Whatever is happening atop college football’s polls — Georgia is No. 1, after Texas lost to Oklahoma — all you must know is that one monster game remains. This is what we adore about the sport, a likelihood that Notre Dame or Miami will control the final weeks until championship night with a victory on Nov. 7. They play in South Bend, which is nowhere near Bloomington, as Curt Cignetti no longer tells a joke.

Almost 40 seasons have passed since the Catholics played the Convicts. Isn’t it fascinating that NIL and transfer portals haven’t changed circumstances? The Irish won the game and ultimately claimed their last national title, and at this point, only two glances at Darian Mensah and Malachi Toney stifle the grand plan for Marcus Freeman. We cannot wait — a new nickname will arrive, which shouldn’t come from Dan Le Batard’s show — though we do wonder why Arch Manning threw two fourth-quarter interceptions and burned Texas as John Mateer was the better quarterback.

Allowing a pick-six is not evidence for a Heisman Trophy. Manning continue to wane while Mateer, who committed six turnovers the previous three games, used his tree-trunk forearm to lead the final field-goal drive. Hammer curls were enough in a 27-24 victory, with Mateer saying, “I thought about this game for 365 days. I think that was the longest fourth quarter I’ve ever been a part of. It was awesome, and I’ll never forget it. But I knew with 19 seconds left that this was the time.”

Said Manning, who will not be the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft: “We’ve got to do a better job, especially me not being loose to the ball. I think we beat ourselves.”

Could Texas slip into the final four in December? Doubt it. All Brent Venables knows is that his critics can expire. “We needed to get a win for obvious reasons,” said the Oklahoma coach, who is 3-2. “People questioning the commitment and ‘the coaches can’t coach’ and ‘the players stink’ and all all of this stuff — just spewing all kinds of incredibly repulsive things about people, coaches, players, all that. It comes in the arena, but at the same time, sometimes that fuels you. I don’t think you look for that to fuel you, but I do think it brought us closer inside our building.”

The upset allowed us to ask if Georgia, which won back-to-back titles earlier this decade, was handed a victory by Southeastern Conference officials. Why did they not see an obvious penalty in the end zone on Bulldogs safety KJ Bolden? Alabama would have kept the ball and perhaps won the game, but the mishap forced Bolden’s sack of Keelon Russell and a punt. Then the officials whistled Dijon Lee Jr., the Crimson Tide cornerback, for a personal-foul call. Georgia won 20-17 in Tuscaloosa, which wasn’t swept away by Hurricane Isaias.

“We can’t put the game in a situation where the officials come into play,” Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer said. “We just got to control the things we can control. We preach emotional maturity and never would have expected that to happen. You’ve got to give yourself a chance. You’re out there giving everything you got. And so, emotional maturity is what it comes down to. We didn’t respond the right way.”

“He’s my brother till we die,” safety Keon Sabb said of Lee. “So obviously, I try to uplift him. But there’s a standard that we need to play with. And on that play, he wasn’t up to the standard, and it will be addressed.”

Cignetti, who has played a weak schedule, must address why Indiana fell behind by 11 points. The Hoosiers returned behind two long touchdown passes by Josh Hoover — to Nick Marsh, who kept chanting on the sideline, “We got to believe!” — and won their 22nd consecutive game at Nebraska. But this is not a repeat national champion.

“I’m not sure it’s completely sunk in — or is starting to — that we won, because it took everything the players and coaches had to find a way to overcome,” Cignetti said. “You’ve got to have an indomitable will, man, a will that can’t be defeated or subdued. And you’ve got to be resilient. You have the ability to overcome the unexpected. No matter how bad it gets, you never let anxiety, frustration enter your mindset. You’re going to find a way. It’s just a matter of time.”

And Lane Kiffin lost — at Kentucky — meaning he can’t slip into an LSU frat party and sing, as he did last week. He will not win a championship this season and deals with two losses. Why did Kiffin’s defense allow quarterback Kenneth Minchey to run with ease for the winning two-point conversion in overtime?

“It came down to a one-play game, but there were a lot of plays before that to close the game out,” Kiffin said. “Disappointing in all three phases. If you don’t execute, you don’t execute.”

That’s also what Ole Miss says.

Said Kentucky coach Will Stein, who is 5-1: “I’m in shock. We’ve got a really good football team. People count us out. I took a picture of (ESPN’s) College GameDay this morning. Everyone picked LSU. Keep doing that. It gives us a lot of fuel. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t perfect. We just kept chopping. We kept fighting.”

Lincoln RIley kept his job for another week. But if he remains at USC, what about Bob Chesney, who is for real at UCLA? The Bruins ventured to Eugene and beat Oregon 17-15 without quarterback Nico Iamaleava. The final Saturday of November features Riley vs. Chesney at the Rose Bowl. If UCLA wins? USC will dismiss RIley and pay him a $60 million buyout — and kidding, sort of — before making a run at Chesney, who is 5-0. Or maybe Oregon fires Dan Lanning and enters the sweepstakes.

“I don’t got a message for the team right now. Not tonight, at least. But tomorrow it’s going to be the same,” Chesney said. “It’s going to be. it doesn’t matter now. We got to get better and how do we get better? We look at these things we got to fix.”

The rest of us count down the days and night. The Catholics remain the Catholics.

The Hurricanes are not the same Convicts. But they did steal a quarterback from Duke on legal terms, I think.

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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host.