THE MAIN CHARACTER, Week 1: The excellence of execution

Each weekend in college football, there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.

Welcome to THE MAIN CHARACTER, a weekly college football wrapup that recognizes the truth of this sport: it’s about nothing but feelings, primarily about enjoying the bad ones suffered by people other than you.

Most sports rely on math, science, and other nerd garbage, sorting out their business by counting which teams won the most games or which players scored the most fantasy points. But here in college sports, particularly in FBS football, it’s all just vibes. Polls, conferences, scheduling, rivalries, traditions, recruiting, and everything else are entirely based on emotions, disappearing at the whim of seemingly anyone at any time.

But here’s the magic: those emotions have real-world effects. Those made-up polls determine which teams get the most attention and best postseason invites. Goofy athletic consortiums founded 100 years ago determine which teams get to call themselves “powers.” Recruiting, the lifeblood of the sport, is about the feelings of 17-year-old boys, and even head coaches can vanish like thieves in the night because some booster gifted the big man the wrong color BMW.

So the college football internet is a potent stew. One does not simply watch one’s team win and then log off. No. One must maximize the advantage, storming the beaches of rivals whose teams did not win, because the actually impactful Feelings Market never stops fluctuating. And if one’s team loses, well, there’s always punching down on somebody who had a worse weekend. Almost always.

Let’s see which of this week’s cast members earned MAIN CHARACTER honors.

Arizona, Cal, Colorado State, Duke, Georgia Tech, Illinois, Tulsa, UConn, UNLV, Vanderbilt, Washington, Washington State

One of college sports’ foundational lies: members of certain conferences or subdivisions possess some sort of inherent merit. In Week 1, the teams in this list were reminded otherwise.

Ah well. The SEC checks will keep cashing anyway. Eyes ahead.

UConn, again

When your head coach announces he plans to leave you (again) and, one day later, announces he’s leaving you immediately, and all of this happens about 11 minutes into the season, you’re the MAIN CHARACTER for at least a bit. The new coach is a guy accused by the internet of failing to get his athletes riled up on Saturday, but as you can see from the full clip, they were reasonably riled. I’m so glad there are UConn Huddle Breakdown Truthers.

Points

No. 10 Wisconsin punted six times, losing a Big Noon Funeral March to No. 19 Penn State. Compare that to the following:

This trend continued, with Georgia beating Clemson in a game featuring six offensive points.

In times like these, we look for the helpers, the heroes who only seek to make the scoreboard look as nice as possible.

Please be patient. It’s only Week 1. We’re still uploading assets.

The American Athletic Conference

East Carolina, Navy, Temple, Tulsa, and USF lost non-conference games by more points than Vegas anticipated. Cincinnati and UCF had pretty great weekends! But they’re leaving. So is Houston.

The lone truly bright spot was Tulane, taking over Oklahoma’s field and nearly its scoreboard as well. Now the AAC must pray Tulane doesn’t return home to the SEC.

Nick Rolovich

College football coaches who want to keep their jobs for more than a few weeks, you may choose one of the following traits.

  1. Being an obnoxious, selfish person constantly making things worse for everyone.
  2. Losing to lower-level teams.

Again, you only get to choose one, not two. Washington State’s head coach entered the season under fire for playing around with anti-vax stuff (and other stuff), then lost to Utah State, which went 1-5 last year. And now we wait to find out what happens to coaches who choose two, not one.

The Turnover Chain

Miami made a series of mistakes. The Hurricanes agreed to play Alabama, agreed to play Alabama somewhere besides Miami (not that home-field advantage would’ve counted for much), and then actually showed up to play Alabama.

Do you know the last time someone beat Nick Saban in a game that didn’t need to be scheduled? As in, a regular-season, non-conference game? Way back in 2007, Saban’s first year (Florida State and the mighty ULM Warhawks). That’s a long time ago!

Since then, the Tide have made an annual thing of convincing suckers to show up in Atlanta or whatever for a Week 1 humiliation. Bama’s reign of Week 1 neutral-site terror includes smooth wins over Clemson, Duke (?????), Florida State, Louisville, Michigan, USC, Virginia Tech, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and now the Canes. None of you had to do this! It turned out great for Clemson, installing Dabo Swinney atop the little hill, but that’s no excuse for the rest of you!

Week 1 is supposed to be about securing an easy dub over a small school just happy to be on your field. Week 1 isn’t supposed to be about your program’s biggest source of joy becoming a burden on national TV in real time. Not only did Miami have the saddest Turnover Chain celebration ever, the chain then became an Overturn Chain.

And, just as FSU’s 2017 loss to the Tide has haunted the Noles for years, this loss has already stalked Miami onto the plane ride home.

That individual whose last token of Cane pride was disappeared by the War on Terror? I believe in my heart that individual was none other than BRAD.

Mack Brown

Enter the season ranked No. 10 with Heisman Trophy hype, then lose to unranked Virginia Tech without a whole lot else on TV at the time? Yeah, you’re gonna become the meme of the night.

West Virginia

The Mountaineers doinked off the shell of September Maryland, annually the country’s finest 3-0 team likely to finish 5-7 or so. It was a fine showing for the underdog Terps, a six-point win and all.

And then they referenced Drake’s new album cover in a way that still fills the mind with questions. Just choosing to see these as beer guts, not pregnant bellies.

Florida State

When it comes to reliably generating angry fan memes, FSU is in the national top two, hands down (more like hands curled into rage gestures). There are many great screenshots involving fans of LSU, Michigan, Texas, and others, but the only people who can compete with the Noles in this regard are Tennessee fans.

To the proud FSU lineage, we add this masterpiece. Study it five times before you choose your fighter. I’m in awe of the perfect sync between our two bird-flippers.

LSU

The big bad Tigers rolled into Pasadena, ready to drink the Rose Bowl dry and — as Ed Orgeron put it while counter-heckling a Bruins fan — beat up on some “sissy blue shirts” from California. And then UCLA crushed LSU both in fashion and football.

College football

College football is back? Nature is healing.

College football’s dumbest (and therefore best) crowd traditions are back? Nature is healing.

A bunch of internet know-it-alls are parachuting in, unaware these two crowds consisted almost entirely of vaccinated people, and delivering overly confident opinions about Southerners and Midwesterners? Nature is healing.

In response to Twitterland judging these Virginia Tech and Wisconsin fans without even bothering to research whether they were staging superspreader events or not (they weren’t), the homie David Roth writes:

A stadium full of overwhelmingly vaccinated twentysomethings wilding out to a Metallica song from 1991 is far from the reason Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. It might be more useful, I think, to understand all that strange and giddy closeness as something like the Nice Thing itself—an experience that could be had again, something strange but also safe and silly and shared, if only everyone loved it enough to fight for it.

Clemson

Remember, any time you make a joke …

… someone else is saying it for real.

THE MAIN CHARACTER OF THE WEEK: Brian Kelly

Notre Dame could’ve sat back and enjoyed a Week 1 road win over an improving and inspiring Florida State, all alone in the Sunday night national spotlight. Instead, Fighting Irish head coach Brian Kelly decided to torment a reference to another coach’s possibly apocryphal quote from 40-something years ago.

Asked about his team’s resilience, Kelly said, “I’m in favor of execution. Maybe our entire team needs to be executed after tonight.”

A joke referencing a joke (that almost nobody under 40 had ever heard before)! Alright. It’s also kinda Kelly making a joke about his own irascible temperament, a reputation he’s tried to defuse several times over the years.

I’ve tried to think of scenarios in which Sunday night’s joke could’ve landed as intended, and there might be a few. But especially considering Kelly’s program was found to be at fault for the death of a student assistant in 2010, there was no way for this humor to produce anything other than startled blinks and head shakes.

Sometimes, making a joke works great. Sometimes, it doesn’t. And sometimes, making a joke gets jokes made about you.