2017 College Football Week 1 Big Damn Blog

2017 College Football Week 1 Big Damn Blog

Life goals.

Hello to the twelve people who still read this blog religiously, and the three people who keep sending me weird photoshopped pictures of my face on Tim Tebow rookie cards. Never quit, I'm doing this for you. Football is strange now! Clemson won a national championship, Bob Stoops is no longer a coach, Texas has a DIFFERENT coach, and I think Florida just suspended 23 more players for their game against Michigan. 

I'm also now part of a podcast! Me and some colorful characters will be speaking actual words at each other in an audio format over the course of this season. Please listen in here at OKYourCoverage if you want to hear the smooth silky voices of several drunken, enraged, Texas fans a few times this year.

In world news, Hurricane Harvey recently left a path of destruction through Texas with Houston suffering horrible flood damage including tens of millions of dollars in personal property loss and several deaths caused by the storms.

If you would like to contribute, here is a Flood Relief Fund. Please help out if you can, many people have just had their lives absolutely destroyed and every bit helps. One love, Houston.

Continuing my tradition of doing little to no research before the season, I will now guide you through the first weekend of college football with BLISTERING accuracy. Please hold your applause until the end.

Michigan 35 - Florida 17

Florida suspended their starting running back, their entire secondary, Steve Spurrier, and the 1987 cheerleading squad for this game. I haven't looked into it, but I believe this stems from a copyright disagreement over the Chomp hand motion. This Civil War will divide the campus and likely the state. Ideally, Tim Tebow will step in, Jon Snow style, and work out an armistice that will prevent actual violence so they can focus on the real enemy, Jim Harbaugh's pleated khakis and his DEVASTATING music video.

Georgia (A VERY HIGH NUMBER) - Appalachian State (A MUCH LOWER NUMBER)

Look, I know my audience. I know there a lot of #UGGA folks out there reading this and you guys have to know you're playing a cupcake to start and then you're playing the rest of the SEC East to continue the pastry parade. Tennessee will fire Butch Jones before you start conference play, Will Muschamp will get suspended for head-butting one of his own linebackers, and Florida will suspend their entire team if anybody even so much as thinks about cheating the food hall system this year. So yeah, you guys will be fine. I don't think Knowshon Moreno or Musa Smith is coming back anytime soon, but at least you have a guy named after a videogame character with an eating disorder leading your team. Good luck!

Alabama 41 - FSU 24

Go to hell, Jimbo. I'll never forgive you for letting Jameis "All I did was steal crab legs" Winston not get arrested for sexual assault. Now I have to look at that creep's name on a bunch of fantasy football draft lists and cringe. HE MAY HAVE HAD ISSUES IN COLLEGE BUT HE'S PUT THOSE BEHIND HIM AND DAMN IF HE CAN'T THROW A FOOTBALL NOW. I hate football. The fact that Nick Saban looks like a saint in this matchup makes me throw up a little, but at least he had the decency to fire his offensive coordinator and Hugh Freeze Award Runner-Up, Lane Kiffin. For some real football here, you actually can't beat a Nick Saban coached team in week 1. It's a mathematical reality, folks. Roll tide.

Baylor plays Liberty (which is a school, I guess???)

God, I hope Baylor loses this game and then the stadium catches on fire at night when nobody is there.

LSU 35 - BYU 10

I'm just here to warn LSU that BYU can mess you up REAL hard if you're not prepared for some ridiculous Mormon QB read-option action. Head on a swivel, Orgeron.

Georgia Tech 30 - Tennessee 24

No easy way to say this, Tenneseee. You guys are about to lose to a bunch of nerds. Georgia Tech doesn't even actually play "football". They just recruit guys who run an offense that was really really good in 1960 and run that at you until somebody dies. The last time I watched a Tennessee game, they won a game against a junior varsity squad by having their QB fumble INTO THE ENDZONE AT THE OTHER TEAM and miraculously recovering that fumble to win. Now I've played football a while and haven't ever read of this strategy, so you guys are either 20 years ahead of the competition or you actually are trying to play a different game. Either way, I don't think you're prepared to have a full-back run 27 times for 300 yards against you, so enjoy sports talk radio in #Knoxvegas debating ol' Butch's hot seat for the next week.

West Virgina 24 - Virgina Tech 13

West Virginiaaaaaaa, mountain mamaaaaaaaaaa, take me hooooooome, country rooooooaaaaaaads.

True story: One of my coworkers is from West Virginia and turned me onto John Denver's Country Roads and it is now the ABSOLUTE one song I have to listen to when I am on a plane. I have no idea how that correlation came about, but it soothes me as I fly into the abyss on a metal bird beast. Love it.

West Virginia has been in the Big 12 for a few years now which makes perfect sense both geographically and mathematically (17 teams in the conference now?). The fact that they've been better than Texas most of that time has just been AWESOME, NO I'M NOT MAD I'M HAPPY YOU'RE MAD.

I think Marcus Vick retired from coaching VT last year, so there should be a noticeable decline in throat stompings this year, but with two teams from the Appalachians playing, couch burnings will be WAY up. Take them to the place they belong, Mountaineers.

Texas Football

UT Austin has been a large part of my soul for a while and that soul is in a rough spot right now in the football department. I came to UT when Colt McCoy was a sophomore and enjoyed several years of dominance. Top 5 rankings, awards, parties with titles like "Texas Just Won 10 Games Again So Let's Drink 10 Bottles of Whiskey" were commonplace. More recently, we've had parties like "Texas is Playing Football Again So Lets Drink 10 Bottles of Whiskey And Not Think About It", so yeah, things haven't been great.

Mack Brown came to Texas in 1998 and did mostly good things here. Of course, having Ricky Williams, Vince Young, and Colt McCoy over the course of a decade certainly helped. I won't spend anymore time recounting my feelings on Mack, OF WHICH THERE ARE PLENTY, so lets just say that unfortunately, in Mack's last few years the program had fallen into disarray. Whether it was all Mack's fault or not, it was time for a change.

When Charlie Strong came in, there was plenty of discussion about how well he would fit in here and if he could succeed and the honest answer at the time was that nobody knew what was going to happen. There were too many variables. I have a huge soft spot in my heart for Coach Strong, so I'll offer up my perspective here. Charlie Strong inherited one of the least prepared to win Power 5 conference teams in recent memory. Texas hadn't had an offensive lineman DRAFTED, not drafted highly, just drafted in general, in like 5 years, our starting QB at the time, David Ash (God rest his soul), had roughly 12 concussions in 18 career games and his career was over about 2 games into Charlie's tenure here. Recruiting and stadium attendance was down, other schools in our region were on the upswing, and morale in general was real real low. The three years Charlie was here was about as much of an emotional rollercoaster as a program can go through. We beat Oklahoma! We lost to Oklahoma. We got crushed by Notre Dame. WE BEAT NOTRE DAME IN OVERTIME FOR SWEET REVENGE! We ended that season 5-7 and lost to Kansas (KANSAS!). D'onta Foreman carried the team! I think we broke D'onta by giving him 700 carries in a season. A lot happened, OK?

At the conclusion of the 2016 season, after several years weeks of boosters undermining him drama, Charlie Strong was fired by the administration. The discussion around this decision was heated amongst fans, players, and media outlets. The argument for firing him just came down to on the field performance. We lost a lot, and sometimes we lost BY a lot. But the counter argument was just as strong. Charlie came into one of the worst situations a coach could get into and did his best with what he had. He certainly made mistakes, no doubt about that. But nobody can argue that the team we see coming into 2017 is more prepared to win than any team in recent UT history and we only have one person to thank for that. And equally as important to me is that Charlie Strong changed the lives of the young men who played for him. After Charlie took over the program, you stopped hearing reports of players getting into trouble, graduation rates went up, and in one emotional event at the end of his tenure, the entire team showed up to one of his press conferences to express support for him remaining on as the coach. At the end of the day, football is stupid and changing kids live for the better is more important, but fine, lets fire Charlie because the boosters were upset.

Now entering 2017, Texas has brought back one of our former graduate assistants, Tom Herman, to be the head coach. Like Charlie Strong, Tom comes from the Urban Meyer coaching tree, having worked with him at Ohio State for a few years as offensive coordinator. Most recently he was head coach at the University of Houston where he had a lot of success in his 2 year tenure. Bowl games, record-breaking offenses, and big wins have built up Herman's early career to the point he was THE coach everyone with an open spot wanted to hire this past off-season. Well, we got him. Suck it, LSU (you should have kept Les). I'm reserving judgment on Tom until we get into the season, right now I'm somewhere between "I did not want this to happen" and "well I guess we can score points so that's cool".

Ok, lets get into some actual football analysis. We should be pretty good! We have returning starters everywhere on the offense and defense, a proven offensive system, and a conference with a lot of question marks. I fully expect Shane Buechele to be the starting QB, but if Sam Ehlinger, highly touted freshman from Austin's own Westlake High School, ends up winning the job, I think we'll be fine either way.

Malik Jefferson is coming off of a disappointing sophomore season, but you could say that about 99% of the team and it wouldn't be wrong. He's moving to weakside linebacker and I'm told this will directly lead to him winning the Heisman. Na, he'll be good though.

The scouting report for our opponent is that they are turtles from the northeast. I doubt they travel well, and I think half of their players are also walk-ons for their club soccer team. This is a good first game for us to over scrutinize and project the entire season based off of the 3 quarters our starters are expected to play.

Texas football starts on Saturday, and as many problems as I have with our school's handling of Charlie, the various medical and financial issues that plague the sport in general, and my growing apathy towards basically everything as I get older and more "get off my lawn"-ish, I'm incredibly excited to see how this game, and the season, play out. Hook 'em.

Texas 45 - Maryland 17