College Football is Back in Big Way

Labor Day weekend is, I submit, the most packed weekend in sports. College football kicks off, the NFL has its preseason in full swing, it's historically an "international match date" weekend in soccer (where the clubs have to release their players to play for their national teams), the U.S. Open in tennis is underway, the pennant race and the FedEx Cup race enter their final act, and there is usually one extra outlier to consider (the FIBA World Basketball Championships, in this case).

I love it. I make ambitious plans to watch all of it, even the sports I only pay a minimum of attention to, with the aid of a fistful of amphetamines.

In the end, though, I invariably stay off the drugs and stick to my favorites on the weekend, which is college football with soccer coming in a distant second.

In Europe, this was the first full weekend of qualifying for Euro 2012, and there were upsets galore. Georgia held World Cup participant Greece to a draw — in Greece. Cyprus held World Cup participant Portugal to a draw (a 4-4 thriller) — in Portugal. But France was actually beaten at home by Belarus. Their exit of ignominy from the World Cup did not figure to get any worse. It did.

But as much as I love soccer and the sports gluttony of Labor Day weekend, it's all just the icing on the cake of the college football. Oh, how I missed you so. I saw a ton of games, just like I like to.

I understand journalism and I understand the need to create talking points. But please, can we hold off on declaring that TCU and Boise State will inevitably finish unbeaten now that they defeated the ostensible toughest opponent they will face all season? Boise State still has to beat Oregon State and TCU still has Utah. But it's Week 1. We don't know jack yet. At least one of the teams in the top five will flop and lose four games or more. Other teams will have excellent seasons but look past that one unranked opponent. Let's play the games, shall we?

Ohio State often looks shaky in their early season matches against the dregs of college football, but wow, not this time. They started rolling downhill at the end of last year when they finally defeated a top-10 team after several years of being unable to, and now it appears it will take one of those fluky upsets to stop them.

The same cannot be said for USC, who look every bit like a team hit hard with sanctions and coming off a four-loss season. Five years ago, they also opened up at Hawaii, and won by 46. This time, they won by 13 ... after they knocked Hawaii's starting QB out of the game and after Hawaii got hosed on a bad call that cost them four points.

I've come to enjoy the annual Week 1 game between Illinois and Missouri, played in St. Louis and called the Arch Rivalry (get it?).

Illinois made more of a game of it than they did last year, but once again came up short. Freshman QB Nathan Scheelhaase, who belongs in the Reggie Cleveland All-Stars, took his team into the locker room at halftime up by 10 and having gone 5-for-8 passing against a good defense. The announcers were giddy and declaring that Illinois has found their replacement for Juice Williams.

In the second half, Scheelhaase was 4-for-15 with 2 picks, and the Illini lost by 10. They have lost every game in the modern day "Arch Rivalry" and this was the end of the road — the series has not been renewed for the foreseeable future. The best quarterback debut for an Illinois team (as a starter anyway) was Dan Persa, who went a staggering 19-of-21 in Northwestern's win over Vanderbilt.

But I'm an upset connoisseur, and there were two gems in that realm Saturday. The first was North Dakota State defeating Kansas, 6-3. Though Kansas out-gained NDSU, this was not a fluke result and it's quite possible that the Bison are straight-up a better team than Kansas.

Is that meant as praise for North Dakota State, or an insult to Kansas? Both. North Dakota State is the Boise State of Division 1-AA (yes, I still will not call it "the FCS"). They have already taken down a Division 1-A scalp (yes, I will still not call it "the FBS"), beating Minnesota in 2007 after nearly doing so in 2006. They made the jump from Division II just six years ago and have already have a conference title in the 1-AA ranks and have earned a promotion to the swankier Missouri Valley Conference.

On the other hand, Kansas's football relevance is over, over, over, over, over. Their glory years of 2005-2008 might as well have been 1905-1908. They lost their last seven games last year, coach Mark Mangino resigned in a cloud of controversy, and Kansas is one of those schools that demonstrates that, although football non-powers can have great seasons, when they fall, they fall hard.

With a school like Michigan, you sort of know that eventually, they will be a national title contender again. The same assumption cannot be made about a program like Kansas. Another good example is Washington State, staring down the barrel of a third straight year of being perhaps the worst team in the BCS conferences. They had three straight 10-win seasons earlier in the decade.

But the game of the day and the upset of the day was surely Jacksonville State's victory over Ole Miss. Yes, it's always great when a 1-AA school knocks off any 1-A school. And it's awesome that they scored a touchdown in overtime on what could have been their last play — 4th-and-15 from their own 30, needing a touchdown to stay alive. And it seems like God Himself must have intervened when, going for the two-pointer and the win, JSU quarterback Coty Blanchard threw what was the shortest Hail Mary ever thrown, an up-for-grabs flip as he was being dragged down by a defender, and it was caught by one of his teammates.

That's all very cool. But what pushes this game to "historic" for me is that JSU was down 31-13 heading to the fourth quarter. Division 1-AA schools sometimes beat 1-A schools. But they never, I mean never, come from way behind to do it. If they do it, they were in it all game.

The esteemed college basketball guru Ken Pomeroy covered similar ground in his blog, with a statistical analysis over a two-part series of the least likely comebacks in college basketball last year, not only because the winning team came from well behind, but because the winning team by most measures was an inferior team to the loser.

This game would make his computer blow up. Mississippi coach Houston Nutt called it the worse loss he ever dealt with as a coach. For winning coach Jack Crowe, it was serendipity. He was fired from Arkansas after losing to Division 1-AA The Citadel in 1992. His recruiting coordinator and assistant head coach? Houston Nutt.