Ohio State cornerback Jay Timmons has apparently decided that being a true freshman is no excuse to act like a human pothole in the middle of a top-five road game. In the Buckeyes’ 19-15 win at Indiana, the first-year defensive back made seven tackles, broke up two passes and forced a fumble, which is a pretty respectable stat line for most players and a deeply rude one for a freshman still learning where the good lunch options are on campus.

The funniest part is that Timmons didn’t just look like a promising young corner; he looked like he had been assigned by the football gods to ruin Indiana’s Saturday. He was lining up at safety and nickel, closing windows like a landlord with a clipboard, and poking the ball free at exactly the wrong time for the Hoosiers. Ohio State needed somebody young, fast and annoyingly decisive in a game that turned into a street fight, and Timmons answered by acting like the secondary’s emergency room. For a program that recruits stars the way other schools recruit water bottles, this is the kind of freshman performance that makes everyone else wonder if the Buckeyes accidentally signed a defensive coordinator in shoulder pads. If this is Week 7, the rest of the Big Ten may want to start filing paperwork now.

Slippery Rock has done it. The Rock is No. 1 in the NCAA’s first Division II NPI rankings, which is exactly the kind of sentence that makes sense only if you have spent the last decade watching college football officials invent new ways to tell people their favorite team is “very good, actually.” For a program that already carries one of the best names in the sport, this is the cherry on top: the NCAA has created a new ranking system, and Slippery Rock immediately responded by climbing to the top like it had been waiting for the league office to hand it a laminated certificate.

That’s the real beauty of this thing. The NPI is the NCAA’s new power ranking format, and it gives Division II fans another national measuring stick beyond the usual polls and playoff debates. For Slippery Rock, landing at No. 1 is both a bragging right and a validation of what the program has built on the field. It does not magically hand out a postseason trophy or send the team straight to a parade route, but it absolutely matters for visibility, momentum, and the sacred art of making everyone else in Division II answer the question, “Yes, but have you considered The Rock?”

And that is where this gets fun. Smaller programs spend years begging for national attention, and Slippery Rock gets to walk into the first NPI release and sit on the throne like it owns the place. That is peak college football absurdity: a school with one of the funniest names in the country also becoming the benchmark for a brand-new NCAA ranking system. If the goal was to create order out of chaos, the NCAA may have succeeded. If the goal was to prevent Slippery Rock from becoming the headline every time rankings are discussed, the answer appears to be a firm and deeply embarrassing no.

Week 7 in West Virginia high school football has the kind of schedule that makes a sane person look at the calendar, sigh, and start drawing brackets on a napkin. The marquee attraction in Class AAA is two Big 10 showdowns that feel less like regular-season games and more like neighborhood arguments with helmets: unbeaten North Marion travels to Elkins, while Robert C. Byrd meets Lincoln in another game with enough local bragging rights to power a small city. If you like your Friday nights with a side of chaos, this is the week for you.

The beauty of it is that the slate doesn’t try to be subtle. It just opens the floodgates and lets West Virginia football do what it does best: turn ordinary autumn evenings into full-contact community theater. Spring Valley at Bridgeport, Oak Hill at Capital, Point Pleasant at Herbert Hoover and the rest of the Class AAA board give the week that classic high school-football vibe where one upset can rearrange everyone’s mood before the band has even packed up. But the headliners are still the Big 10 games, because nothing says “we’re taking this seriously” quite like two schools spending 48 minutes trying to physically out-mispronounce each other’s play calls. The takeaway is simple: Week 7 is the kind of Friday slate that separates contenders from teams that just happen to own matching uniforms, and the best part is nobody has to wait long to find out which is which.