It’s been said a million times over and I’m going to be the daredevil to say it again – college football is the greatest sport on the planet. I know Soccer, or Fútbol, is the “world’s sport” so save yourself some time and step off. I digress, Week 2 was fantastic! We were given major upsets, big time ranked matchups, hailmary victories and everything in between. I walked away with 3 primary storylines. Check me out…
1. The SunBelt Conference is not to be trifled with.
Like many a G5 conference, SunBelt teams are often paid hefty amounts of money to play away games at larger programs. On the surface it’s supposed to be a win-win situation - the bigger program gets a lesser opponent to come play them for what is typically viewed as a glorified scrimmage and the SunBelt, or any G5 team, gets a nice payday for being willing participants. Cool. Problems arise, though, when those pesky G5 teams don’t want to lie down and just take a drubbing. The entire arrangement is rattled. AND I LOVE IT! This weekend we got to see three SunBelt teams go on the road to “name brand” programs and EARN a victory. They weren’t fluky. None of them were via the aforementioned Hail Mary method. They were flat out wins, out-performances. Georgia Southern visited the Midwest and took down Nebraska – more on them later. Marshall strolled into South Bend undefeated and left the same after knocking off #8 Notre Dame. Then the pièce de resistance was Appalachian St handling #6 Texas A&M. The Mountaineers were the more physical team on both sides of the ball as they ran for ~100 yards more than the Aggies while also holding them to under 100 total rushing yards. That’s wild. Jimbo is getting all sorts of flack and deservedly so but put some blame on the AD for trifling with the SunBelt.
2. Early season rankings are meaningless.
This may start to sound like a contradiction because I used the rankings of certain teams in point #1 to emphasize how bad their losses were but this is more than that. In just two weeks of play we’ve seen 11 ranked teams lose (some against other ranked teams, yes) and several more struggle to win games where the rankings would tell you they shouldn’t. We had the three teams I’ve already talked about but I didn’t mention Houston losing to Texas Tech, Wisconsin losing to Washingston St, or Alabama *gasp* barely beating Texas and that was just this weekend. The biggest ranking goof was the committee taking Florida from unranked to #12 for beating then #7 Utah at home just for the Gators to lose to #20 Kentucky, also at home. What an overreaction! I have gone on record multiple times advocating for rankings to be withheld until Week 7. Primarily because we have no idea how good (or bad) teams may actually be until we see a body of work. TV networks and CFB as a whole wants the rankings because you can use it in marketing early season matchups but beyond that they provide zero value to the actual sport. Now that some of these teams have been “exposed”, what happens to the teams that already played them? Does Ohio State struggling to beat Notre Dame look as good this week considering Marshall beat them as well? I don’t know. What I do know is that early and preseason rankings aren’t worth the box a frozen pizza comes in.
3. I ain’t gone lie – Scott Frost is getting cooked!
(Edit: minutes after publishing this article Scott's firing was announced)
The beloved son was coming home to resurrect Nebraska back to football glory. That was the storyline when Nebraska lured Scott Frost away from UCF to come be their head man. Scott only spent two seasons in Orlando and it was his 2nd season that catapulted him to being one of the hottest young names in college football coaching. That season the Knights went 13-0 including a Peach Bowl dub over Auburn. There was plenty of fanfare for Scott but there were some in the background questioning if he’d found lightning in a bottle or actually built a sustainable contender. Regardless, Nebraska had seen enough. They wanted their man and they got him…for better or worse. Since becoming the HC at Nebraska, the Cornhuskers have a record of 16-31 in just over 4 seasons and they’ve never finished better than 5th in the Big Ten West. Scott has, impressively(?), become the king of losing close games and being in games has to be part of what has allowed him to keep his job this long. Time has to be up, though. The 2022 campaign began with a flubbing in Ireland against Northwestern and Week 3 saw the Huskers lose to Georgia Southern. It’s time again for Nebraska to have seen enough and give Scott his walking papers. That fanbase is too dedicated and loyal and, frankly, they deserve better.
Week 2 was a BLAST and I enjoyed watching all these things transpire. Hop off in the comments and let me know what y’all think
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