College Football Week 9 Picks, DFS Plays & Podcast: FSU-Wake, Utah-Oregon, Duke-Louisville lead battle for conference positioning

The Pac-12 is the gift that keeps on giving this year. They’re absolutely stacked with fun teams that seem to all play completely different styles and this week. Everybody has varying degrees of the same strengths and the same weaknesses. Almost all of them are really good offenses with terrible to above average defenses. Then there’s Utah. The Utes are missing their starting quarterback Cam Rising who seems destined to take this year as a medical redshirt as he works his way back from a torn ACL in last season’s Rose Bowl. And yet, they keep winning. Why? The defense is elite. So elite they were able to bring along former Utah pig farmer Bryson Barnes to a pretty decent QB. Safety Sione Vake has become a star RB the last two weeks and they’re right there in the mix for the Pac-12 title game and a playoff spot. In their way this week is perhaps the only other Pac-12 defense I trust in Oregon. The Ducks aren’t quite Utah good on defense, but they make up for it with an offense that isn’t quite Washington good but pretty close. Elsewhere, the Pac-12 also treats us to Colorado at UCLA and Oregon State at Arizona as wonderfully fun contests to feed us football late into the night. Thank you to our west coast friends for taking this last season together with a bang. Us east coast college football sickos appreciate it more than we can ever show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices