College Football Week 0 Open Thread

Oh hey, there’s college football today! I’ll have my weekly posts as I did last year.

It was a big offseason, like the rest focused primarily on the expansion of player movement and the consolidation of conferences and power in the ESPN (SEC) and FOX (Big 10) Leagues. Given the prices for players, you can no longer call this Peon Ball or anything like that. Top players are becoming millionaires and even minor players are making something. Players can transfer every single year for higher money or more playing time or whatever maximizes what they want. Texas Tech oil people have put up tens of millions of dollars to buy a football team and all of that cash is going straight to players’ pockets, except for what goes to the players’ agents. It’s a very very different game than 5 years ago. There’s a fuckton of money in the game and unlike before, the players are making bank.

Also, just the other day, the SEC finally agreed to a 9 game conference season plus a required non-conference game against other power conference team. Finally. The laughable schedules played by SEC schools has long been a plague in the sport. I always love how they schedule a game against West Tennessee Tech the game before any big game. They did this, despite the fact that schools such as Arkansas and Kentucky and Mississippi State didn’t want this because they are afraid of not winning 6 games and making a bowl, in order to hold off the insane Big 10 playoff expansion plans that would blow up any sense that the regular season mattered anymore. I hope that works. Big 10 leadership really doesn’t care about college football or its fans at all. It just wants to wring every penny out of the TV networks for the athletic departments of its member school. A 12 team playoff is probably going to end up at 16, which seems appropriate to me. Going to 28 teams or something means 7-5 SEC teams having a shot and that’s just ridiculous. Even at 12 teams last year, the whining was ridiculous–sorry Bama, if you beat Vanderbilt or Oklahoma, you go to the playoffs, but you didn’t. But because of the bad scheduling issue in the SEC, Big 10 teams like Indiana and Nebraska were cancelling all decent non-conference games to maximize wins. That’s not great either.

Maybe by the time I die, college football will have a rational postseason. Maybe.

Anyway, this is an interesting year in that there is no team considered really a favorite. Texas I guess but that’s a lot of projections of Arch Manning being God. He might be, but we’ll see. Ohio State is the other highly favored team, but their QB situation is also rather wishcasting hopeful. Some people are talking Clemson, but color me very skeptical that Dabo Swinney can win in the modern football landscape. There’s 8 or 10 teams that could realistically have a claim to the title and I imagine there will be some serious reshuffling of top teams this year. North Carolina is not one of them. Bill Belichick is going to be a complete failure as a college football coach. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tar Heels don’t even make a bowl game.

Well, onto the games. What is Week 0? Because college football makes no sense, they created a week before the real season starts where you could have a few games. Basically, if you play a game at Hawaii, you get an extra game if you want it because of the distance involved. Also, there’s now an annual game in Ireland that they’ve put there. So you end up with a few games this week before the season starts for everyone else next week. As I did last year, I am going to use the Athletic’s ranking of all teams to determine the best games to discuss. They will be in order of start time, which is listed as Eastern Time, which is the only time that matters, if you live in Iowa, no one cares about you. There aren’t 10 of those games this week, but here are the games:

1. #27 Iowa State vs. #21 Kansas State (-3.5), 12, ESPN. Hey, this is actually a hell of a good game with serious implications for the Big 12 race!! The Big 12 is a total unknown this year. There’e about 10 teams that could win this conference. Two of the top contenders are playing in Ireland to start the year, which is a weird game to have there, but OK. Does KSU have a functional offensive line? Does ISU have anyone to throw to? They both have decent QBs, but they both have serious offensive questions. I think I’d take Kansas State -3.5 here as I tend to never believe in the Cyclones until I have to.
2. #78 Fresno State at #36 Kansas (-14.5), 6:30, FOX. Fresno is often underrated good but no one is expecting much from them this year. Kansas, despite its horrendous history on the gridiron, has a puncher’s chance of wining the Big 12 too. That chance depends on its excellent QB Jalon Daniels remaining healthy. Their defense should be good and they were very unlucky in close games last year. I like the Jayhawks here unless Daniels gets hurt again in the 1st quarter, which isn’t impossible given his history.
3. #103 Sam Houston at #63 Western Kentucky (-9.5), 7, CBSSN. This might be the only Conference USA game I discuss this year. Sam Houston was good last year and then lost everyone to the portal, from coaches on down, which is what can happen to good mid-major teams. Western Kentucky is usually a solid team. You’d have to be a degenerate to bet on this game, but given that Sam Houston returns nothing, taking Western Kentucky makes sense to me.
4. #93 Stanford at #109 Hawaii (-2.5), 7, CBS. Stanford has completely collapsed as a program in the last few years, leading it to hiring its famed alum Andrew Luck to be the football GM. Then, when coach Troy Taylor was fired for being a piece of shit as a human being, Luck asked former Bills QB and his NFL coach Frank Reich to come out of retirement to coach for one year only. It can’t hurt. Stanford isn’t going to be good, but neither is Hawaii and it’s not as if that stadium provides the home team some huge advantage, especially because opposing team fans routinely use it as a vacation excuse. I can’t understand these odds, so I’d take Stanford easily at +2.5

Also, I am morally opposed to betting, so I think you are a bad person if you bet on sports. That’s not going to stop me from giving my opinion on it though.