It was a day, and it was an evening, and it wasn’t quite a night but had Arizona State not sacrificed two more quarterbacks last week upon the continued altar of Herm Edwards, it may have been a night. Thoughts:
We completed, as suspected, the transition from reckless Colorado hype to vigorous Colorado backlash, a development which left Travis Hunter asking on Twitter/X, “What Do You People Get Out Of Hating?” I was hoping that Mr. Hunter was going to follow this up with an essay on the topic, having gone above and beyond the traditional capitalization practices used when titling, but alas, I will instead merely have to bookmark the tweet/post and save it for future use (expect it roughly once a week).
What I don’t think Travis Hunter grasped—and this is not a critique of Travis Hunter, that dude is a baller and a badass and I would offer that at least four of Oregon’s 35 first-half points would not have scored had Travis Hunter been on the field—is that most of the backlash against Deion Sanders was backlash against the outlandish hype Deion Sanders’s program received. The Deion Sanders Colorado Buffaloes Experience™ has been nothing but great for college football, but when a sport elevates to the most mainstream of the mainstream, you get some stupid takes, and there have been a lot of stupid takes. We are hardly more than seven days removed from a professional football broadcaster asking us if we “believe” because Colorado beat one of the worse Group of Five programs in double overtime at home. The Deion Sanders thing jumped the shark, and that’s fine, and now there’s a backlash, and that’s fine too, but I do think a lot of people are conflating the backlash against the hype with hate for Sanders and/or Colorado, and I don’t think that’s how it’s all built. There is some Coach Prime hate, and very little of it is grounded in any reasonable or good-faith rationale, but that is a fringe plot. Instead, most of what’s happening is that the people who like to blow every fun little story into a breathless heralding of the transformation of sport had and enjoyed their day, and the people who care a lot about the accuracy of The Broader Sports Narrative™ are now having and enjoying theirs.
What’s wrong here, what’s morally despicable and a gross misuse of the human mind, is that some of the first people, the breathless heralds, have now jumped into the second camp. You can’t do that. If you sincerely speculated that Colorado might make the playoff, you cannot jump on them for getting smoked at the Autzen Zoo. If you’re participating in this behavior, you deserve to have bad things happen to you. I don’t want them to happen, but you deserve them.
One person who did lash back against Deion Sanders, specifically and personally, was Dan Lanning, and that was warranted and fair and smart. Dan Lanning is a shit-stirrer. Dan Lanning is a dawg (was also a Dawg, but we are saying lowercase ‘d’ dawg here). In Dan Lanning’s eye sits the sociopathic gleam of a young man who does not care what anyone in the world thinks of him, a kind of excitement you see from all shit-stirrers of his ilk who do things at parties like ask friends’ relatives, unprovoked, what they think about Roe v. Wade. You know the type. They know what they are doing and they are doing it for the sake of their own joy. I have a friend who likes to ask waiters to bring platters of waters to groups of strangers at bars. I have a friend who does the Roe v. Wade thing as a bit. If you put these two men and Dan Lanning in a room together with a fourth person, that person would emerge weeping but feeling vaguely safe and loved. Dan Lanning was going to make fun of Deion Sanders. Were Dan Lanning to give Deion Sanders a pass, Dan Lanning would be betraying Polonius.
It is good for Oregon that Oregon had Dan Lanning yesterday, because Oregon’s other attempts at trolling Colorado went poorly. The shirts that said the game was business and not personal read like Ducks fans were begging Prime preemptively for mercy. The Oregon Duck knocking his own head off in a botched sledgehammering of a well-made Prime Time prop was the worst omen. In the grand cosmic weighting of these prides and prejudices, though, Dan Lanning’s swagger ruled the day, to the point where, as the West Coast drifts further and further from the North American Plate and also the concept of school pride, it is fair to ask what role Dan Lanning might play in keeping the whole country interested in college sports. If the West Coast can return to college football, there is hope, and Dan Lanning’s ceiling in the realm of interest generation dwarfs that of Lincoln Riley.
Overall? Dan Lanning was sticking up for his players, who’ve had a better start than Colorado’s and are better players than Colorado’s and have not received the plaudits lavished upon Colorado’s players like sprinkles on a child’s frozen yogurt. It is hard to criticize a coach for sticking up for his players.
Speaking of sticking up for your players: Lou Holtz did call Ohio State soft. It was hard to understand his words, Lou Holtz has never exceled in enunciation, but what Lou Holtz said was that these Ohio State Buckeyes are weak, impotent, wimpy men playing weak, impotent, wimpy football, and while that’s the kind of thing you generally encourage 86-year-olds to say, it’s probably fair for Ryan Day to use it as motivation. To succeed in the game of football, it often helps if your players believe something insane. To convince someone of something, it helps to believe it yourself. Ryan Day successfully made himself believe that Lou Holtz’s criticism of his team’s two straight losses to Michigan—losses lost on physicality—was 86 bridges too far, and it worked, and it’s hard to be unhappy with the guy, comical though his postgame interview may have been. Most people don’t hate Ohio, guys. Hate requires giving the thing in question an occasional passing thought.
We were at the Notre Dame–Ohio State game, about twenty rows back from the endzone where it ended. Someone in our section noticed that Notre Dame had only ten men on the field, and they hollered about it, so everyone started hollering about it and you could feel the dread spread across those in green, a dread followed by brief sensational relief—from the incomplete pass—but echoed with only more dread as Notre Dame failed to realize its problem on the second play until it was too late.
What I have realized with this incident is that part of your responsibility, if you are a fan in the first row at a sporting event, is to be prepared to disrupt play should your team need you to do that. Notre Dame, in that moment, needed an official’s timeout. How do you get an official to take a timeout, as a fan? You run onto the field of play. It is trespassing, you will be arrested, it can result in charges and a lifetime stadium ban, but my impression is that every Notre Dame fan making any semblance of good use of their soul would trade both those things for an eleventh man on the field at that point in that game. Notre Dame fans should have poured out of the stands when they noticed, doing anything to disrupt the play. It could have drawn a flag on the crowd, yes. But so long as the flag happened before the snap, it would only be a half-yard cost, not a full free play.
Florida State is bad. I have decided this because Florida State’s result yesterday provoked a question, and to answer that question—as with all questions peripheral to the ACC these days—one must begin with the premise that the ACC is bad. All further inferences must flow from that prior. We have received no indication for four full years now that the ACC has anything good going for it in the sport of football. When Florida State struggles to beat another ACC opponent on the road? I don’t really care how good that opponent was in 2016. Florida State is bad.
The Pac-2 has gotten a little hokey, especially on the Washington State side. I love Washington State, but Kirk Schulz would do his school a favor if he would just shut up. Who did this, Kirk Schulz? Who killed the Pac-12? Was it the presidents? It was the presidents, wasn’t it? What’s your job title, Kirk Schulz, you cowering failure crying victim at every passerby? If the institution of journalism wasn’t crumbling from within and unable to coherently and accurately share what blew up the Pac-12, you would be fired for what you’ve helped do to your school’s financial and cultural future. You are the man in the hot dog suit.
To be fair, it was actually WSU AD Pat Chun this week who said (thank you to 750 The Game for the quotes):
Although we’re asking our Coug fans to make it the toughest, loudest environment, we’re also going to encourage them, 18 minutes before kickoff, our band is going to play the Oregon State fight song, and we’re going to ask as a show of respect, to applaud that fight song, because the two universities are in a fight together.
…
I know our two mascots are going to interact more than they’ve ever interacted, as symbolic of these two schools going down this road together.
This is lame.
This is loser behavior.
People of dignity in this situation would look one another in the eye, shake hands, nod silently, and then either beat each other’s brains out or sneak all of one team’s good players onto the better team so that through collusion, one of these two schools could win the Pac-12 in its final year. You can acknowledge the situation and your shared plight, and you can be friendly with one another, but this is 18 steps too far. (I’m hoping the 18 minutes part is some goofy symbolism, referencing the size of the New Big Ten or how many stripes were on Judas’s tunic.)
Great game in Pullman, and I want to make clear that I’m very happy for Washington State. I love Washington State, I think Cam Ward is a cool, cool man. I am more sad for Oregon State, though, and part of that is just because Oregon State was the bigger Playoff threat between the two going into the day but part is that Oregon State’s leadership has been a little less whiny and a little less eager to blame everybody else. Oregon State’s leadership hasn’t been in the clear here, but I don’t know Oregon State’s president’s name, and that’s a good thing.
Iowa is hilarious.
I understand that Drake Maye made a left-handed throw last night, and that this was a good thing, and I regret to inform you that I am on an airplane right now and have not had a chance to watch (also haven’t, ahem, used the bathroom in the graphic way, and I am considering driving from the airport out to Bastrop after I land so I can use the Buc-ee’s toilets even though that’s further away than my house). It’s possible that this is a sign Drake Maye is going to turn into a wizard over the next two months, but going back to our Florida State discussion, I think the actual development this foreshadows is Drake Maye getting too confident in his ability to make miracles and thereby throwing seven interceptions one day in October.
Texas got right after two of the worst games anyone capable of beating Alabama has ever played directly on either side of beating Alabama. It seems like a focus/energy thing, but it also seems fixable and probably fair. You might have to look ahead to Alabama if you’re going to beat Alabama. You might have to accept a post-Alabama letdown if you’re going to beat Alabama. Rallying from the letdown to dominate a bad kind–of–rival in a trap game on the road is a good development. I want good things for Quinn Ewers the same way I want good things for Trea Turner. There isn’t any deep-rooted loyalty there, but they could both just be so good, and they both would be so good at being so good.
Lastly, yes. I share your impression. Alabama is probably going to win the national championship. Have a good Sunday, everybody.
Post-credits scene: Ok I actually have to go back to Iowa. Four first downs and four turnovers is too funny to go without mention. Penn State is good but Iowa’s star chart was written by a divine Donald Glover. Somewhere, a Hawkeye fan who watches a lot of Newsmax is forging a historic level of contempt for nepotism.
