Give the Big Man the Ball

Sometimes, the 6'7, 360-pound guy is the hardest person to tackle on the field. (PLUS! The dawn of the Lunch era, celebrating the rise of a Division II superstar, and MORE!)

I thought I’d avoided the dreaded Fall Saturday Wedding scenario when one of my oldest, closest friends revealed that he was getting married on a Friday. This was one of the most-hyped college football weekends in years – Oregon-Penn State! Alabama-Georgia! — and I wasn’t going to miss a thing.

But alas… I missed one oof the greatest Friday nights in college football history! I should’ve known better than to value my lifelong friendship with my buddy over the storied Jefferson-Eppes Trophy game between Florida State and Virginia.

(Just kidding, you should always go to weddings instead of watching football on TV! And I say that as someone who really likes watching football on TV!)

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Run this every down

Alabama-Georgia is always going to be about Dudes.

This is a battle of five-star football factories, two teams that routinely bring in the best recruits in the country. Both schools have finished in the top 3 of the 247 Composite rankings every year since 2021. More than any other matchup in the sport, this rivalry is about Dudes, the most talented players in the sport crashing into each other like kaijus.

Alabama gets it. In the second quarter against Georgia, they threw the ball to their moving mountain, 6’7, 366-pound left tackle Kadyn Proctor. Proctor bounced off Georgia defenders and picked up 11 yards, bringing the Tide to the two-yard line.

Proctor wasn’t exactly a well-practiced runner. Instead of running down the clean lane his teammates blocked for him, he voluntarily sought out contact. But he actually looked pretty good with the ball in his hands—he has really quick feet, bouncing off contact, keeping his balance, and keeping his feet moving. He’s got really quick feet for a big man.

Proctor is An Athlete, capital A. His size is unmissable, but he’s also got fast feet and flexibility. He was rated as one of the best offensive line prospects in recent memory and earned the #2 spot on Bruce Feldman’s famous Freaks List, in part for his 32 inch vertical jump. Contrary to popular belief, all that athleticism is actually very useful for offensive linemen, but Alabama has made sure to let him use it in more obvious ways. Against Wisconsin, Proctor made a massive block 20 yards downfield on an Alabama flea flicker, burying a Wisconsin defensive back to clear the way for a 75-yard touchdown.

The pass to Proctor wasn’t the biggest play of the day — it wasn’t even a touchdown! — and that somehow makes me love it more. It didn’t feel like a gimmick, it didn’t feel like a trick. It was just a reminder that ultimately, this sport is about moving the ball downfield. Maybe the guy you’d be most scared to tackle is a good candidate for some carries.

Georgia, meanwhile, offered a near-opposite lesson in Big Guy Gets Ball. They bypassed a stable of elite running back prospects and gave the biggest carry of the game to fourth-stringer Cash Jones, a former walk-on who has earned reps on third downs for his blocking and receiving skills. On 4th-and-1, Jones was knocked backwards by former 5-star prospect LT Overton and lost three yards. (Jones finished the day with two carries for negative seven yards.)

There are excuses, of course. Kirby Smart explained that Jones got the carry because it was part of a two-play sequence which his coaching staff installed to pick up a first down out of a 3rd-and-3. They felt the advantage of getting up to the line and running a play quickly outweighed the advantage gained by subbing Jones out for a better back. (Or at least a bigger one, like Josh McCray, their 240-pounder who keeps scoring touchdowns in short yardage situations.) It’s the type of thing which makes you understand why so many Georgia fans are determined to have their vengeance on offensive coordinator Mike Bobo in this life or the next.

Alabama understood that the goal of football is to put your best athletes in a position to make plays, even if that means altering a player’s traditional role. Georgia was so committed to observing their team’s pre-determined roles that they ran a season-changing play for their undersized third-down back. They brought a Guy to a Dude Fight. NEVER bring a Guy to a Dude Fight.

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You know that our friends at Homefield Apparel appreciate Alabama’s decision to get the ball to the biggest guy on the field, because their Crimson Tide collection features multiple shirts with elephants toting the rock. If you thought tackling Kadyn Proctor was hard, try bringing down Big Al:

Rumble, Big Al, Rumble!

They also have a Punting Elephant. Homefield’s animal research department uncovered a fascinating detail: While football elephants use their hand-feet to carry the ball, basketball elephants are capable of a Trunk Dunk.

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All Gold Everything

We’re past the “plucky backup comes in and gets the job done” storyline with Trinidad Chambliss. After Chambliss looked electric in his third straight game as Ole Miss’ starting QB — this one a 24-19 win over 4th-ranked LSU — Chambliss feels less like a flash-in-the-pan feel-good story and more like a Heisman candidate.

Per ESPN, Chambliss is the first SEC player with 300 passing yards and 50 rushing yards in back-to-back-to-back games in over 30 years. He did that in his first three starts. Per Pro Football Focus, Chambliss is the second-best passer in the country on passes more than 20 yards downfield, with 11 completions on 15 attempts.

And in case you haven’t heard by now: He’s a transfer from Division II. CBS put up a graphic showing that there were more fans in the stands on Saturday than at every game Chambliss played over the past two seasons at Ferris State, combined. (Not to be confused with Grand Rapids. Where Chambliss is from!)

Chambliss had no FBS offers out of high school, although this article does note that he was offered by Notre Dame……… College, a Division II school in Ohio. He went to Ferris State in Big Rapids, Michigan (not to be confused with Chambliss’ hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan) and led the Bulldogs to last year’s national championship, their third national title in four seasons.

It’s relatively common for players from the FCS (the second tier of Division I football) to transfer up to top-tier programs and compete. But Division II is an entire tier below the FCS, and even the best D2 players are generally overlooked. The Athletic produced a list of the top 25 transfers moving up from the FCS, Division II, and Division III this offseason… and it included 24 FCS players, and one Division II player. According to this seemingly conclusive list, Chambliss was the only quarterback to transfer from Division II to the FBS this season. The last QB I can think of to make an impact in the FBS straight from D2 was Austin Reed, a Division II champion at West Florida who went to Western Kentucky in 2022 and led the nation in passing yardage.

But Chambliss didn’t just move up to the FBS — he went to the SEC! The conference that prides itself on being on its own level! He did this to LSU, one of the best defenses in the country! The Tigers had already faced two 5-star QB prospects this year in Cade Klubnik and DJ Lagway, and both of them looked like they were in hell against LSU. It took the zero-star guy from Division II to show up and dice them up.

College football can be disheartening if you’re a fan of the underdog story. More often than not, the scouts are right, and the team with the higher-rated recruits wins. (Read above for the story of a 5-star offensive tackle being better at running the ball than a no-star running back!) But maybe Chambliss shining will get some more scouts out to Big Rapids to see what sort of talent they’re hiding down there in Division II.

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Lunchtime in Lafayette

Things were looking bleak for the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns. They lost their starting QB, Walker Howard, in a season opening loss to Rice. (Incidentally, Howard was the guy Chambliss essentially replaced as Ole Miss’ backup QB, but I digress.) Their backup, Daniel Beale, was ineffective, throwing one touchdown and six interceptions. Saturday night, they were losing by 17 points in the third quarter to Marshall after Beale threw a pick-six … and then they turned to their third-stringer, Lunch Winfield.

Lunch accounted for five touchdowns (three running, two passing) and 129 rushing yards in about a half of playing time, powering the Cajuns to a 54-51 win over Marshall:

Lunch is a nickname — his birth certificate says D’Wanye’, and he says he received the nickname for eating his grandfather’s entire lunch when he was three months old. It seems like an implausible story (how could a baby eat an entire adult human’s meal without choking to death?) but look, if Lunch says he ate his grandpa’s food, I’m not going to disagree with him.

I love Cajun food, but this has to be the best lunch in Lafayette since the all-you-can-eat Popeyes closed.

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• I’m not a big Hot Take guy, but man… Penn State really can’t Win The Big Game. They lost 30-24 to Oregon in an overtime thriller, rallying back from 14 points down in the fourth quarter just for Drew Allar to throw a pick on the first play of double OT.

• Arkansas lost so badly to Notre Dame they had to fire their coach. After giving up 42 first-half points in a 56-13 loss, they fired Sam Pittman. Their new interim coach? Bobby Petrino, the same guy Arkansas fired in 2012 after a motorcycle crash revealed he was having an affair with a staffer. Time is a flat motorcycle wheel.

• (The football uprights are like an instrument, and great musicians can get different sounds depending on how they play it. Wake Forest’s kicker unlocked every possible note from the posts on a 27-yarder against Georgia Tech:

  The Deacs lost 30-29 in overtime, so the miss was critical. You’d think I’d post the video of Georgia Tech’s dramatic interception on a do-or-die two-point conversion, but nope, in this newsletter, the funny goalpost noises are more important.

• Indiana decided to close out their game against Iowa with the “run backwards through the end zone for a safety” play, and although I normally support creative football tomfoolery… this seems unnecessarily dangerous!

  

  @houseofhighlightsIndiana with the intentional safety to end the game 😂🔥 #cfb #collegefootball #football #indianafootball #funny

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  Like, the Iowa player could’ve caught Mendoza before the clock ran out, which would’ve been a turnover on downs and given Iowa a shot at the end zone. Or he could’ve fumbled. I guess Indiana wasn’t really ready for funky late-game scenarios after winning all their first few games by like 75 points each.

• New Mexico and New Mexico State decided to introduce a new trophy for their annual matchup—naturally, a giant chile roaster, which looked to be full of New Mexico’s famous red and green chiles:
  

  Credit goes to the students at the two schools, who actually came up with the idea for the trophy and paid for it.

• Finally, some good news: Liberty sucks ass this year. They’re now 1-4 with four straight double-digit losses after a 21-7 loss to Old Dominion. The game wasn’t even that close—they were outgained 490-207.