Broncos’ sloppiness.
Last year’s Mountain West champions were a College Football Playoff team. But they looked like a mess while surrendering 34 unanswered points over the final three quarters to USF. For that reason, Boise State is No. 12 in the inaugural Bottom 25 of the 2025 season.
This year, in the spirit of the discourse about potential future changes to the College Football Playoff, surrounding “automatic bids,” we are tweaking the formula to ensure fair representation from across the sport. Each of the Power Four leagues gets an automatic bid to the Bottom 25 each week, and a total of 10 Power Four schools must be represented. It’s only fair.
College football rankings: Ohio State, LSU rise as Texas, Alabama tumble in CBS Sports 136
Chip Patterson
Bottom 25 Rankings
Rough starts
All five of these are Power Four teams who lost to Power Four opponents, but our new selection criteria calls for at least 10 Power Four representatives in the Bottom 25, and it wasn’t hard to find significant flaws in each of them. Did you see Alabama’s defense against Florida State quarterback Tommy Castellanos? What about Cincinnati’s passing game? Some Bearcats fans were up in arms that Evan Sorsby wasn’t included in the top 50 of CBS Sports’ initial college football quarterback power rankings heading into Week 1. They quieted down after he averaged 2.8 yards per attempt and finished with 69 yards passing in the Bearcats’ 20-17 loss to Nebraska.
25. Virginia Tech
24. Colorado
23. Alabama
22. Baylor
21. Cincinnati
Brain buddies
Stanford and Northwestern top the charts academically, but they are in big trouble when it comes to quarterback play. Stanford’s Ben Gulbranson finished 15 of 30 for 109 yards with no touchdowns and an interception in Stanford’s 23-20 Week 0 loss at Hawaii. Northwestern’s Preston Stone was even worse, as he threw four interceptions in the Wildcats’ 23-3 loss at Tulane last Saturday.
20. Stanford
19. Northwestern
18. Charlotte
17. FAU
16. Syracuse
Nico’s nightmare
Utah zapped the hype surrounding what Nico Iamaleava could bring to UCLA’s offense as the Utes held the Bruins to just 220 yards in a 43-10 beatdown. Iamaleava finished 11 of 22 passing for 136 yards with a touchdown and an interception. If there was any consolation, it was that Arch Manning, the lone quarterback ranked ahead of Iamaleava in the Class of 2023, had a similarly rough Week 1 outing.
15. Miami (Ohio)
14. New Mexico
13. UCLA
12. Boise State
11. Georgia Southern
Carolina club
As CBS Sports’ John Talty and Richard Johnson explained from the scene in Chapel Hill, there was no vintage bite from Bill Belichick in the aftermath of North Carolina’s embarrassing season-opening loss to TCU. “This was sadder and more depressing,” they wrote, “as if the gravity of how hard it was to win in college football finally gobsmacked him.”
10. UMass
9. Nevada
8. Eastern Michigan
7. Coastal Carolina
6. North Carolina
Worst of the worst
Four of these five teams got smacked around by Power Four opponents and were rewarded financially for it. The outlier is Middle Tennessee, which fell 34-14 at home to in-state FCS foe Austin Peay. The visiting Governors are coming off a 4-8 season and had not defeated an FBS foe since 1987. But they dominated the Blue Raiders by holding them to a paltry 153 total yards.
5. Ball State
4. Middle Tennessee
3. Marshall
2. Georgia State
1. Missouri State
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