This is the online version of our daily newsletter, The Morning Win. Subscribe to get irreverent and incisive sports stories, delivered to your mailbox every morning. Here’s Mike Sykes.
Rejoice, college football fans. Your time is now. Well, not now, at this moment. But soon!
This is our last week without college football as the Week-0 slate kicks off August 26 with Navy-Notre Dame.
Is that the most appetizing game? No. But that never matters to heathens like us. It could be literal teams of dogs and cats out there, but if it had an impact on the SEC West? We’re ten toes down, y’all.
Here’s the thing about this season, though. The college football that we all know and love — the one that is so near and dear to our hearts — probably isn’t going to be recognizable at all next season.
Think about it. There’s a lot of change coming to a sport we love so much.
We’re going to have an SEC that includes Texas and Oklahoma come 2024. USC and UCLA will be in the Big Ten and the Pac-12 might be dead. There’s also the College Football Playoff (that was already kind of weird but also fun) that will be expanded into 12 teams from the four that we’re used to.
Some of that change will be good, surely. But most of it will completely change the fabric of the sport. Some of the rivalries you grew up watching will now only exist in “the good ol’ days.” Some of the teams you love to watch won’t look the same through the lens of conference realignment.
In the longterm, that stinks. But that’s OK. We don’t live in the longterm. Not when we have today. Not when we have this year.
There’s so much to be excited about when it comes to this college football season. Think about all the storylines that we’re getting. We get to watch Deion Sanders work on turning Colorado around. We get to see if Nick Saban really still has it or if we’ve reached the end of Alabama’s modern-day reign. Not to mention, we get another year of Caleb Williams.
This year is going to be so fun. I can’t wait for it to start. Luckily, folks, we’ve only got a few days left and the clock is ticking. Let’s have a great year.
Quick hits: The greatest rock bands ever … Patrick Mahomes is still unreal … and more
— The FTW team ranked the greatest American rock bands ever. Please direct your ire toward the rest of my lovely colleagues and not me.
— Patrick Mahomes really has the best incompletions. This dude makes no sense. Robert Zeglinski has more.
— Zeglinski put together a list of MLBers who once dominated the Little League World Series.
— Here’s Robert, again, on fans ripping the Spanish Football Federation for their support of head coach Jorge Vilda, who seems like a pretty terrible person. Yikes.
That’s all, folks. Happy Monday.