September always comes with its merciful promise of ebbing heat, and September always unspools its four or five college football Saturdays, and September always teaches us some things. Sometimes they’re smallish things and sometimes, like in this doozy of a September, they’re not.
Middle Tennessee State. James Madison. How the lesser-known do enchant us.
It’s the Appalachian State. It’s the Marshall. It’s the Middle Tennessee State.
It’s the James Madison.
Hell, it’s the Kansas.
Those would be the charms that save the thing from staleness.
With Middle Tennessee State, of course, people from afar might be able to surmise it’s somewhere in Tennessee, and very likely somewhere in the middle. They might not know it’s Murfreesboro. They might not know Murfreesboro is 35 miles southeast of Nashville.
But come a football Saturday in September, they might start hearing some strange news out of Miami, where apparently a too-proud old powerhouse with an overhyped new coach it paid a fortune to snare from Oregon is having some trouble, some 24-3 kind of trouble early on, with this Middle Tennessee State and its mod nickname “Blue Raiders” and its lifetime total of wins over ranked teams standing temporarily at zero.
Hours later, there might be Middle coach Rick Stockstill, long since a quarterback for Bobby Bowden at Florida State, and way high on the survival list of FBS coaches — at Middle since December 2005 — and he might be down there in Miami uttering this eternal truth: “It’s always fun to do stuff that nobody thinks you can do.”
Put that on his statue in Murfreesboro, because, wait, continuing: “Coming down here 26-point ’dogs and kicking their butt like we did …”
(Slight pause for a clarification.)
“ … because it was a butt-kicking, there was no fluke to this …”
How college football does give its people days to last forever, and, do carry on, Mr. Stockstill: “We were the tougher team here tonight, mentally and physically, and we got after them. I told our team earlier in the week, I said, ‘Ray Lewis and Michael Irvin and all of them cats, they ain’t coming out of the smoke (at pregame entry). They ain’t coming out of the tunnel. Have a strong belief in yourself, a strong belief in your team and don’t flinch, don’t look at the scoreboard, just keep playing.’”
Just keep playing, and you might keep remembering all your life. We all wish a long life to a 280-defensive tackle named Zaylin Wood, so that he can sit around as an old man and recollect how he got things going by tipping a pass, wheeling around, searching the hot sky for the ball, finding it, corralling it and rumbling 15 yards along the left side to the end zone.
May a 150-pound wide receiver named DJ England-Chisolm have bountiful days of recalling how he zoomed past any apparent defenders to get open and grab Chase Cunningham’s pass at the Miami 40-yard line for a 71-yard touchdown. Give him still more days to recall how, with Middle at its own 2 after a fourth-down stop early in the fourth quarter, he went up the left sideline to take Cunningham’s mighty lob for a 98-yard touchdown.
Let a receiver named Elijah Metcalf tell others as much as he wants about blowing past the apparent defenders for a 69-yard touchdown that made it 31-10, and let a receiver named Jaylin Lane tell how he caught a short pass on the right hash at his own 12, then carved his way through the apparent Miami defense through the middle and over to the left for a 94-yard gain that set up a touchdown.
Let them all remember how the empty seats in Hard Rock Stadium just looked sad.
Then let them all be truthful, if they can, to remember their opener in 2022, before they got to 3-1. They went to James Madison on Sept. 3. The far-flung or the oblivious may not be able to pinpoint James Madison’s location (it’s a gem: Harrisonburg, Va., in the Shenandoah Valley) or James Madison’s name, given the general national disinterest in history (fourth president, authored an important document).
Yet as JMU’s brawny FCS football program officially moved up a division to the FBS that day, Middle Tennessee went into Harrisonburg and took a 44-7 wallop. Then this past Saturday that same James Madison went to gorgeous Boone, N.C., trailed Appalachian State 28-3 and won 32-28.
Get this: This September alone, in three home games, gorgeous Boone has staged a 63-61 game that involved a 40-22 fourth quarter, one of the wacko Hails Mary you’ll ever see, and a comeback from 28-3. The home team is 1-2 in those and very nearly 0-3, and that’s the same home team that went to then-No. 6 Texas A&M and proved superior, one day after an A&M yell leader said to a chortling crowd in the Friday night pep rally, “I had to Google this team to make sure that they’re even real.”
These are the charms that make college football exceptional. If we’re lucky, in one September, Eastern Kentucky can beat Bowling Green, which beat Marshall which beat Notre Dame which beat North Carolina which beat Appalachian State which beat Texas A&M which beat Miami (Fla.) which can’t beat Middle, which can’t beat James Madison. If the transfer portal has abetted all this, then maybe we all should go hang out in the transfer portal, maybe even ask if there’s a sommelier in there.
The flavor comes from the bottom more than from the top. It’s an idea that right about now can distill to the state of Kansas. It’s the idea that Oklahoma can spend decades and decades as a mastodon but suddenly can’t seem to solve Kansas State at home twice in a row and thrice out of four, succumbing to a five-touchdown quarterback (Adrian Martinez) — four rush, one pass — who never seemed to have much fun in four years and 1,055 passes at Nebraska. And it’s the idea that Kansas, a threat to get jettisoned from somebody’s league in any cold, bottom-line future, can rise from a long turn south of moribund and reach 4-0, sell out its place and have that place storm the field.
And their outright delight of a quarterback, Jalon Daniels, who just went 19-for-23 against Duke to make it 66-for-93 with 11 touchdown passes to one interception on the September, tells how they even had him punt in the fourth quarter. The junior from California popped a 33-yarder inside the 10 and said, “I was able to punt the ball my freshman year once, and I’ve just been waiting for them to call that play out again. So it felt nice to be able to show that I’m able to do a few more things.”
A soaring September of Saturdays ended with a 4-0 Kansas, long the cradle of somber punting, conducting a happy punt. In the lower tiers lay most of the enchantments.
Source: WP
