Perhaps game week media conferences in college football should come with a warning that they are purely for entertainment value. Read too much into them at your own peril.
Days before Notre Dame went down to Marshall in a stunner, head coach Marcus Freeman oozed calm and confidence. You couldn’t help but believe in him. Then … the Thundering Herd thundered.
In the build-up to Texas A&M being sent tumbling by Appalachian State, Jimbo Fisher spoke of poise and stability. That was convincing stuff, too. Then … the Mountaineers climbed highest.
Those instances alone should be enough to warn anyone against buying in too deeply based off anything uttered pre-game, except that listening to Ryan Day this week made it almost impossible not to make an exception.
Discussing why some teams were falling prey to lower-ranked, nonconference upstarts, the Ohio State head coach gave an emphatic and cold-blooded answer to why his own team would remain immune to stumbles.
“It really doesn’t have anything to do with the team we are playing,” Day told reporters. “It doesn’t. It has everything to do with Ohio State. We’re Ohio State. It doesn’t matter who we’re playing. It’s about the process. It’s about the way that we play. It doesn’t matter what the stage is. It doesn’t matter what’s going on.”
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Day’s team will take on Toledo on Saturday (FOX, 7 p.m. ET) and clearly has its eyes on the biggest prize of all, a national championship. Day didn’t look like a man scared of getting turned over this weekend. Or that he is even entertaining the possibility. And that’s the great separator in this year’s college season.
Maybe the early upsets should have served as a reminder of the concept that any dog can have its day and that even the loftiest of favorites are not invincible. But it didn’t really work that way.
Instead, it spawned the feeling that the very best teams are the only ones who don’t have to worry too much about such shocks, and that this season is going to be one for the heavyweights.
Already the AP rankings reflect the reality that college football has two absolute monsters as its biggest conferences and the delicious convenience that the top two teams from each openly detest each other.
SEC and Big Ten. Alabama and Georgia. Ohio State and Michigan. One, two, three and four in the country, as we get ready for things to become properly spicy.
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You’d better believe the likes of Oklahoma (which faces Nebraska on Saturday at noon ET on FOX) and Clemson will have something to say about the current status quo, and those programs have traditional might, too. But with the list of peripheral contenders trimmed – Notre Dame looked like a strong preseason No. 5 and A&M a solid No. 6 – this campaign is already starting to have a certain feel to it.
Alabama, having gotten past Texas and with Bryce Young arguably the sport’s best player, looks poised to be dominant again. Georgia, behind the inspiration of Stetson Bennett, is hell-bent on retaining the national title. Day’s Ohio State means business just as much as the coach’s words indicate.
Michigan has some convincing to do to show everyone that there is a genuine Big Four, with a handful of question marks surrounding Jim Harbaugh’s program – though J.J. McCarthy being selected as the permanent starting quarterback over Cade McNamara might have answered one.
“I see Alabama, Ohio State and Georgia and there’s a big separation until someone else starts coming on,” FOX analyst Urban Meyer told the Big Ten Network. “The Wolverines, I went back and I watched their video and the teams they’re playing are really struggling. And they obviously have the quarterback issue going on.”
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This feels like a very 2022 kind of situation. Just like how in many of the world’s leading soccer leagues the top teams are so big and powerful that they are always in contention, year after year, college football has a core of elites that are never far from the conversation.
It gives you a sense of how the season is going to go and offers an implied guarantee that there will be juicy matchups involving star-laden teams at the end of it.
Don’t expect something like 2007, possibly still my favorite college football season ever, when it felt like there were multiple upsets every weekend, when West Virginia came within a game of playing for the national title, when South Florida and Cal and Kansas and Boston College all spent time at No. 2, and the absolute upheaval was dizzyingly wonderful.
The game isn’t really built that way anymore, but it is also hard not to like rankings that have a meaty feel to them.
The powerhouses have the status and the position and they’re there to be shot at, which is the whole point.
When you’ve got the credentials, you have to be prepared to back them up. The words are nice. The actions speak louder.
