The best team in the nation lives in Ann Arbor, and the best coach in the nation is Michigan’s Lloyd Carr.

Quietly, Carr is retooling a team that will become a dynasty in the Big Ten. His Michigan recruiters could be making this sales pitch in the parlors of America: JoePa soon will be following his offense into retirement; Ohio State has major credibility problems writing police reports and taking oral exams; Wisconsin is again acting erratic; and Penn State and Wisconsin are not even on the Michigan schedule this season or next season.

The Wolverines played better than a national championship contender Saturday by manhandling Notre Dame, 38-0, with Perry scoring 4 touchdowns and netting 177 total yards in the biggest performance by a running back against Notre Dame in the rivalry. It was the first time Notre Dame drew a blank in the series since 1902.

Michigan demoralized Notre Dame with the most punishing offensive performance in the series by pounding the ball behind mammoth blockers. And Carr spent some of the offseason improving the defense, and he sent the defensive coordinator to the press-box level to coach. The result was Notre Dame being limited to 140 yards by swarming blue and maize brutes.

Notre Dame rallied last week from a 19-0 deficit to beat Washington State and elicited some optimism before the Michigan game. But as Lee Corso of ESPN correctly observed, the game could have been played in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican with the Pope watching from the 50-yard-line balcony, and Notre Dame would still have been shut out.

Incredibly, fans in New York City, where college football has become a Waste Land, could not find the game on WFAN Radio at 3:30 P.M. as advertised. The talk-radio station instead broadcast sophomoric Sid Rosenberg ogling about some woman sitting behind a backstop at a baseball game somewhere. And next at 4 P.M. was Ed Randall’s baseball show.

Not until a while later was the game found farther down the dial on Bloomberg Radio. By then Michigan led, 17-0.

Last weekend, WFAN cut away from the Notre Dame game when it went into overtime to broadcast a Mets baseball pregame show. Talk about Waste Land.

College football has become a Waste Land in New York City, where there are more Michigan alumni than anywhere outside of the State of Michigan and where every reader of one major newspaper is a college graduate. (That newspaper, incidentally, does not record scores of games played Thursday or Friday in its season schedule and scores package in its Sunday edition.)

The 111,000 who jammed into Michigan Stadium as part of the largest crowd ever to see a game there would blanch at the New York state of mind.

“And it’s not even October!” a Wisconsin alum cried out as the whacky Week 3 scores zipped over a television set.

Besides Notre Dame, four top 20 teams failed: Wake Forest, Texas, Colorado and Wisconsin. And Nebraska and Florida State were in close games.

The biggest shocker occurred in Madison, Wis., where the legendary John Robinson, who gave up his athletic director’s duties to have more time to care for his ill wife, led Nevada-Las Vegas to a 23-5 upset of Wisconsin. Last season the teams played a tight game that Wisconsin won before the lights went out in Vegas. This time Robinson and U.N.L.V. shocked the Cheeseheads early by forcing tailback Anthony Davis out of the game with a foot injury.

Wake Forest, which upset Boston College and North Carolina to start the season 2-0, lost at home to Purdue, 16-0.

Texas, once again overrated with a lofty preseason ranking, was hooked at home by the old Southwestern Conference rival Arkansas, 38-28.

Colorado allowed 20 first-quarter points and 24 third-quarter points while losing by 47-26 to Washington State, which showed no effects from its heart-breaking overtime loss at Notre Dame last week.

Ohio State should have lost were it not for some questionable playcalling in the third overtime period by North Carolina State Chuck Amato. The final effort failed by a yard when the 6-foot-6-inch running back tried to stretch the ball over the goal-line while on his back. He was ruled down and the Tarheels, upset last week by Wake Forest, fell, 44-38, to the luckiest team in America over its last 15 games. Amato cried with his team afterward and his voice broke during his postgame interviews.

Boston College stopped Connecticut, which began the season 2-0 by beating Indiana and Army, 24-14, and that indicated that Connecticut might be the equal of Penn State, which lost by 27-14 to Boston College.

The Penn State offense is still in semi-retirement. It netted 44 yards rushing and 159 yards passing for 203 total yards. Nebraska had 337 yards rushing and 60 yards passing for 397 total yards. The result was a gritty 18-10 Nebraska victory at Lincoln on four field goals and one touchdown to Penn State’s one touchdown, one point after and one field goal.

Penn State’s defense, which was on the field for nearly 40 of the 60 minutes, gave the Nittany Lions a chance at the end. But the embarrassing offense that ran only one series of plays in the third quarter again sputtered behind quarterback Zach Mills’s two lost fumbles and one intercepted pass. The last lost fumble led to a field goal and the eight-point margin.

With the loss, Joe Paterno’s lead in the most victories by a major-college coach slipped to two over Bobby Bowden, whose Florida State Seminoles rallied and then intercepted Georgia Tech’s final drive to win, 14-13.

The “Go, Blue!” crowd loves it.

To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, the quarterback of the poetic “Waste Land”, September is the cruelest month, for many top 20 teams.