COLLEGE FOOTBALL KEEPS SPINNING OUR HEADS, WITH MAGIC AND CONFUSION UP CLOSE
Get used to Dan Lanning and Dillon Gabriel at Oregon, which hosts Ohio State in early October and could send Phil Knight and the Ducks toward a national championship game in a 12-team tournament
Can I giggle? When the Oregon quarterback, a favorite to win the Heisman Trophy, is playing for his third program in four seasons? When Deion Sanders refers to once-filthy-rich media conferences as “foolishness” after his son, Shilo, filed for bankruptcy? When the northwestern portion of the Big Ten, Seattle, doesn’t know that the easternmost part is in Piscataway and needs Eddie Vedder to find Springsteen and Bon Jovi?
Can I doubt? Texas and Oklahoma will challenge Alabama in the Southeastern Conference. But they’ll be overseen by Nick Saban in a TV studio and not on the field, where he has been succeeded by Kalen DeBoer, who wasn’t really known in America until last year. “I understand there's only one Coach Saban,” he said. “There will only ever be one Coach Saban.” If he isn’t close, Coach Saban will turn ESPN into a weekly battleaxe session.
Can I cringe? College football coaches, who’ve cycled their sport into professional free agency thanks to the Supreme Court, are so disgusted by financial requests from players that they want everyone to shut up. They’ll throw around money from donors and collectives the entire offseason. Not now.
“I told the players there's no negotiating. The portal's over,” Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy said. “All negotiation is history. Now we're playing football — just coaching and playing football. The business side of what we’re doing now is, we have to have those conversations with them. Tell your agent to quit calling us and asking for more money. It's nonnegotiable now. Start again in December.”
And can I wonder why Georgia, which has won two national championships in three years, keeps losing players to police trouble when they drive cars? And why Texas A&M fired Jimbo Fisher with a $75 million payoff and replaced him with Mike Elko, who will make $7 million a year? And why Arch Manning went to a school, Texas, where he is forgotten on the second team behind Quinn Ewers? And why Florida State opens the season Saturday against Georgia Tech in Dublin, where one drawl could lead to an Irish poke in the nose? And speaking of Florida State and Clemson, should we ask when the Big Ten will expand to 20 teams, which is double jeopardy?
“We’re focused on the 18, right now,” said commissioner Tony Petitti, crossing his fingers and trying to whip the SEC’s Greg Sankey.
Also, can I summon faith if five SEC teams — Georgia, Texas, LSU, Alabama and Ole Miss — join three Big Ten teams — Ohio State, Oregon and Penn State — in comprising eight bids in the very first 12-program playoff tournament? Notre Dame remains a funky independent with Duke transfer Riley Leonard at quarterback, replacing Wake Forest transfer Sam Hartman, with transfers at that position defining who wins in the sport. Utah and Florida State are hand-me-downs that should rate as conference champions. Boise State should rank best among Group of Five teams, a lowball necessary according to the bylaws.
That means, with at least 67 percent efficiency, the two megaconferences always should meet for the national title — unless one romps over the other, and we end up with a rematch of Oregon against Ohio State in a championship game. The SEC could rampage each other with four teams among the top six in the preseason top 25. Why not Oregon, which forces a coach like Georgia’s Kirby Smart clamoring for Phil Knight’s resources in regard to — all together now — names, images and likenesses?
“I wish we could get some of that NIL money he's giving Dan Lanning,” he said.
Lanning left Georgia to take over the Ducks, where he might take over the Big Ten. He has a home game against Ohio State on Oct. 12. He isn’t apologizing for the grand Nike edge, saying, “The reality is, find a top-10 team in college football right now that doesn't have great support. Do we have a lot more than everybody else? I think that'd be an exaggeration or we'd never lose. Everyone else right now is focused on our ice cream cone, and if I'm busy looking at theirs, that means mine's melting.’’
If Dillon Gabriel pushes Oregon to a victory and prompts questions about whether he knew fight songs at previous schools — Oklahoma, Central Florida — he could play the Bulldogs for a national title. Anyone looking for immediate pluses? On Aug. 31, Georgia plays Clemson in Atlanta while Notre Dame visits Texas A&M. Georgia faces more hell on Sept. 28 in Tuscaloosa, where Smart faces DeBoer. Also on Oct. 12, Ole Miss heads to LSU. Georgia plays at Texas on Oct. 19 and hosts Tennessee on Nov. 16. Ohio State visits Penn State on Nov. 2 and hosts Michigan on Nov. 30, no longer worrying about Jim Harbaugh while new coach Sherrone Moore tries to avoid super probation.
What we know about college football, now more than ever, centers on coaches who must win to avoid firings. Ohio State cleaned up in transfer warfare with Caleb Downs and Quinshon Judkins. The quarterback is Will Howard, a transfer from Kansas State. Ryan Day is 56-8 as head coach after replacing Urban Meyer. Is this finally the big year? Or will he quack a duck in Eugene? “We're not going to shy away from that. We want to win this Big Ten championship, win a national championship,” he said. “Every time I've gone into a season in Ohio State, you expect to win every game. That's just what it is. And if you don't think that's the case, try losing a game at Ohio State. You're expected to win them all. So that's not new. We embrace it.”
Also found on broiling roasters is USC’s Lincoln Riley, who wins Heismans but can’t win national championships. Some think Sanders is off to Los Angeles, which wouldn’t work because he doesn’t win. He was 4-8 at Colorado after a suffocating exaggeration in national media positivity. A player said the in-house culture is dreadful. “It’s like a real-life Grand Theft Auto video game. There are many distractions with fights, guns, and money floating around,” he said, mentioning a fight between Shilo and five-star recruit Cormani McClain. The Buffaloes are picked to finish 11th in a 16-team Big 12.
“What is chemistry?” Deion said about his program.
Reset all TVs. CBS doesn’t televise the SEC, with ABC and ESPN taking over in the late afternoon and early evening. The Big Ten usually airs at noon ET on Fox, 3:30 p.m. ET on CBS and 7:30 p.m. ET on NBC. Pat McAfee returns on ESPN’s “College GameDay,” with Saban, who will mash up Kirk Herbstreit.
And forget the lengthy gap between conference title games and bigger bowls. At rocking campus sites, seeds five through eight will host seeds nine through 12 on Dec. 20-21. One quarterfinal will be played on Dec. 31 and three on Jan. 1 in Arizona, New Orleans, Atlanta and Pasadena. The semis are on a Thursday and Friday — blah — in Miami and Dallas. The title game is played on Jan. 20 in Atlanta, a day of presidential inauguration in Washington.
My head is spinning. Don’t ever say college football, whatever is is, doesn’t intrigue us each season. What you might do is familiarize yourself with the same teams, year after year. The transfers find the top programs, fed by lucre, and in that sense, the money always counts but now it isn’t dirty. I would like to see a new Manning play.
“We’ve been fortunate to have some really good quarterback rooms, and I think the Manning family is pretty well aware of that,” Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said. “I think they trained Arch to put himself in the best position to play in the best conference in America and then ultimately put himself in the best position to further his career playing in the National Football League.”
For now, he watches Gabriel, who loves Lanning. “I think he connects well with the players because he's not like a grandpa,” Gabriel said. “I think he does a damn good job of being real. He is able to be vulnerable with us and that allows us to be vulnerable, which makes you gain confidence in one another.”
A grandpa? Is that a shot at Saban?
“Pretty badass,” Lanning called an inflatable duck during media days in Indianapolis. “We don't want to come in and be a team that follows the trends. We want to be a team that sets the trends. At the end of the day, you control your destiny by winning at the end of the year.”
Sing the new fight song, Dillon Gabriel. You might need it in early December and then on Jan. 20. It probably has something to do with Knight and Day.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.