This week's college football things: Some perjury and a new-era QB swap
College football is different now. But that doesn’t mean it’s worse.
Georgia and Alabama played on Saturday, a matchup which could’ve lost some of its luster because both teams are more or less guaranteed to make the expanded playoff. The last time they met in the regular season, back in 2020, Georgia would have made the SEC Championship Game and likely the playoff with a win. Instead they lost, and got knocked out. That wouldn’t have been the case with a 12-team postseason. So the stakes were lowered.
But guess what. It slapped anyway. Alabama took a 30-7 halftime lead, Georgia stormed back to go up 34-33, then 17-year old phenom Ryan Williams made one of the most exceptional football plays I’ve ever seen to win the game for Bama:
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Williams is 17, born in 2007. He’s a Zoomer, both in that he’s Gen Z and in that he zooms. He should be playing his senior year of high school right now, but reclassified to the class of 2024 because that guy should not be playing against high school kids. My player comp for Williams based on this The Night Fox, the expert thief who dances through a laser security defense system in Oceans 12, a movie that came out in Year 3 BRW (before Ryan Williams.)
So yeah, the sport is different now. The regular season hypothetically matters less, and the stars of the sport were born around the same time the song “Umbrella” by Rihanna was released.
But it’s still college football. Williams wore eyeblack with the words KILL EVERYBODY on it, seemingly a reference to The Program, a college football movie which came out 14 years before Williams was born. (I mean, I hope it’s a reference to that movie and not just a life mantra.) See? The kids get it. They understand what’s important about this sport—rivalry games and references to movies that came out before you were born.
College football is different now. But that doesn’t mean it’s worse.
UNLV hits the jackpot in QB Roulette
The biggest college sports story of last week was, naturally, about UNLV’s quarterback situation. After a 3-0 start put the Rebels in the mix for the new playoff spot reserved for teams from non-power conferences, QB Matthew Sluka announced he’d be leaving the team over unpaid NIL commitments.
This sucked. Players have left teams mid-season before—but this was a starting QB for an undefeated potential playoff team. Over money! Some people were mad that Sluka could abandon his team for cash. I’m mad that a talented player like Sluka was apparently lied to by scammers operating in college football’s semi-legal NIL free agent market. (I get the sense this is happening a lot, but few people have the clout or the willpower to leave their teams like Sluka did.)
Luckily for UNLV, Sluka was just one of two senior quarterbacks who transferred to UNLV after a record-setting career at an FCS school. Sluka went out and Hajj-Malik Williams—the all-time leading leading passer for the Campbell Camels. Williams transferred to UNLV several months ahead of Sluka, and looked doomed to finish his prodigious career riding the pine until the direct deposit failed to hit Sluka’s account.
The Rebels didn’t just win with Williams. They looked awesome. Williams threw for three touchdowns and ran for a fourth in a 59-14 beatdown of a quality Fresno State team.
(Don’t know why the highlights are in Spanish. Viva Las Vegas!)
It’s possible the Rebels are actually better off with Williams at QB rather than Sluka—he’s a better passer, which allows UNLV to get the ball to their best player, Ricky White III. (White’s NIL checks have apparently cleared.) At the end of a crap rainbow in Las Vegas, the Rebels found a pot of casino chips.
I’m not happy we’re losing stars mid-season over NIL disputes—but hey! We have our first potential superstar discovered due to an NIL dispute transfer! Again: Different doesn’t always mean worse. Here’s hoping Hajj leads UNLV to college football Mecca.
FSU commits perjury
Generally, I’d like there to be less lawyering in college football. Schools are suing conferences, conferences are suing each other, state legislatures keep passing laws changing what teams are allowed to do in their jurisdictions, and oh yeah, sometimes the Supreme Court tells the governing body of the sport “oh wow, what you guys are doing over there is super illegal” and everything has to change overnight. We’ve got as many plaintiffs as players, and sometimes you just want to watch ball. But sometimes, it pays off.
At this point, it is not particularly interesting to write about FSU losing football games. They are 1-4, and face a massive uphill battle to even reach bowl eligibility. But the Noles’ 42-16 loss to SMU on Saturday is still worth laughing about, because it is the legal opinion of Florida State University that they are better at football than SMU.
In a suit asking to be freed from their commitments to the ACC, FSU’s lawyers fired some strays at SMU’s football program in a seemingly needless rant, noting that the Mustangs had been “repeatedly passed over” by the Big 12 conference before the ACC invited them to join. “Rather than improve its football media profile, the ACC consciously chose to diminish it, along with undermining the ACC’s strength of schedule potential,” the suit argues.
I feel like Saturday’s result has to be a factor in the upcoming court hearings.
OBJECTION, your honor! Scoreboard!
Sustained!
If it please the court, I’d like to enter Exhibit DJ-U—this is just a Youtube video of SMU getting 3 rushers to the QB and the Noles throwing a pick-six that could’ve been intercepted by like three separate SMU players. The Noles’ lawyers made a legal claim that SMU was going to make their schedule too easy. That’s now perjury. Their schedule with SMU on it is absolutely tough enough.
(I don’t actually know how Court works, but I’ve watched a lot of SVU.)
There are a lot of things which separate college football from the rest of the sports world—but “filing a pouty lawsuit claiming a team sucks, then getting your ass kicked by the team you said sucks” is special. No other sport is doing it like this.
Handling Helene
College football is a hurricane sport. It is sport played in September and October with many of its biggest fanbases and programs centered in the Southeastern United States. Storms will affect this sport every year.
But this past week was particularly frightening. Hurricane Helene got inland and hurt some parts of the country that aren’t used to storms, especially in the Southern end of the Appalachians along the Tennessee-North Carolina border. That’s college football country.
East Tennessee was scheduled to play at The Citadel Saturday. The team set out in busses Friday, which was a bad idea. “We end up going over a bridge, and about 10 minutes later, the bridge collapsed,” ETSU coach Tre Lamb told The Athletic. The team scavenged pre-made sandwiches from a grocery store that had lost power and slept on the bus in a hotel parking lot on high ground after seeking high ground to escape the floodwaters. After a terrifying night, the team got the all-clear to drive to Charleston… and won 34-17. Lamb was on the verge of tears when interviewed after the game.
Gardner-Webb hosted Tennessee Tech in Boiling Springs, North Carolina with no power. Want highlights of TTU’s 52-21 victory? Too bad. There are none. There were no cameras and no broadcast of the game. The refs kept time on the field with a stopwatch. The game was scheduled to be played in the late afternoon, but, no lights, so they moved the kick up to 1 p.m. The training staff normally treats players indoors, but it would’ve been pretty dark in there, so they moved their equipment outdoors and worked on the field.
Saturday’s matchup between App State and Liberty was canceled and will not be rescheduled. There’s a football hook here: App was the best team Liberty was scheduled to play this year. With that game off, Liberty’s strength-of-schedule is bad enough that even a 12-0 season probably won’t be good enough to get them into the playoff.
But let’s take a break from football for a second.
I went to a lot of places last year on my 62-game college football roadtrip, but few hooked my heart as hard as Boone, North Carolina, home of the App State Mountaineers. I knew I’d be awestruck by the beauty of the place up in the Blue Ridge mountains at the western end of North Carolina, and yeah, I was: When I showed up there in mid-October, the mountain air was crisp and the leaves in the forest overlooking the football field were starting to turn. But what made Boone shine was the people who packed The Rock ready to party on a Tuesday night. The hill behind the end zone was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with rowdy students, some of whom burst into spontaneous square dances when “Mountain Music” came over the PA.
The world doesn’t look up at Boone, North Carolina often, so college football is a chance for them to show the world what they’re all about. They have deep pride in their team (which has had way more success than just a game against Michigan) and deep pride in their gorgeous corner of the world. They are Appalachian, and they are Mountaineers. This played on the big screen before the game:
Boone and the areas surrounding it are in deep trouble right now. The street that App State students flooded after they beat Texas A&M a couple years ago was now flooded with actual water. They weren’t ready to handle a hurricane up in the mountains—why would they be? The videos are devastating. As I post this, the US 321, the winding mountain highway I drove into Boone, is still closed around the Tennessee border, and 40 percent of the homes in Boone’s county are without power. App State professor Chris Moody wrote about the giant hole in his street in The Atlantic. “It looks like bombs have been dropped,” the editor of the local paper said on CNN. And Boone is in better shape than many places to the south and west, like Asheville. So much infrastructure has been wiped that recovery will likely take years.
I’d be stunned if they play a game in Boone again this year. There’s too much broken, and even at a place where football is so important, it’s not right now.
This is the point where normally there’s a little button urging you to give me money, but, well, Boone needs it more. College football is a sport of places, and this one needs help. App State has started an emergency relief fund, and I saw this Gofundme by an App State alum today.