On my end, I have a library of Google Docs for each week of the season that I keep updated as things unfold. The goal is to make sure we’re talking about the biggest national games and storylines, as well as the under-the-radar stuff that often gets missed by bigger media outlets. Our first clue that October 17th was actually going to be crazy came on Tuesday of last week when we tried to figure out the structure of our Wednesday preview episode and I timed my first draft at roughly 135 minutes. For reference, we’re usually shooting for 60-75-minute episodes.

In addition, we made the call last week to pull together a live watchalong stream for the Ohio State vs. Indiana matchup given its implications for two top-five teams and our large Big Ten audience. Typically, we try to schedule these out when there’s a monster game in an early window that isn’t too much in conflict with the rest of the slate. It seemed like this would be the case on Saturday, as the other “big” games in the noon window featured Texas as a double-digit favorite over reeling Florida and LSU against an injury-riddled Mississippi State. We love doing these live streams during a college football Saturday, but they always carry the risk of setting us back when it comes to putting together the bigger recap stream we run at midnight. Our aim every Saturday is to watch as many games as possible while monitoring constantly for the most important storylines.

Depending on your perspective, the Ohio State-Indiana matchup was either a high-level defensive showdown or an ugly rock fight. Regardless, we expected a close game. The ending left me in a catatonic state for about 10 minutes, and the injury to Julian Sayin will likely be a defining moment when we tell the story of the 2026 season. We ended up voting Ohio State No. 1 on our AP Top 25 ballot, which some people took issue with.

But what we didn’t expect was for Florida to clamp down and hold the Texas offense to just 272 total yards, or to go into Austin with a backup quarterback and win. Saturday had all the makings of a get-right game for Arch Manning, but in reality, the Longhorns looked more broken than ever other than a quick start and some late-game hero plays. Suddenly, this was a game that we needed to rewatch in its entirety to understand the full context.

While we were going back through Florida’s upset victory, Jim Knowles and the Tennessee defense went full send on Alabama, Ole Miss made Missouri look like an FCS team, Bill Belichick built a hint of momentum at UNC by knocking off Duke, Bryce Underwood got benched in Ann Arbor, and Byrum Brown put No. 1 Georgia in a torture chamber and pulled off the biggest upset of the day. At the same time, Arizona State got drilled by Texas Tech and benched Cutter Boley, Jesse Legree had another banner day for Oregon State, Wake Forest annihilated Cal, and Air Force ran for 430 yards against UNLV. The Verballerhood cares about all of these things!

At one point, I had two TVs running with quad boxes and stole a third from an upstairs bedroom to set up another. Twitter was melting down. I was having visions of that old Y2K “This Is SportsCenter” commercial. Even if you’re monitoring every game, you’re not actually watching them with real depth. It was apparent that Week 7 was indeed going to be different and that there would be more games that needed a thorough rewatch before midnight. (Yeah, that watchalong stream might’ve set us back a smidge.)

From a production standpoint, the question was never what we’d talk about, but how we’d fit everything in. Dan and I usually have a call at halftime of the night slate to figure out how to organize our midnight recap episode. I have a template saved that looks something like this:

INTRO
BIG GAMES
REVERBS / FAN SENTIMENT
OTHER RAPID-FIRE TAKEAWAYS
AP TOP 25 DISCUSSION
DUDE ALERTS
OUTRO

After about 10 minutes on the phone, we decided to scrap the entire plan and shoot from the hip. There was no point in trying to organize the chaos of Week 7. The only path forward was to steer into it. We had no outline on Saturday night and no idea where the conversation would go. We made the call to fight fire with fire and go back to rewatching as much as possible from the early games while Notre Dame-BYU was still at halftime.

I think I almost passed out watching the end of the Notre Dame-BYU game. But I nearly had a heart attack when I checked the voicemails that were coming in.

After hinting that 2025 might be the last year for our popular Reverbs segment, we’re getting more calls now than ever. The plan is always to condense our favorites down into a 3-4-minute segment that we can play as a transition to get from our first segment to our second. The complication on Saturday was that we received a million calls, and our prodigious Reverbs engineer was taking a much-deserved weekend away. Given everything that went down on Saturday, there was just no way we could fit a rogue session of audio editing into a busy evening of studying. As such, the Reverbs will be part of tonight’s episode.

The midnight stream went off without a hitch. It reminded me of the good old days of flying blind and shooting the breeze with a friend and fellow college football sicko. Dan gave me enough space to get out some emotion after Notre Dame’s loss and unload on Matt Campbell’s blind loyalty to Rocco Becht. I gave him some wiggle room to keep tabs on Oregon’s late kick with Nebraska. It’s still early, but thus far, it’s trending towards our biggest episode of the season.

We hit stop on the recording around 1:30 AM ET. But we stayed on the line until the end of the Oregon game so we could put our AP Top 25 ballot together. For the first time in the 90-year history of the poll, five of the top seven teams lost. There was no making sense of any of this, and we reordered our teams about a thousand times.

After getting everything posted and rewatching clips of that final play in the Notre Dame-BYU game about 1400 times, I tucked myself in around 4:00 AM ET only to wake up a few hours later to argue with the fine people of the Internet.

I can’t wait to do it all over again in Week 8.