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Ted Miller, ESPN Senior Writer 9y

What madness will Week 12 bring?

College Football, Mississippi State Bulldogs, Oregon Ducks, Florida State Seminoles, TCU Horned Frogs, Alabama Crimson Tide, Arizona State Sun Devils, Baylor Bears, Ohio State Buckeyes

Imagine what Mississippi State fans are feeling this week. Joy. Hope. Trepidation. Impending doom. It's not too difficult to imagine every Bulldog obsessively embracing notions of karma -- "Ah, let me help you with that ... no trouble at all!" -- like a naughty boy trying to rally himself back into Santa Claus' good graces. Superstitions? We're guessing no one is stepping on cracks in Starkville and rabbits' feet are surely selling like tulips in Holland in the 1630s.

It's so very close. Just there -- on the horizon. Top-ranked Mississippi State has never won a national football title. In fact, it's never been ranked No. 1 before this season. Heck, it's never been 9-0 since Mississippi A&M first fielded a team in 1895. Yet it has begun to sniff the otherworldly aroma of ambrosial possibility as it wafts through cracks in a previously impregnable encasement of realistic hopes.

It really, really wants to beat No. 5 Alabama on Saturday. Few believe it will, including, one suspects, more than a few Mississippi State fans, worrywarts who received a pep talk this week from their SB Nation site, "For Whom the Cowbell Tolls," about embracing their good fortune without fearing it will come crashing down at any moment. Or that someone will wake them up. Despite their No. 1 ranking, the Bulldogs are more than a touchdown underdog. Alabama is also Las Vegas' co-favorite with Oregon to win the national title.

Alabama, as Crimson Tide fans so humbly volunteer at each quarter hour, has won 14 national titles. The Bulldogs all-time record against the Tide is 18-77-3, a .190 winning percentage. Alabama has won six in a row in the series, last losing to the Bulldogs in 2007, when first-year coach Nick Saban had yet to complete construction of his Death Star. Mississippi State is 5-0 in SEC play. It has never been 6-0 in SEC play.

LSU coach Les Miles famously said that his Tiger Stadium, inhospitably know as Death Valley, is "where dreams go to die." Last weekend, the Tide ineluctably rolled through that colorful boast in overtime with Saban's frumpy expression never changing. There's nothing magical about Alabama. Alabama doesn't dream. Its approach is manifest destiny. It's a football dynasty engineered in a lab, five-star athletes genetically engineered for their respective positions uploaded with Saban's operating system, "The Process." Alabama has been favored to win 64 games in a row, and no current Tide player has faced a game as an underdog, per ESPN Stats & Information.

When Mississippi State won at LSU on Sept. 20, it was all about improbability, dreaming and magic, not to mention an unnecessarily stressful conclusion. That victory, which officially launched the Bulldogs Fellowship of the Championship Ring, ended a 14-game losing streak in the series. In fact, it was the Bulldogs' second win in the teams' past 22 meetings, their first in Tiger Stadium since 1991, when coach Dan Mullen was a tight end at Ursinus (Pa.) College and just about all of his players weren't even born.

Where dreams truly go to die is ... college football. What Mississippi State -- and Oregon and Baylor, etc. -- is trying to do is become a first-time national champion. That hasn't happened since Florida broke through in 1996, when today's players were still in wombs or cribs. The BCS era, for all its annual intrigue, was all about the haves by December -- the FSUs, Miamis, Ohio States, USCs and SEC powers. Interlopers weren't allowed to hoist the crystal football. When the SEC crowed about winning seven of eight BCS titles, Mississippi State mostly served as an exhibit for folks straining to assert the SEC actually wasn't that good.

Further, this -- Week 12 -- is typically when the wheels come off the nouveau riche's tricycles. In 2012, Kansas State and Oregon went down as unbeaten teams in Week 12. In 2011, it was Oklahoma State. Last year, Baylor went down for the first time in Week 13. Texas Tech's improbable national title hopes went splat in Week 13 of the 2008 season. Of course, all these teams turned in fine seasons, but they were not afforded the benefit of the doubt when their records received their first losing smudge.

The same might prove true for Mississippi State, which played a nonconference schedule for which it should feel ashamed (Southern Miss, UAB, South Alabama and UT Martin -- seriously). The Bulldogs likely will need to win the SEC to earn a spot in the College Football Playoff, unless the gaggle of one-loss teams from other conferences go down a second time. Unbeaten Florida State is in. A one-loss Pac-12 champion is in. The SEC champion is in, unless it hails from the East. Would the Bulldogs, as runners-up in the SEC West, eclipse the Big 12 or Big Ten champion? Maybe, but also maybe not. The selection committee seemed to assert this week that it doesn't care if it's unpredictable -- see the promotion of one-loss Oregon to No. 2 over unbeaten Florida State.

There are plenty of intriguing games this weekend. Vegas seems to be messing with folks by making FSU only a slight favorite over Miami. Todd Gurley -- "I'd trade my past for Todd Gurley's future," says Superman -- returns for Georgia's visit from Auburn, with a Bulldogs' loss perhaps setting the table for Missouri, losers to Indiana, to win the SEC East for a second consecutive year. Nebraska-Wisconsin is a big matchup in the Big Ten West (Ameer Abdullah versus Melvin Gordon!), while Ohio State's visit to Minnesota is sneaky interesting.

And what about Duke, the lowest-ranked one-loss Power 5 team? It plays host to the Virginia Tech squad that made it justifiable to facilely dismiss Ohio State, which might well be the nation's best team right now.

Yet there's no doubt that college football's epicenter will be in Tuscaloosa on Saturday, when the Bulldog Alliance -- no Rebels here -- will try to outsmart and outflank Saban's Empire.

Hey, if Cleveland and Detroit can be atop their divisions in the NFL and Kansas City can return to the World Series, why can't Mississippi State break through?

It's so very close. Just there -- on the horizon.

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