Looking at the all the schedules for the preseason top 25 teams, when should we expect to see each team’s first loss and how will the season come together as the undefeated teams fall week after week?
A week before the season kicks off, we look out and see the calm before the storm. Everyone is 0-0. No one has collapsed, been blindsided or come out of nowhere to turn things upside down. I have expectations, a feel for the landscape of the season. I haven’t been proven completely wrong yet.
At this point last season though, I thought Florida State was a top-five team, Texas was going to be good. Tennessee was ranked. I was vaguely familiar with UCF, but only because they’d gone 0-12 a season or two before. I had no idea the U was going to be back until they were, but then they weren’t. If you’d asked me to bet my life on Syracuse to upset Clemson, Iowa to upset Ohio State or Troy to upset LSU, I’d be down three lives.
It feels like Nick Saban has killed some of the unpredictability of college football. And he has, but only at the very top. The rest of the season is like a giant March Madness bracket and everybody knows the first two rounds are better than anything the Final Four or championship game produces. If you’re an Alabama fan and your team is playing the final weekend of the season every year, that sounds awesome but that’s not most people’s reality.
And the essence, the core, the soul of the game and what I love about college football, isn’t in the national title game or the Heisman presentation. It’s in watching guys like Memphis’ Anthony Miller who walked on to the team as a freshman and four years later walked off the field in a Tiger uniform for the final time as the program’s all-time leading receiver. It’s seeing Arizona’s Khalil Tate come in off the bench for a series, stay in the game and end up rushing for 327 yards and 4 touchdowns. It’s hearing what Mike Leach has to say in some random midweek press conference in October or what thinly veiled shot Lane Kiffin tweeted at his former head coach.
These 25 losses (possibly less) are how I think the season will look as it starts to take shape. But I have no idea. I may only go 22 of 25, or worse. You never know and no matter what, the total sum of things you can even try to predict add up to about one percent of all the storylines, developments and characters no one had even imagined before.
I haven’t been wrong about anything yet, but it’s coming. And after a long summer without football, I’m ready.