BALTIMORE, Maryland -- Is it the imagination, or is college football having one whale of a season that has been getting better and better with each passing week?


Unlikely upsets, fantastic finishes and individual stats that seem to break most of the laws Newton ever wrote -- college football has pulled it all out of its helmet this fall.


Surefire winners in the interest department are perennial losers suddenly taking the field with competitive teams or better and turning on their tormentors of decades past. Rice and all those math majors with the 1250 SAT scores beating up on Texas -- breaking a 28-year losing streak, and on national TV no less -- is what legends are made of.


Wouldn't a Rice-Alabama Cotton Bowl matchup be great with a Crimson Tide player jumping up off the bench and tackling a Rice running back as he's away on a 75-yard touchdown run? D?j? vu all over again as Yogi Berra might say.


And how about Kansas State, which holds scores of records for autumn ineptitude. The Wildcats, good last year, threatened greatness this year until beaten by No. 2 Nebraska, 17-6.


Then there's Duke, the basketball school picked to finish even behind Maryland and Wake Forest in the ACC, and Colorado State, which lists potent Arizona among its victims. Both are still unbeaten and into the second half of their schedules after years of performing somewhere way south of mediocre.


The Auburn story is such that, even though the War Eagles are on probation, millions are pulling for them to run the table for a second straight year and somehow end up with the national championship in the Associated Press poll. Auburn is currently ranked No. 4 on the AP list while not getting so much as a mention in the coaches' poll conducted by CNN and USA Today .


And it's not as though this is a freak of nature and the team isn't deserving. Auburn's come-from-behind victory over top-ranked Florida last week was the third time the team has come through in the clutch in the late going. Trailing LSU by 26-3 last month, Auburn won the game by intercepting four passes in the second half and returning all of them for touchdowns. The next time that happens figures to be the 12th of Never.


You want upsets? Army, after dropping four straight against hardly overwhelming opposition, beat Louisville last Saturday, 30-29. Louisville has been going to bowl games lately, and winning. Vanderbilt, a 20-point underdog to Georgia, buried the Dawgs, 43-30. And Notre Dame -- a 15-point favorite against Brigham Young at home, where an opposing coach once said, "it's like taking on the devil in hell going to South Bend" -- lost.


Form-reversals are always huge attention-grabbers, just as spectacular individual performances have a way of sticking around forever. Some pretty amazing stats have been run up by guys over the years, but the numbers Alcorn State quarterback Steve McNair is posting weekly are in the twilight zone. He has passed or run for 34 scores already, an average of just under five TDs per game.


Fantastic finishes? No shortage. Even the folks who witnessed it live or on TV still won't swear that Colorado beat Michigan on a last-play Hail Mary pass in Ann Arbor. Pitt and West Virginia have certainly seen better days, but think of the thrills and excitement of Pitt recovering from a 31-6 deficit to lead, 41-40, only to lose on another last-play heave. Alabama scoring to beat Tennessee, 17-13, as the umpire was hauling the cap pistol out of his pocket to end matters was Hollywood stuff, too.


On and on the story goes and where they stop nobody knows. Maybe it has something to do with college football celebrating its 125th birthday. Nov. 6, 1869, is when it all started when lads from Princeton and Rutgers decided they were spending too much time in the library on Saturday afternoons.