This hasn’t been a wild season, but there’s still plenty to enjoy at the margins.
At this same point a year ago, the following had already happened in college football:
- Iowa State’s upset of Oklahoma in Norman
- Syracuse flipping Clemson’s season upside down in the Carrier Dome
- Florida throwing a Hail Mary to beat Tennessee
- Penn State winning in the last minute at Iowa
There are more, if you want to look. There are a lot more, so many that just looking down the list kind of makes the point.
If I asked you to make a list of the same games for 2018, you’d come to the same conclusion I have. It’s not a welcome one, nor one I really want to make, but it’s unavoidable at this point: the 2018 college football season has been without bangers.
Very few dance-floor-shaking thumpers out there. There have been interesting games and teams having unusually good seasons, sure. There are great players and a few great moments. But if we’re all going to have a moment of clarity, then let’s have it at something above a whisper: 2018 has not been the most obviously entertaining college football season.
There are reasons for this.
1. Marquee games have missed hugely.
LSU-Alabama ended without the Tigers scoring a point. Washington-Auburn opened the season with a struggle that turned out to be less about two titans testing their might against each other, and more about two underwhelming squads figuring out all the things they couldn’t do. Ohio State-Penn State concluded with a wet fart.
Do you even remember 2018 USC-Texas, the followup to one of 2017’s best games? No, no you do not.
Only the Red River Shootout really lived up to the billing, and that was a noon Eastern game, which people tend to forget by 5 o’clock of the same day. Night games have consistently disappointed (and this is saying something, in a year when teams as bad as a currently 3-8 Navy have been in the spotlight), big afternoon game have been iffy, and games touted as crucial showdowns have bellyflopped out of the public consciousness before the third quarter ended.
2. The games that have been good — and the teams in them — have largely happened at the margins.
It’s emblematic of the 2018 experience that when I tried to think of the most fun I’ve had watching a game, the immediate answer was: Oh yeah, Purdue blowing out Ohio State.
FBS’ best stories have involved teams in college football’s hinterlands: Washington State in Pullman, Purdue in West Lafayette, UCF in the AAC, or UAB in Conference USA. They are delightful and obscure, relative to the teams one expects to be talking about in November.
That’s been exacerbated by a lot of big brands — Penn State, USC, Florida State, Auburn, Miami, Wisconsin, etc. — having seasons that for one reason or another are at least 10 percent letdown. (In USC’s case it’s way, way more than 10 percent letdown.) This is cold demography, but if teams with lots of fans are less interesting, then fewer people are as invested in the sport as a whole.
3. A lot of potentially interesting teams are in year one or two of rebuild. This is reason to believe 2019 will be a lot more fun.
The hiring/firing season of 2017 was a bloodbath. The natural consequence: a 2018 with a substantial number of powers and important role players still testing out their depth charts in live games.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the SEC West. Alabama has barely broken a sweat in part because it’s crazily talented, but also because a huge chunk of their division is still figuring out where to put their furniture in the new digs. Ole Miss head coach Matt Luke is a recently promoted interim under NCAA sanctions. Texas A&M, Mississippi State, and Arkansas are in year ones. At times all three teams have obviously looked it.
Note: Arkansas might be in year one for another year. They might have two year ones and then jump right to year three, based on what I’ve seen out of the hard-fighting and deeply undermanned Razorbacks.
That first-year malaise extends elsewhere. Oregon, Florida State, UCLA, Tennessee, and Nebraska are under new management, and for the most part have played like it.
4. This adds to the temporary collapse of college football’s middle class.
For instance, in 2017 at the same point in the season, there were seven teams with three losses in the AP top 25. This week, there are the same number of three-loss teams — plus FOUR four-loss teams. Texas could finish 9-4 and end up in the New Year’s Six bowls as a top-12 team.
It is a bear market for quality, and it shows.
5. The Alabama Effect.
It doesn’t matter as much as people think it does, but it is real. The absolute certainty of Alabama’s dominance does take some of the drama out of a season, especially when other teams on its schedule fail to show up at all. Louisville turned out to be appalling, LSU couldn’t score a single point, and no one else has been able to stay on Alabama’s bumper for more than two quarters.
That is a terrible formula for interest. Nick Saban majored in business at Kent State, though, and can’t write screenplays for shit. No, he will not apologize for it, either.
6. P.S. The same is largely true of Clemson, too.
This equals everyone expecting a Clemson-Alabama title game, something we’ve already seen three times! That kind of expectancy isn’t helping, either.
7. Superstar players are either low-profile, following tough acts, or stuck in the margins.
Fill out your own private Heisman ballot just for fun. I won’t share mine — because as a Heisman voter, I can’t — but theoretically speaking: How far do you get after Tua Tagovailoa and Kyler Murray before you run out of slots? Could you even name the top rusher without looking it up?
That top rusher is Jonathan Taylor of Wisconsin, who plays for a 7-4 team that lost to BYU. Taylor’s situation is the point: take out Tua, and many of the game’s top performers play out of the spotlight, many for teams out of contention.
Will Grier is having an amazing season, Gardner Minshew is overseeing Arena Ball madness, and Benny Snell, Jr. has been his team’s entire offense. It’s not fair, but the three of those playing at West Virginia, Washington State, and Kentucky show how off-map this season has gotten in terms of big stories. If they played anywhere else, we’d have a more obvious cohort of “SERIOUS PLAYERS GO HERE.” Instead, we kind of have to remind everyone that they’re having incredible seasons, even if they happen to be one block off Main Street.
The best way to describe 2018 in sum: This has been the ESPNU season.
It’s where I finally learned the channel numbers for ESPN2, the SEC Network, and FS1 by heart, because that’s where the season’s most interesting things have happened. It’s been a hipster’s season with subtle joys and slightly obscure heroes. Subtle is fine, even if we’d sometimes rather have something we could dance to without thinking about it too much.
You know: A banger.