College Football, and I Didn’t Know You Could Do That With The Game Clock

Every fan should invest in a laminator.

Lines written a few feet away from my television as and after I flipped through college football games. My Alabama bias is part of the mix.

– Florida’s in trouble. They’re coach is on a short leash, and they’ve got a four game stretch later this season of Georgia followed by Texas, LSU, and Ole Miss. Whatever momentum could have been gained in these early games was needed to face a month where LSU might be the easiest match up. They lost to Miami by an unredeemable amount today. There’s no silver lining and there’s no rose colored glasses or funny accents that make their future seem any less dire than it looks to me.

They’ll get a win against Samford and maybe FSU. Their four sequential games above are all losses. Texas A&M is probably a loss. Ditto Tennessee. UCF, MSU, and KY are all toss ups. I’ll be impressed if they get five wins. They could go 1-11. Meanwhile, their biology and chemistry departments continue to impress and my assessment of the football team in no way has bearing on my regard of the university as an excellent and praiseworthy center of learning and innovation; something to keep in mind when reviewing my son’s application.

Napier seems like a nice guy, but he was trouble with fans and boosters coming into the season after two seven loss years. I’m betting he doesn’t last the semester.

– Georgia is the destroyer of worlds. That wasn’t one of Dabo’s great Clemson teams I just watched, but they weren’t as bad as the Bulldogs made them look. They’re considered, early I know, contenders for the ACC title, which was almost won by Louisville last year so that may not be as positive a claim as it first seems. But still, they’re a talented team that was tossed around by Georgia with ease.

GA WR Dillon Bell left the game in the fourth quarter with cramps. I know these guys are only human, but cramps in an indoor stadium makes me and everybody else who isn’t running like mad on the field look accusingly, but amusingly too because this seems more oversight than dereliction, toward the strength and conditioning staff. Spend a few bucks on pickles and be done with this.

– Texas played defense, and the SEC should be scared. Sarkesian is going to have more offense than any situation calls for and his seeming miscalculations, though rare, usually turn out to be set ups (I really would rather it be sets up) for something exquisitely clever later on. He and Kiffin are different from the rest of the college football world.

We can marvel at Kiffin’s offensive genius while knowing that Ole Miss will still be vulnerable on defense. A good team that doesn’t play like Florida did against Miami today will have a chance against them. I was hoping Sark in Austin would be an oil rich, poofy blond hair version of the same. I root for both coaches when they aren’t playing Alabama. They’re fun to watch. Now it looks like Sarkesian has found a non-gimmicky defensive coordinator who teaches corners to be scrappy bullies without drawing calls. The safeties didn’t get drawn in or out. They played well enough for me to complain about not getting full 22 widescreen shots.

Colorado Sate isn’t very good, but they’re decent enough to have a Big 12 rival and make it a game every few years. This week the SEC dismantled cupcakes. Missouri beat Murray State 51-0, Arkansas blanked Arkansas Pine-Bluff 70-0, Ole Miss beat Furman 76-0, Miss State / Eastern Kentucky 56-7, Tennessee / Chatanooga 69-3, Oklahoma Temple 51-3, Auburn / Alabama A&M 73-3, Alabama / Western Kentucky 63-0. It was brutal, ugly stuff. Texas beat Colorado State in the same fashion as the conference did payout game opponents; 52-0. I still think Georgia’s better, but damn.

– I didn’t watch Auburn blow out Alabama A&M, but if what I’m hearing is true, A&M needs Jesus. Apparently, the coaches spoke at half time. Since the game was already a 52-0 blowout after two quarters, they agreed to shorten the third and fourth quarters to ten minutes each. I didn’t know you could do that.

I’m reading that the request came from A&M. I can’t imagine a team asking for mercy and expecting to ever hold up their heads again, but that’s what seems to have happened. I don’t care if you lose by two hundred. You have to finish.

Was there nothing either coach could do with the time? Practices are limited. Why not run two-minute drills, give the third string a shot at playing time, keep trying one play to get the blocking down and maybe use a variation later in the season against a team that watched your film. There was nothing they could do?

I’m trying to figure out why Auburn would agree to this. I can see a scenario where Coach Freeze wonders for a moment if the A&M staff would cause a should-have-done-as-we-asked injury to one of his guys. You don’t want to suspect such a thing of anyone, but moments before you’d never imagined that anyone would ask for mercy in a football game. Now you have no idea what these guys are thinking. It’s weird.

– Alabama was great and we’re great and nobody can beat the Tide, but…

We had five penalties for forty-five yards in the first quarter. Snapping cleanly is still an aspiration. We had touchdown passes of eighty-four and fifty-five yards and touchdown runs of eighty-five and thirty-nine yards. Big plays didn’t elude us. Small ones did.

We’d spot a mistake and make the Hilltoppers pay. Our athletes are as advertised. Broken plays don’t necessarily mean lost plays. Our first touchdown was made possible by some clever improvisation. All the tools are there, but we can’t do the easy stuff reliably. Milroe throws short passes with the same arm as he does long; not every time, but enough. Penalties kill us. Lack of cohesion on the offensive line was reportedly a problem with the mercenary Proctor on the field, but he managed to get hurt in warmups. The resulting shift around caused inconsistency on the left side.

The offense took brilliant advantage of mistakes by WKU, but I don’t feel like we ever put together a drive. I want a sense of inevitability in third and short that wasn’t there.

The defense was a mixed bag. They held an opponent scoreless. That’s huge. But they also allowed a week opponent multiple chances in our territory. WKU had a twenty-one play drive. It came to nothing, no score, but !???!!!! That zero on the scoreboard was courtesy of a missed kick from being three; an easy kick. “Bend don’t break” got mentioned a few times by the announcers and on Twitter. That sounds good against LSU or even Vanderbilt (who took out another kinda sorta ACC championship contender, which is plucky of them) but against WKU? We’re not likely to see as many openings as they gave us again. I hope it was first day jitters.

Keon Sabb snagged two interceptions in the first quarter, and of that I’m in awe.

– That was my viewing Saturday. LSU vs USC looks good for Sunday, and FSU plays BC on Monday. In case you missed it from last week, there was an observation.

If you did miss it, “WE SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN THE PLAYOFFS” Florida State, late of their 63-3 thrashing by Georgia in last season’s Orange Bowl, lost to rebuilding GA Tech in Dublin. That jet lag excuse was defended by several, I’m tickled to report. There were less defenders than mockers, but I’m impressed it got backing at all. I guess GA Tech went by boat.

The point is, the Biden-esque travel related debilitation should be in full effect given that there was a return flight since that Tweet, so FSU has a lined up, tried, and tested excuse should they inexcusably lose this one to a Boston College team that went 3-5 in conference last year and almost took down the “POWER FIVE CHAMPION!” Seminoles but for two points. I don’t want to miss that.

Updated: I forgot to add this.