• This is the time of year, with lots of teams starting conference play, when the teams that spent August and September beating up on the little girls and old ladies of college football get theirs. Happens every year. Starting out 4-0, 3-0 or 3-1 doesn’t mean a thing for these pretenders … Kinda looking at you Wake Forest, Cal, Kentucky, Minnesota.
• If you change your uniforms every week and where colors that aren’t your school colors, it means you have no football tradition. If you’re a fan that routinely uses your hands to make the shape of a letter or a circus animal or some secret code, you’re gonna have a hard time finding dates.
• The AP Top 25 has the top four spots right, and if you woke up on Christmas morning and found Alabama, Clemson, Penn State and Oklahoma undefeated it wouldn’t be surprising … Speaking of surprises, Troy beating LSU wasn’t one. Troy was completely unafraid and in LSU’s face from the opening kick. It was only a surprise if you’re still in denial about the fact that there’s some really good football being played in the Sun Belt or the MAC or the AAC … In the SEC it’s Alabama and kinda everyone else. Still, Georgia and Auburn are pretty scary, Florida and LSU, not so much … San Diego State has beaten Arizona State, Stanford, Northern Illinois and Air Force; it’s no SEC gauntlet, but it’s no slouch either … I really wouldn’t want to play TCU or South Florida right now
• I know all sports are really about the money, but for the fans, well, we’re in it for the fun of it. Texas Tech versus Oklahoma State was fun, and is it just me, or do games on Big Fox seem more energetic and fun as well? I think so. Throwing toast is fun, and I saw the student body at Penn (while they were losing to Dartmouth) tossing the whole grain Frisbees on Saturday. It has something to do with an old fight song saying something like, Let’s drink a highball and make a toast to good ol‘ Penn. Since drinking a highball during timeouts is apparently frowned upon, they just started throwing toast. Great idea!
• For the second week running, the liveliest football in the country was played in the MEAC. North Carolina Central won its seventeenth consecutive conference game in an entertaining fight with the Florida A&M Rattlers on Thursday. The atmosphere, the football and the enthusiastic celebration of college football just made it a better watch on a Thursday night than the pro football offering or the Texas-Iowa State game .
• I’m not jumping off the Sam Darnold bandwagon … because I was never really on it. Darnold is a cool kid with some skills and a lot of intangibles, but his coronation was too much too soon. Perhaps the reality check at Wazzu will serve to let the nervous energy out of the balloon, and with more reasonable expectations, we can get a realistic line on who Darnold is and what he’s capable of. By the way, USC senior linebacker Uchenna Nwosu was the best player on the field Friday night. In forty years of closely watching Trojan football, I’ve seen a lot of very good teams – this isn’t one of them. Their inflated ranking is purely the result of a miracle Rose Bowl, and the stupid concept of preseason rankings based almost entirely on last year’s news. A four-loss season for SC would not be a shocking development.