College Football Week 1: Friday Sports Thread

I am going to add a bit to our college football coverage this year. Last year, I picked 10 games a week, based on the best matchups if you follow the Athletic’s ranking of all the teams. But sometimes, the games would be Thursday or Friday. So when that happens, I want to have a thread during the week on this (if there are multiple nights, just the earliest. That allows me to pick 10 games on Saturday alone. Plus it gives up an additional sports thread.

Some sports issues worth discussing:

1. The Clippers being stripped of almost every draft asset for years after cheating to pay Kawhi Leonard over the salary cap so that he could be hurt and never win anything.
2. Random judges in states like Texas and Louisiana stopping any meaningful NCAA reform in order to protect the teams they are fans of, the latest of which being some rando Louisiana state judge ruling that LSU can bring back players from NFL rosters to play, which I think at this point probably won’t actually happen, but it’s Lane Kiffin and so anything is possible.
3. The Cubs being a fun team to watch, even if they don’t have the pitching to win the whole thing probably.
4. Novak Djokovic losing in the first round of the US Open to a random Argentine
5. The Cleveland Browns QB room
6. UCLA’s disastrous finances that truly are not sustainable for a college program

Now for a game pick:

#57 Fresno State at #14 USC (-23.5), 9, FOX. The story out of USC’s victory against San Jose State in Week 0 was the almost totally empty stadium. Stewart Mandel writes here that this what schools get for scheduling nobodies, which sadly is becoming even more common for non conference games. Oregon’s future non-con scheduling is flat out embarrassing. This really shouldn’t be that hard to fix–every Power 4 team is required to play another Power 4 team in a nonconference game and scheduling is taken into account for the playoffs is logical. But this is NCAA football, where nothing is logical.

Now, USC did not cover the spread, but that’s misleading, as these early games often are, because San Jose State got a bunch of late points. That said, Fresno is a better team than San Jose, USC didn’t run the ball well against the Spartans, which should be concerning. Fresno prides itself on the trenches and running the ball a lot. Good chance USC throws a lot and pretty successfully to counter this, but Fresno’s game does run the clock. So based on this, I’ll take Fresno +23.5.

Talk about whatever sports you want. There’s a Miami-Stanford game starting now too, though that should be a blowout.