One fewer unbeaten, thanks to LSU

— -- It makes perfect sense, really.

We couldn't get to the College Football Playoff selection committee's first rankings of the season without the Mad Hatter having his say.

In what's been a nonsensical season in the SEC West -- one in which Ole Miss paraded goalposts through the Grove after beating Alabama, Mississippi State is the No. 1 team in the country and a Kevin Sumlin-coached Texas A&M team was shut out -- Les Miles added his own touch of drama to the mix, as LSU secured an improbable win over the Rebels on Saturday night. On the day after Miles' 91-year-old mother passed away, the No. 24 Tigers threw a major wrench into the sport's inaugural four-team playoff by upsetting No. 3 Ole Miss 10-7 at Tiger Stadium.

"That was a great game, wasn't it?" Miles said. "One thing about these Tigers: If you put them in Tiger Stadium, and give us a little time to fix things, we are going to be very special. This team wanted to make this night special, and they did."

Of course, what was one of the biggest upsets of the season ended in the only way Miles would have wanted: complete chaos. Not that that's anything new for Miles, whose Tigers celebrated their 24th fourth-quarter comeback win under his watch. That puts Miles best in the FBS in his time at LSU.

With LSU leading 10-7 with nine seconds to play, the Rebels lined up for what would have been a 42-yard field goal to send the game into overtime. But Ole Miss was late in sending its kicking team onto the field and was penalized 5 yards for delay of game.

After Miles used a timeout to try to ice Ole Miss freshman kicker Gary Wunderlich, Rebels coach Hugh Freeze sent his offense back on the field and passed up a 47-yard field goal attempt. Instead of trying to pick up a few yards with a quick pass to the sideline to help Wunderlich's chances, Rebels quarterback Bo Wallace went for broke and threw deep. LSU's Ronald Martin intercepted his pass at the Tigers' 2.

"We've been on the good side of these for seven in a row now. This league is brutal," Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze said. "Give LSU a ton of credit."

The Rebels aren't out of the playoff picture entirely. They're now in the middle of a deep pack of one-loss teams, with only two unbeaten teams left in Power 5 conferences: No. 1 Mississippi State and No. 2 Florida State.

When the selection committee releases its first top-25 ballot Tuesday night, only one team from Mississippi figures to be in the top four. Mississippi State, which is ranked No. 1 in The Associated Press and coaches' polls for the first time in school history, survived a 45-31 victory at Kentucky on Saturday.

The Bulldogs hardly looked like the team that steamrolled three consecutive top-10 opponents earlier this season (then again, Texas A&M hasn't looked like a top-10 team for weeks now, and LSU didn't until Saturday night), but they moved to 7-0 and remained in control of the rugged SEC West.

"Hopefully, we can get all of this ranking stuff behind us," Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen said. "I don't know where we'll rank. You can drop us if you want, or you can raise us -- I don't really care on any of that now. I think our kids are going to be over it now."

If Saturday was the day for final (or first) impressions before the first rankings, No. 10 TCU might have been the big winner. The Horned Frogs walloped Texas Tech 82-27, which set a school record for scoring and is the second most by a team in a Big 12 game. TCU piled up 785 yards of offense and scored 24 points in the first quarter and 31 in the third.

"We were not trying to send a message about anything," Horned Frogs coach Gary Patterson said. "We did not go into this saying we wanted to run up the score. That's not what TCU is all about it. We're not that kind of football team."

Michigan heard Michigan State's message loud and clear. The Spartans defeated the Wolverines 35-11 for the sixth time in seven meetings in East Lansing, and tacked on a touchdown with 28 seconds to go for good measure. MSU coach Mark Dantonio wasn't happy with Michigan's pregame antics, in which the Wolverines planted a stake in the turf at midfield at Spartans Stadium, and doesn't seem too fond of anything else about his school's biggest rival.

"I can only be diplomatic for so long," Dantonio said. "The little brother stuff, all the disrespect, it didn't have to go in that direction. We try to handle ourselves with composure. That doesn't come from a coach. It comes from the program. Throwing the stake down in our backyard out here and coming out there like they're all that. That got shoved up. ... It got shoved in the last minute and a half."

Hang on. We're about to embark on a brave new world in college football, in which the numbers next to a team actually matter, despite what Mullen and others might say.