THE MAIN CHARACTER, Week 8: College football’s greatest final score ever

Each week on college football Twitter, there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.

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.

Steve Addazio

One of the good things about playing weeknight college football: Everybody’s more aware of your achievements than they would’ve been if you’d played on Saturday.

One of the bad things about playing weeknight college football: Everybody notices when you lose a game in a way that infuriates anyone who’s ever played Madden.

Colorado State head coach Steve Addazio tried to explain the situation, but only managed to portray his sideline as an anarchist collective with no, um, head coach.

Where was the special teams coach? Due to NCAA staffing limits, lots of college football teams don’t have one. And at CSU, Addazio himself has filled that role, along with a quality control staffer.

Addazio, hired by CSU after his 44-44 stint at Boston College and an Urban Meyer recommendation, has at least remained consistent overall.

 

The weekly Arizona check-in

The Wildcats continue their quest to be considered for the title of worst team in FBS, losing their 19th game in a row, a 21-16 collapse against Washington. The following screenshot is authentic.

 

Oklahoma

The Sooners won, if we expand the definition of a win to include “trailed Kansas in the fourth quarter.” This is kinda OU’s thing this year, entertaining neutrals by trailing everyone in sight for at least a little bit, and we appreciate the Sooners’ commitment to drama.

And if we wanna ding Cincinnati for getting into an ugly tussle with Navy, then we’d better keep that same energy when it comes to evaluating OU.

Just to really hammer the point home, I wanna note Oklahoma (a team still ranked ahead of six other undefeated teams for some reason) was losing a game in an environment so football-averse, the stadium literally threw its doors open to pedestrians at one point.

 

Oklahoma State

You’d think an undefeated team losing to an unranked team would produce lots of giggles, but all I found were OSU and Iowa State fans competing to be angrier about Big 12 refs. (Also, nobody was all that astounded by the result, because Iowa State was favored at home anyway.)

There’s a lot of this, though:

All who tremble before San Diego State’s special teams demigod

Brady Hoke’s team is 7-0 despite ranking No. 110 in yards per play against FBS opponents, way down there between Bowling Green and Clemson.

How are the Aztecs undefeated?

Well, their defense is No. 3 in the same stat. In both metrics, they’re in clusters that include Wisconsin, Penn State, and Iowa.

And they have a guy who might be, relative to his position, one of the most advanced players ever. Punter Matt Araiza entered Saturday already on pace to set a new NCAA/NFL record for punting average, topping the 50.98 yards of 2018 Texas A&M’s Braden Mann by almost three yards per punt.

And then, in Saturday’s tight battle at 6-1 Air Force, the San Diego native blasted this 81-yard field-flipper that had announcers agog before it even landed.

And not only is Araiza unfurling 53.96-yard rainbows, he’s also No. 4 nationally in average kickoff yardage and 26-of-26 on extra points. His field goal accuracy, 69.2 percent, doesn’t look impressive, but consider the distance of his missed kicks: a 57-yarder against Arizona, a 55-yarder against San Jose State, a 48-yarder against Utah, and a 36-yarder against Utah. You could argue his average on field goals looks a little shaky because Hoke trusts his kicker’s leg enough to attempt 50-yard bombs. Araiza’s hit three of them, after all.

The Aztecs are 3-0 in one-score games, and it’s not difficult to argue they could’ve lost all three, if they’d had a mortal punter.

Clemson, yet again

The Tigers’ loss to Pitt sent everyone back to a couple very reliable comedy wells. First, it’s becoming clearer that the coach who once said he’d quit if players were paid by their universities is also overwhelmed by players being paid by companies.

And second, the “Dabo Swinney without a generational quarterback” meme has become a weekly staple.

There’s an additional wrinkle of comedy here, as Pitt is now 2-2 against Swinney, and Clemson is now 0-1 all-time in Pittsburgh. But Pitt upsetting a No. 3 Clemson, as happened in 2016, was just Pitt doing kid-with-knife Pitt stuff.

Pitt’s supposed to wreck famous teams. Pitt’s not supposed to be actually good. So when Pitt is College GameDay’s unanimous pick to beat the conference bully, then not only wins, but covers the spread? It might not be possible to spend an adequate amount of time laughing about that.

Speaking of 2016’s upset, that was the game when the Panthers shovel-passed Clemson into agony. So imagine the 2021 Tigers’ dismay when they tried the same move against Pitt, only to realize they’d only adopted the shovel pass, whereas Pitt had been molded by it.

 

And now, for a transitional tweet:

THE MAIN CHARACTER: Penn State

The No. 7 Nittany Lions were favored over Illinois by 23, with Vegas setting the points total around 45.

They then lost to Illinois in a game that produced only 38 points … despite each team getting nine overtime possessions, two each from the 25-yard line with full scoring available, and seven each from two-point-conversion range, per college football’s newish overtime rules.

So let me show you something.

ESPN

Do you see?

Illinois athletic department

DO YOU SEE?

Read that out loud in front of a mirror, and you will summon Heartlandyman, the Big Ten Candyman who is unable to progress within three yards of you.

The number of total yards in each of these overtime frames:

  1. Sixteen
  2. Twenty-four
  3. Zero
  4. Zero
  5. Zero
  6. Two
  7. Minus-one
  8. Six
  9.  Three

OT8 really pulled its weight with four total points, and there were a few field goals in there. But otherwise, this was an entire bonus hour of horrendous football that accomplished nothing other than producing greater quantities of horrendous football, a nanomachine replicating versions of itself that really put the gray in gray goo.

It’s one of the five dumbest games I’ve ever witnessed. We’ve had 6-4, 3-0, 3-2, 2-0, and 0-0 games, sure. And I’m aware of 222-0, a fake game between an actual Georgia Tech team and some Cumberland guys pulled off whatever passed for streets at the time. But none of those disasters included each team getting seven freebie goal-line tries.

And the college football internet was riveted.

Even while acknowledging the extreme Big Ten-ness on display — remember that stat above about Penn State having one of the country’s best offenses and worst defenses — this was special. It’s gonna be a while before we see another game last this long with so few things happening. The new OT rule had been nicknamed the two-point shootout rule, after all.

Not since 222-0 have scoreboards struggled so mightily to keep up with mathematical accumulation, because zero is a number.

Seriously, if someone had told you a game went to nine overtimes and asked you to predict how many total points it featured, you wouldn’t have been crazy if you’d guessed 200 or more. Yet this entire, five-hour spectacle was outscored on Saturday by 60 minutes’ worth of the Northern Illinois Huskies. Here’s the complete history of FBS teams playing in games of seven-plus overtimes:

  • 2001 Arkansas-Ole Miss: 114 points
  • 2003 Arkansas-Kentucky: 134 points 
  • 2018 Texas A&M-LSU: 146 points
  • 2021 Illinois-Penn State: 38 points

But this is not a mockery of good defense, the Midwest, wholesomeness, chopped-and-screwed music, plate tectonics, or 1870s football. Let me reiterate how much everyone loved this disgusting game and wished it would last forever.

However, this was a game Penn State never has any business losing, let alone while having umpteen different chances to put it away.

And finally, my favorite post of the weekend:

Previously in THE MAIN CHARACTER

We recommend interesting sports viewing/streaming and betting opportunities. If you sign up for a service by clicking one of the links, we may earn a referral fee. Newsrooms are independent of this relationship and there is no influence on news coverage.

[mm-video type=video id=01fjr6zpvmahas24aabm playlist_id=none player_id=none image=https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/video/thumbnail/mmplus/01fjr6zpvmahas24aabm/01fjr6zpvmahas24aabm-a34427c64c8ed49c2f02b0b5d6e4f0ed.jpg]