Tag: Explainer

College football’s ‘Week 0,’ explained

Wondering why Vanderbilt plays at Hawaii next Saturday? Or why Northwestern and Nebraska are meeting in Ireland? You’re not alone.

Generally, the start of the college football season is reserved for the week leading up to Labor Day.

Indeed, the bulk of the big-ticket early season contests between blue bloods, such as Oregon-Georgia and Ohio State-Notre Dame, are reserved for the official Week 1 slate in 2022.

But if you’ve taken a look at the college football schedule for this fall, you’ll notice that a handful of games are set for the prior weekend on August 27. This is what has come to be known as “Week 0” by fans, and several teams will begin action before the technical start of the college football season.

Why is that?

The answer, believe it or not, lies with the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors.

Given Hawaii’s exorbitant costs to travel to and from the continental US during the season, it has historically been allowed to schedule an extra home game to make up for those costs (any team that plays at Hawaii also has this option, though other schools rarely take advantage of it).

However, beginning in 2016, the NCAA took things even further. Hawaii — and any team that travels to the islands for a game — is permitted to begin their season a week early. This year, the Rainbow Warriors open by hosting an SEC foe in Vanderbilt during Week 0.

That’s also why teams with road games in Hawaii, such as UNLV and Duquesne — who opens at Florida State next Saturday — are permitted to play.

There are also several other situations in which teams are allowed to play games early. FCS teams can schedule during Week 0 as long as it’s a non-conference matchup on national television. This year, the matchup between Stephen F. Austin and Jacksonville State, which will be broadcast on ESPN, meets that criteria.

Understand all that? Good, because it gets even more complicated.

Teams can also apply for an exemption to these rules, allowing them to play during Week 0 for a range of reasons. Those reasons can include extreme travel, like when Nebraska and Northwestern face each other in Dublin, Ireland, next weekend, or if they really, really want to, as was the case when Florida opened against Miami to kick off ESPN’s coverage of the 150th anniversary of college football in 2019.

While Week 0 exists, at least nominally, for the purpose of providing financial relief to Hawaii and the programs that play it, it has become an important part of the college football television industrial complex, and its role is likely only going to continue to grow.

Hopefully with this peek behind the curtain, all you’ll be able to think about while watching mid-level college football next weekend is the exhausting amount of red tape that went into bringing that game to your screen.

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Panthers’ rookie QB Matt Corral’s Lisfranc injury, explained

You may have heard of Lisfranc injuries before, but do you know what they are?

On Saturday, Carolina Panthers coach Matt Rhule announced that rookie quarterback Matt Corral’s 2022 season was likely over after he exited Friday night’s loss to the Patriots early.

Corral’s foot was stepped on, and coaches suspect that the third-round pick out of Ole Miss suffered what would be a season-ending Lisfranc injury.

You may have heard of a Lisfranc injury before. It’s what held out Jacksonville Jaguars running back Travis Etienne during his rookie season last fall, and it’s what limited third-overall pick Derek Stingley Jr. to just three games during his final campaign at LSU in 2021.

But what, exactly, is a Lisfranc injury?

Most football-related injuries are relatively self-explanatory. A broken finger or sprained ankle is an easy enough concept to grasp, and the alphabet soup that is the ACL, MCL, PCL and LCL can be understood basically as the ligaments that keep your knee from bending in an unholy fashion. Tearing one of them is no bueno and can keep you out of action for a lengthy period of time.

But Lisfranc injuries are less intuitive.

As defined by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons:

“Lisfranc (midfoot) injuries result if bones in the midfoot are broken or ligaments that support the midfoot are torn.”

Essentially, the five long bones that make up your foot — the metatarsals, if we feel like being fancy — are held together by what is called the Lisfranc joint complex, named after 19th-century French army surgeon Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin, one of the early observers of such injuries.

These joints keep the bones in the middle part of the foot in place, but they can be easily damaged, and Lisfranc injuries are common in athletes, especially football and soccer players, when another player steps on their foot. This is exactly what happened to Corral.

Considering the stress football players put on their feet, a Lisfranc injury is no joke and can have quite a lengthy recovery process that extends to six months or even a year, depending on the severity. If surgery is required, patients generally can’t bare weight on the injured foot for a six-to-eight week period following surgery.

This is why Corral’s outlook in 2022 isn’t very optimistic, and it could be quite some time until he’s allowed to practice at full speed once again.

But at least now, when you see Lisfranc injuries in the news, you can impress everyone around you by using the word “metatarsals.”

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