College football Week 10 recap: Playoff trends to watch

It was another madcap weekend of college football.

We saw our fourth top-five matchup of the season -- the most we've had since 2011 (and if we get another one, it'll be the first time we've had five since 1996) -- plus the top two Big 12 teams in action lost as comfortable favorites. Louisville beat Clemson for the first time (and on the road, no less), Texas A&M got pummeled in its first game as a top-10 team, and Indiana (gasp) trailed for the first time all season but still won its ninth game of the year for just the third time in program history. And to top it all off, we saw one of the biggest upsets in the history of the sport at the Division II level.

After all that wild action, though, the college football landscape looks awfully ... familiar. The top three teams in the preseason AP poll (Georgia, Ohio State and Oregon) are the top three teams now, albeit in a slightly different order. The seven teams that began the season with at least a 50% chance of making the expanded College Football Playoff, per the Allstate Playoff Predictor, are all still above 50% now (and three are above 90%). Boise State began the season as the Group of 5's favorite to reach the CFP and is an even bigger favorite now. There are eight teams within one game of a spot in the Big 12 championship game -- about as chaotic as we dreamed before the season.

It's been quite a roller-coaster ride, but the journey has taken us about where we expected to be. Still, there's a rumble beneath the surface. Of the nine teams ranked between 10th and 18th in last week's AP poll, five lost. And suddenly quite a few teams have found a form that is awfully different from their form when they began the season (or even began October). So let's do a little trendspotting. Who appears to be moving up in the world? Who appears to have run out of gas? What impact might that have on the sport's biggest prizes?