Every now and then, fans ignore the eighth chapter of the First Book of Samuel and request a commissioner be installed atop college football. Usually when this happens, I get angry, and I quote the eighth chapter of the First Book of Samuel, and I spit at how fear drives the fearful towards authoritarianism, throwing in some Steinbeck for good measure.
Saturday was pretty nice, though. One good game in the early slot while we got all the blowouts over with? An SEC classic in the afternoon paired with Iowa State making me soil my drawers? A primetime window full of momentum swings and bloodshed? All that was missing was something lighthearted to end it, like the Kibbie Dome or Deion Sanders trying to coach players who aren’t as good as Travis Hunter was.
The college football commissioner idea is bad. But Saturday’s schedule was perfect. Takeaways and thesis statements from a vicious Week 3, categorized and numbered this time because last week’s post felt like it was written by Gertrude Stein.
Georgia over Tennessee
1. It’s always been easy to love the idea of Gunner Stockton, because he’s from a small town in the northeast corner of Georgia and he lowers his shoulder when he runs. This weekend he was even better than the concept, with that London Humphreys pitch and catch particularly scary for the rest of the country. It’s early, but Georgia’s offense looks better than last year’s even after Week 2’s weird day against Austin Peay.
2. Nobody has the talent to match Ohio State, Georgia, Alabama, and Texas’s ceilings. If Georgia can play to their ceiling, then, they’re impossible to beat for anyone outside that quartet. Georgia isn’t at that ceiling yet, but they could still get there, and that’s worth monitoring, because it doesn’t look like Texas will get there and it doesn’t look like Alabama will stay at the ceiling if they stop by.
3. Tennessee had the game won, and it’s going to sting for a while that they lost it, especially living around the SEC Championship and CFP bubbles. But the fact this program could dramatically shed an expensive quarterback and maybe even gain ground is a great sign for where things are going under Josh Heupel.
Texas A&M over Notre Dame
4. Notre Dame thought they were going to make the playoff and tried to coach these first two games in a way that set them up well for December. It’s refreshing to see that not work. It’s also the kind of thing that works when you have Ohio State’s roster and doesn’t work when you have Notre Dame’s. Success can make you cocky.
5. We and plenty others asked last year if Mike Elko could be the one to finally tap Texas A&M’s potential. We didn’t picture it looking anything like this, but that’s a good sign. We knew Elko could win 10–9. We didn’t know he could win with a mediocre defense.
6. The Jeremiyah Love hype was probably unfair to Jeremiyah Love. Ashton Jeanty got to run against minor-league college football players. Love isn’t as good as Jeanty, is part of a two-man running game, and has to play major-league defenses, at least early in the year.
7. I don’t think Marcel Reed is who you want against a penetrative pass rush or a sure-handed secondary, but Texas A&M might not have to deal with those kinds of units for a while. On that schedule right now, only Texas stands out as definitively able to punish Marcel Reed.
Georgia Tech over Clemson
8. Georgia Tech supplied a great crowd to Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field, but I can’t help but be thrown off by the name. Shouldn’t it be Hyundai Field at Bobby Dodd Stadium? Because the stadium includes the field but not vice versa? Either way, great to see a good crowd at a place where college football’s been missing.
9. Dabo Swinney built a great formula for winning at Clemson in the 2010’s: Great quarterbacking, great defensive coordinator, impossibly effective strength and conditioning program. It wasn’t sustainable, though, and now Clemson’s back to the days of those 10–2 ceilings. This all adds up, and instead of asking what went wrong for Clemson we should be recognizing that a strong series of administrative decisions finally ran out of steam.
10. Brent Key’s Georgia Tech plays reckless football in a tough way, not in a cocky way, and that’s why they’ve become so easy to love. They’re the white knight in that ACC race.
Good Teams and Really Good Teams
11. We got our eyebrow-raising bottom line moment in Ohio State vs. Ohio, meaning there was a time when the score popped up during the other primetime games and made us all think about Ohio State vs. Ohio. This doesn’t put Ohio in the playoff or anything, but it was fun. (Ohio State doesn’t have anything to worry about coming out of that game.)
12. Texas needs to get better offensively. I’m sympathetic to Sark, because how can you plan around a guy who can’t reliably hit wide-open receivers, but it’s at the point where Steve Sarkisian needs to plan around Arch Manning. You don’t have to run perfect offense to build a good college football team. There are enough weapons there to be better than this.
13. Alabama looked fixed, and we all expected Alabama to look fixed, and for as bad as Saturday night was in South Bend, I do think Notre Dame might have dodged a bullet when they weren’t able to interview Luke Fickell because Signing Day was coming up and Cincinnati was in the Playoff. If that’s what happened, as the story goes.
14. USF’s a mid-major (not a knock—just harder to hang in there against great lines), but Miami has some inspiring drives. Real wring–out–the–washcloth stuff.
Other SEC
15. I don’t know what’s going on with LSU’s offense, and I don’t think LSU does either. Good win, work to do.
16. Nothing Florida does from here would be surprising, but self-immolation was a more concerning way to lose than if LSU was just a little bit better. Self-immolation can be encouraging, because it means the team was good enough to win and just did the college football thing. In Florida’s context, I think you’re looking for great execution right now. That’s the concern with this Billy Napier program.
17. Mississippi is a good reminder of how small a deal most QB injuries are in college football.
18. Mississippi’s defense might keep them from being great, but Arkansas’s offense has flashed enough so far to keep asking the question of Lane Kiffin’s team. They’ll certainly be fun, and Arkansas might be fun too.
19. It’s possible South Carolina wins that game with LaNorris Sellers healthy, but even if they do, it’s hard to believe they could have done it in a way that wasn’t troubling.
20. Vanderbilt is probably going to be 5–0 when they go to Tuscaloosa, and they could still miss a bowl game but they probably won’t. The jury’s out on whether they actually have something sustainable, but even if they don’t, they’re giving themselves the chance to build it. It usually takes some winning to win.
Los Angeles’s Big Ten Teams
21. USC was probably better than the final score against Purdue looks. Big delay before that game and they outplayed the Boilers comfortably. I still tend to think they’re just as close to Penn State as Penn State is to Ohio State.
22. I don’t have any idea how UCLA has become what UCLA has become, but I’d love to read a good explainer. They are terrible. You destroyed the Pac-12 for this?
Gratuitous Iowa State Reactions
23. Iowa State got bailed out at least a little in Jonesboro, and I will not complain. 112-degree field temperature three weeks after Ireland and one week after Cy–Hawk? With a hurt kicker? A win is a win there.
24. With the Louisiana and Ohio losses still such recent memories, there was an element of getting the monkey off the back here, kind of like there was when Iowa State finally stopped struggling against good FCS teams. The Cyclones found a way to win a tricky game they could have lost. It’s bad that they could have lost it, but they didn’t repeat those sins.
25. Rocco Becht still looks good enough that I will soon try to sneak in lines labeling him a Heisman contender as though others have proclaimed that and not me.
26. I don’t think Iowa State is the best team in the Big 12 but I don’t know who is. Maybe it really is Texas Tech. We’ll find out next week, I guess.
More Big 12
27. The Ireland “curse” makes a lot of logical sense. It’s exhausting to fly to a foreign country and play football. It took a while for NFL teams to figure out how to navigate it. Neither Kansas State nor Iowa State took a week off afterwards, which was bold. But that doesn’t really make it any better for Kansas State.
28. Chris Klieman looks like he’s in over his head, which is a wild thing to say about Chris Klieman. He lost the assistants that made his programs such a machine. Bad for him, and worse for Avery Johnson.
29. I do think Deion Sanders struggles to coach football. He runs a program mostly well, but his real coaching coaching has always been lacking, dating back to when Jackson State would get upset at the end of the year in what should have been huge games for them.
A Little FCS
30. I thought Montana was offsides on the last play of their win over North Dakota, but they were probably winning it anyway. Good game; both teams should feel good about themselves; I’m ready for the Big Sky and MVFC to start conference play. Wish it was happening next week.
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For our model’s reactions to Week 3…
- CFP Bracketology: Will Texas Miss the Playoff?
- FCS Bracketology: Rhode Island Surges; New Hampshire Missed a Chance
- Probabilities
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