THE MAIN CHARACTER, Week 7: The exception who proves the rule

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

Welcome to the weekly college football wrapup that recognizes this sport is about nothing but feelings, primarily about enjoying the bad ones suffered by people besides you.

It’s nothing but feelings, all the way down. Made-up polls determine which teams get the most attention and best postseason invites. Friendship clubs founded 100 years ago determine which teams get to call themselves “powers.” Recruiting is about the feelings of 17-year-old boys, and even head coaches can vanish because some booster gifted the wrong color BMW.

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

Stream live college football games every week this season from conferences across the country on ESPN+.

Let’s see which of this week’s cast members earned MAIN CHARACTER honors. Once again in this especially strange season, there were multiple valid candidates, along with some strong supporting players.

Todd Grantham

No. 20 Florida lost to unranked rival LSU, and then news emerged anyway that the Tigers will part with Ed Orgeron, who won a national title just 17 games ago. Boy, beating the Gators by only a touchdown doesn’t count for all that much these days! (Obviously, Orgeron then became the college football figure drawing most of the attention this weekend, but this column typically focuses on Saturday’s games.)

While the Gators in general and head coach Dan Mullen in particular came under internet fire, most of it burned within the blast radius surrounding defensive coordinator Todd Grantham.

Grantham has long been a frustrating figure, just about always producing defenses that rank in the national top 30 in opponent-adjusted SP+, which measures overall efficiency. Yet they’ve also just about always ranked in the middle of the country at getting off the field on third down, despite Grantham’s big talent advantages at Georgia and Florida and typically competitive raw talent at Louisville.

Fans of his various teams have long lamented his tendency to spam the same blitzes over and over, and apparently that now extends to run defense as well. LSU broke out a Tecmo Bowl playbook, and Grantham responded in kind.

It’s just sad that Gators fans, who spent the Will Muschamp era complaining about low-scoring football, simply can’t make up their minds.

UConn

The season’s lone remaining candidate for the title of Worst FBS Team Ever not only ended their campaign on Saturday, defeating Yale, they snapped a losing streak that’d lasted since October 2019.

Happy for the kids!

It just feels much better to mock an Ivy than it does to keep piling on UConn, the most forgotten child of conference realignment. Take that, Yale!

Arizona

Jedd Fisch’s Wildcats entered Saturday with a rare opportunity still on the table: Finishing the season as arguably the country’s worst team despite being a Power 5 team. This happens way less often than it might feel!

And then Arizona exceeded expectations, in the bad way. The Wildcats lost their 18th straight game, getting shut out by a Colorado team that is also one of thue country’s worst. Zona now ranks between the likes of Old Dominion and UMass in the computers, with six quite likely losses still to go.

I tried to find funny tweets about all of this, but the ultimate indignity for the once-proud program of the Desert Swarm might be how few people care.

Oregon, but actually Ohio State

The Ducks sleepwalked past Cal on Friday night, and I’m mostly glad to see people besides me have to go back and check the Oregon-Ohio State score from time to time, just to confirm it took place in our reality.

 

Liberty

The season’s biggest upset so far, according to Vegas: The 5-1 Flames soaring into Monroe as 33-point favorites, only to be slain by the terrible talons of Terry Bowden’s ULM Warhawks.

There are many jokes to be made about watching Liberty blow it. There sure are.

And here are two tweets about Hugh Freeze.

 

Nick Rolovich

As of this writing, he’s still the head coach at Washington State, despite daring his employer to rid itself of his distracting-at-best mediocrities. His team beat Stanford on Saturday, though Rolovich had already made his team’s season a sideshow in his personal circus.

Iowa

Nice No. 2 ranking you have there, Hawkeyes.

This probably should’ve been anticipated, for several reasons. One was Iowa’s unsustainable business model all season, similar to its business model in all seasons: Keep punting the ball until you can intercept it within field goal range.

The even redder flag, however, was daring to wave a No. 2 ranking in front of Purdue, despite Purdue’s only significant claim to football fame being its absurd success against teams with that exact ranking.

Parts of Purdue’s Graveyard of Empires mystique come from its location in remote West Lafayette, its modestly sized fanbase, and its relative lack of traditional success indicators. But it cannot be overstated how much more horrified Goliath would’ve been if he’d looked down where David stood and saw this thing:

How’d Purdue win? Basically, they trusted Iowa’s offense to be Iowa’s offense, then kept throwing the ball at the one guy Iowa can’t ever stop. In three career games against the Hawkeyes, David Bell has produced 197, 121, and now 240 yards, plus five total touchdowns.

For another level of comedy, consider how angry Penn State fans have been all week after Kirk Ferentz joined in with fans claiming Nittany Lions players had been faking injuries to slow down Iowa’s offense, which would be a little like holding your knee in hopes of delaying continental drift. Ferentz’s claim was so off-putting, even Pitt came to Penn State’s defense.

Thus ends the re-emergence of 2015’s “talk to your kids about undefeated Iowa” meme, and with it, apparently all confidence that the Hawkeyes will reach the Big Ten Championship.

And, while we didn’t realize it at the time, the finest moment from Purdue’s win provided some incredible foreshadowing for the day’s main event.

 

The Main Character: Lane Kiffin

The one thing I’ve determined after a month and a half of chronicling the Main Character is that there’s only one person who actually likes and seeks the honor. And why not? Seizing attention by any means necessary has worked out well for him over the last decade-plus.

When Kiffin’s pre-Alabama “get your popcorn ready” comment led to a wave of instant mockery, but Kiffin was then spotted surfing that very wave, that felt like a microcosm of his entire career. Other coaches who are not troll-brained obnoxiousness experts would be ill-advised to pursue such tactics.

In 2017, Vols fans spent their coach-hiring debacle pleading for Kiffin to return as head coach, but they’re apparently over that now, based on his first return to Knoxville as a head coach since he left in 2009. As always, Tennessee fans like to express numerous feelings, most of them via boos.

As the game came down to some controversial officiating, Tennessee fans reached their fill of anger at Kiffin’s existence, the refs, and having to be Tennessee fans. The outburst took physical form once garbage began raining down from the Neyland Stadium stands.

And, after the Ole Miss win, Kiffin thrived as the star of a really silly show. As always.

His pro rassler exit even included cutting masterful promos all the way outta the territory.

If this week’s Main Character wasn’t either Kiffin or Purdue, it was the bottle of mustard (probably a secret flask) that made its way from someone’s Day-Glo cargo shorts and onto ESPN.

Because Kiffin is our most #online head coach, he and his program wasted no time in converting this sports drama into the only currency that really matters, which is internet likes.

And I leave you with this, when Kiffin posed a challenge to biblical scholarship by attributing a version of Isaiah 54:17 to Ray Lewis.

It’s hard to fathom anything more online than responding to being barraged with mustard by posting Boomer-fried memes more bizarre than the mustard itself, no matter how off-brand it feels to recognize Main Character status in someone who lies awake at night plotting to remain the Main Character.

Previously in THE MAIN CHARACTER

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