College football: Every year is a winding road

College football is a reality TV show that's actually real.

A college football season features a lot of dysfunction and demoliton derby, a lot of jumped-to conclusions that don't prove to be correct, a lot of people squawking nonsense from the first time their voices are heard.  And that's just from the outside world.

There's a loser for every winner, and many of the winners don't win enough to satisfy their supporters. Schedules are laden with traps. Twelve games are enough for almost every team to get dragged into the abyss at some point.

The featured performers are 20 years old. They're high-achievers, yes, but still fully capable of going from total focus one week to the attention span of a goldfish the next.

One club completes a Hail Mary, another's prayers go unanswered. One club's starting offensive line gets gutted by injury. Another club's season-long injury report is so clean you could eat a team meal off it.

Iowa was 4-8 last year and the future was bleak. Unless your idea of the future was longer than 15 minutes, that is. The Hawkeyes are 7-4, and have won two games many of the "experts" projected them to lose before the season, at home against Northwestern and Michigan. As if they had any idea how any of these teams would be playing in October and November.

Now, had Northwestern and Michigan scored on their final fourth-quarter drives instead of ending them with turnovers in Iowa territory, the Hawkeyes could have been 5-6 right now.

Of course, if Jake Rudock hadn't thrown an interception against Northern Illinois with 1:30 left and that game tied, Iowa could have gone on to win, and might have been 8-3 today.

That's three games alone that were forever altered on the balance of just one play. On that, seasons and reputations are judged.

In the end, Dennis Green's famous expression is correct. They are what their record says they are. Iowa has looked like a 7-4 team. The Hawkeyes haven't beaten anyone that is better than them. They haven't lost to anyone who isn't their superior.

That's amazingly normal stuff compared to much of what's gone on in College Football America. Michigan State, Arizona State, and perhaps Duke, Missouri and Auburn will play in the championship games of BCS conferences. None of the four were in Associated Press' or USA TODAY's preseason Top 25.

AP had Florida in its preseason Top 10. That was seven losses ago, the latest to Georgia Southern.

In the words of Sheryl Crow, everybody gets high, everybody gets low.

Michigan was 11-2 two seasons ago. First-year Wolverines coach Brady Hoke was the bomb, while deposed coach Rich Rodriguez supposedly was a bum. Saturday, Hoke's guys lost for the third time in four weeks, and will probably lose again Saturday when they play Ohio State. Meanwhile, Rodriguez's Arizona team thrashed Oregon Saturday, 42-16.

Attach all the meaning to it you want. But you might be better served to just lay back and enjoy the show.