After another offseason of national chitchat about mergers, acquisitions, TV network bids and prospective mergers, acquisitions and TV network bids, they’ll start playing American college football again this weekend, on actual fields from Honolulu to the original Dublin. It’s a wonder they didn’t forget, given a sport that lately feels more like the business section than the sports section.
Week 0 of college football will include kickoffs from Dublin to Hawaii
Eleven games involving Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) teams are on the schedule for Saturday, none involving Southern California or UCLA, which roiled the summer when announcing their eventual moves to the Big Ten in a reshaping — or disfiguring — of America’s most eccentric sport.
None of the 11 games involve any ranked teams, although it’s always wise to watch the excellence at Utah State, coming off an 11-3 run to the Mountain West title and a win no one can take away, the 24-13 pelting of Oregon State in the inaugural Jimmy Kimmel LA Bowl.
Whether anyone would try to take that away, other than Oregon State, would be up for discussion.
Utah State will welcome U-Conn., whose new coach has a long-familiar name, Jim L. Mora, who coached the Atlanta Falcons for three seasons (2004-06), the Seattle Seahawks for one (2009) and UCLA for six (2012-17) back when UCLA was a West Coast school. Mora lately told reporters in Connecticut that listening to the U-Conn. band had reminded him that, “I missed it. I’ve realized every day that I missed it.”
It’s a reminder that even in the dull haze of mergers and acquisitions and TV bids, bands still matter.
Saturday will bring back into view the programs that won the Jimmy Kimmel LA Bowl (Utah State) and the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl (Wyoming), as well as programs that finished runners-up in the Boca Raton Bowl (Western Kentucky), the Duke’s Mayo Bowl (North Carolina), the Frisco Football Classic (North Texas), the New Mexico Bowl (Texas-El Paso) and the Quick Lane Bowl (Nevada), as well as a runner-up from a first-round playoff in the FCS, or Football Championship Subdivision (Florida A&M). For a marker of an era, there’s even a team (Hawaii) which had its bowl (Hawaii Bowl) covid-cancelled.
Hawaii begins under new coach Timmy Chang, who treated it to an NCAA-record 17,072 passing yards as its quarterback from 2000 to 2004, and Hawaii welcomes Vanderbilt, which starts a second year under its former fullback Clark Lea, having gone 2-10 in the first.
As games try to lure attention from mergers, acquisitions and TV bids, five months of football begin in the fine air of Bowling Green, Ky., where Austin Peay visits and a noon Eastern kickoff starts the nation into its annual sedentariness merged with inadvisable food-and-drink products.
Half an hour after that, yet at 5:30 p.m. in the Dublin for which all the lesser Dublins are named, there’s the game figuring to draw the most attention. As America again takes its oddities abroad, and as non-Americans prime to gripe about what’s going on with so much down time between plays, Nebraska will play Northwestern in an early Big Ten determinant of which of the two might feel even more miserable.
Both went 3-9 last year even while proving how 3-9 can contain wildly divergent meanings. Northwestern’s 3-9 looked like a that’s-life hiccup after Big Ten West titles in 2018 and 2020, while Nebraska’s 3-9 looked like still-further concentric circles of red Hades. Northwestern has a fan base that knows a 3-9 comes around from time to time, even as the outstanding coach Pat Fitzgerald stands 109-90 across 16 seasons, while Nebraska has a fan base that once witnessed three losses total across five seasons (1993-97), even as the memory banks required for reminiscing about that keep getting older.
Of course, the past seven seasons have brought 48 losses, as opposed to the seven seasons preceding those, when the team lost four times each year and people found that insufficient. It’s sort of a parallel to the downward curve at Florida State, which will start trying to avoid a fifth straight losing season when it welcomes Duquesne from FCS while remembering that last year, Jacksonville State came from FCS to Tallahassee and left with a victory, albeit on one of the mad-crazy plays that give college football a slew of its lore. That was Damond Philyaw-Johnson’s 59-yard touchdown catch from Zerrick Cooper on the final play, which saw Philyaw-Johnson catch the ball 20 yards shy of the goal line yet find his way through two Florida State defenders.
Can Florida State matter again?
Can Nebraska?
Former Nebraska quarterback and current coach Scott Frost, a savior in summer 2018, finished last season at 15-29 and 0-0 in bowl games across four years, while saying, “I feel like a broken record a little bit with them,” as he tried his psychology with a team that lost its past six games of 2021 by 32-29, 30-23, 28-23, 26-17, 35-28 and 28-21. It knew precisely how to almost win.
Now it starts anew with quarterback Casey Thompson, who fulfilled another trend of the era by transferring. His past four seasons happened at Texas, which has gotten rich in exciting new quarterbacks. His 10 starts last season included a doozy in Dallas against Oklahoma, a 55-48 loss in which Thompson threw for 388 yards, five touchdowns and zero interceptions. He’s got robust charisma at 23, and told Nebraska reporters last Sunday that Frost’s decision to start him owed to his “decision-making at practice, my poise in the pocket and being able to take care of the ball.”
He noted only four or five interceptions in 18 practices with hundreds of attempts. He said he felt perfectly relaxed even in hubbub such as Texas-Oklahoma last season, and that, “You basically go into like a meditative state.”
He’s been around some.
So have so many others. This Week 0 alone, as it’s called, begins with Wyoming having a quarterback who transferred from Utah State, and Utah State having a quarterback who transferred from Wyoming just after winning the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, a sequence that seldom has happened through time.
The Utah State-to-Wyoming quarterback, Andrew Peasley, may or may not start at Illinois in perhaps the most intriguing game of Week 0. Wyoming Coach Craig Bohl, the accomplished sort who helped send Josh Allen to the NFL, listed his starter as “TBA,” provided TBA doesn’t transfer before Saturday.
Source: WP
