College football Week 1: 5 teams on upset alert
As the 2018 college football season gets underway, these five teams need to keep their heads on a swivel as they’re on upset alert in Week 1.
Whenever a new college football season gets underway, almost everything that we’re looking at and talking about with the top teams in the country comes down to what’s on paper. Yes, there are players with experience that are returning that we’ve seen before. However, in terms of the construction of 99 percent of teams and how they’ll perform with this new look, what we know and what we think we know are two different things.
All of this is to say that the 2018 college football season, like any other season, is going to throw fans and teams curveballs early in the year. Teams that we thought had hopes of playing for the title will prove to be nothing more than mediocre. Others that we thought were overrated will prove to be better than that. Then there are the teams that we didn’t even consider that will come out and shock us all.
That’s just the way things go in this sport. Even if talent-factories like Alabama and Ohio State and many others almost always have the advantage in terms of skill, it’s a league of parity and young men that leads to upsets happening every single week. Anything can happen on any given Saturday (or Sunday, or Monday) in college football. And that’s especially true at the start of the season when we’ve not seen any of these teams on the field.
With that, we’re going to look at five ranked teams that should be on upset alert in Week 1 of the college football season. Some of these upsets would be bigger than others, but all are plausible for one reason or another.
5. Oklahoma Sooners
Rank: 7 | Opponent: Florida Atlantic | Date: Saturday, Sept. 1 (Noon ET)
There might be no brighter star in the college football coaching ranks right now than Lincoln Riley with the Oklahoma Sooners. He took the myriad of questions about how he would handle replacing Bob Stoops in Norman and ran them over with one of the most explosive offenses in the country. Of course, having an all-time great college quarterback in Baker Mayfield certainly helped his cause, but a lot of it was due to Riley’s prowess as a coach.
Having said that, this Oklahoma team now enters the 2018 season with more uncertainty than people would like to seemingly admit. Not only is Kyler Murray, despite how talented he is, inexperienced and having to deal with the pressure of replacing Mayfield in terms of just on-field performance, but this is also an offense that lost a fantastic leader. Say what you will about Mayfield’s antics and whatnot, he undoubtedly had his team behind him and believing in him for every second he was on the field.
More than that though, this Sooners defense might legitimately be troublesome this year. They suffered some key losses on every level of that unit, and that unit last season wasn’t that great to begin with. As such, how they perform is rightfully something to be concerned about. And that’s especially true when facing this Florida Atlantic Owls team.
Lane Kiffin’s group won their final 10 games of last season behind the running game of Devin Singletary, who returns this year. What’s more, this offense could be even more explosive with a better quarterback, DeAndre Johnson, taking over the starting job. They can score on anyone it would seem, and with the questions about Oklahoma’s defense, they could keep pace with them in terms of offensive production.
To me, this has the makings of a shootout that will be closer than expected. And when teams get into that kind of game, no matter how high of a profile the program is, anything can happen.