USC the only Big Ten team to play in Week 0 — and USC won
Jeremiah Smith leads the board · Dante Moore, Arch Manning, Julian Sayin behind him
Michigan State opens vs Grambling State — Nick Mansour's first game, calls both sides‘Forty-Two to Six’
Good morning, Big Ten Now. One football game of consequence was played last weekend and the sport has done nothing but talk about it since. Miami forty-two, Notre Dame six, and the Hurricanes never trailed. Coach, you go first.
They got whipped. That's the whole thing. I've watched it twice and I don't have a second point.
You've got more than that.
I don't. They didn't tackle in the first quarter and they didn't tackle in the fourth quarter, and everybody's spent a week looking for a nicer way to say it. There isn't one.
That's a mood, Urban, that's not a breakdown.
It's a football team, Brady. That's what it's for.
Then let me do it properly, because I'm not going to sit here and call it a fluke. It wasn't a fluke. But Miami's the sixth-ranked team in the country, it's a neutral site, it's the first weekend, nobody's played anybody, and you want to hand me a verdict on a hundred and ten kids off that? And before somebody says it, that is not an excuse.
They got beat up front on both sides. That's the part I'd carry. Once you're the one getting moved, none of the rest of the plan matters. It just doesn't. I have been the quarterback in that game. The sideline knows before the crowd does. That's a staff issue and I want to be clear it is not on those kids.
That was three excuses.
That was zero.
Joel.
Two piles, and people mix them up every September. There are things you learn in a blowout that hold all the way to November, and there are things that are gone by the third week of the month.
What holds is physical. Miami's front is real. That group is going to do that to people in October, that's not a kickoff-weekend mirage. And Notre Dame not being able to move anybody, that holds too, because interior offensive line play is the slowest thing in football to repair. You don't fix a guard in nine days. You don't fix him in nine weeks. You fix him in about a year.
What doesn't hold is everything that got clipped. Sideline shots, body language, the they-quit stuff. Throw all of it away. Teams look like that when they're down thirty-six because they're down thirty-six.
So if you're asking me what I'm actually carrying forward on that team, it's one item. They can't block anybody yet. That's the list. And that's a worse problem than the effort argument everybody's having, because the effort stuff comes back on Tuesday. A guard doesn't come back on Tuesday.
You've been in a lot of locker rooms, Joel?
A few. I've also watched you win eleven games with a team that looked exactly like that in September, so I'd be a little careful with that one.
Eleven. You remembered the number.
Put the Top 25 up, because people should see it with their own eyes. One Ohio State. Two Oregon. Three Notre Dame. That is the current, official ranking, six days after Notre Dame lost by thirty-six. Joel, explain the mechanics.
It's the calendar, that's all it is. Nobody votes off kickoff weekend. Week 0 is a handful of games, most of the country hasn't played, so the preseason ballot just sits there until the first in-season vote. It's procedural. It's corrected Sunday night and nobody mentions it again.
Wonderful. Third in America. Frame it.
Nobody in that building thinks they're third. That's what's getting missed while everybody makes jokes about a graphic. The number means nothing to them. There is a very specific sound in a football building on the Monday after something like that, and I have stood in that hallway on that Monday, and it does not sound like a team that thinks it's the third best in —
Then here's the question I want. What does the number do to how they get treated for the next month? Joel.
That's the real thing, and it's a bad month. The poll says three and everybody's gut says something a lot lower, and that gap is where their September lives. They're favored by a pile of points in every game between now and October, and now every one of those is a referendum. Beat somebody by twenty-eight and people shrug. Beat them by ten and it's a crisis. None of that is football and all of it lands on them anyway.
They took four months of coronation in July. They can take September.
Nobody asked you for anything.
You've asked twice already this morning.
Take a break. When we come back, the league we're actually paid to talk about.
Big Ten. One team in this league played a football game in Week 0. That was USC, and USC won it. That is our entire body of work. Everybody else opens Saturday. Joel, top of the board.
Ohio State's one and there's nothing sentimental about it. Sayin's in year two of being the guy, and Jeremiah Smith is the best non-quarterback in the sport, and what that combination buys you is permission to be boring. They don't have to be clever. They line up, they run the play, and the play is better than yours.
Oregon at two is the other version of that. Moore's the most complete quarterback in the league and the roster's deep the way the top programs are deep. Indiana at five, people are still squinting, and I'd stop squinting. Cignetti isn't a story anymore.
The part I'd actually point people at is fourteen through twenty-three. Michigan, Penn State in the first year of a new voice, Iowa doing the Iowa thing, Washington. That's the group that decides this league, because all of them are going to take a game off somebody at the top, and not one of us can tell you which one or when.
There's two teams in this league. Everybody else is selling tickets.
They've won more conference games in two years than —
I've read it. Ask me in November, the first time they walk into a night game where the whole building already expects them to win it. Nobody knows what that does to you until it's doing it.
Brady, Michigan's fourteenth.
Fourteen is the voters admitting they have no idea, and I don't blame them for it. The range on that team is enormous. If the quarterback takes the jump that year-two guys take, and physically he's got everything, they're a top-eight team and everybody in this league has a problem. If he's still figuring out what he's looking at, they're an eight-win team with a good defense. There's no middle with a young quarterback. It's a cliff. I lived on both sides of that cliff at Notre Dame inside about fourteen months, so I'm not guessing at —
USC at fifteen, and they're the only team in the league with a win on the board.
And they'll be ranked higher Sunday than the football justifies. That's the small gift of playing in Week 0. You win, everybody watches it, and there's nothing to compare it to.
Indiana was in Urban's ticket-selling group two years ago, by the way.
With a fifty-nine-year-old head coach who'd won everywhere he'd ever been. Thank you. That's not a fairy tale, that's a resume finally getting the job it earned. I love that story. That story agrees with me.
Heisman board, top four. Jeremiah Smith, a wide receiver, then Dante Moore, Arch Manning, Julian Sayin. Brady, does a receiver actually win it?
He should. He won't. And I don't love how cynical that sounds.
Voters don't pick the best player, they pick whoever's season fits in one hand the first week of December. A quarterback hands you a package. Yards, touchdowns, completion percentage, a team record with his name attached. A receiver hands you eleven catches in a game that was decided at halftime and a highlight everybody's already seen forty times, and somehow that counts for less. I've been on the wrong end of that ballot, so take that for whatever it's worth.
Best player in the country. Won't win it. Both of those, no problem.
They'll split their own ballot too, that's the other thing. And Manning's the one I'd watch, and not because of the tape. Texas is seventh. If Texas is third by the middle of October, he's the heavy favorite whether or not he's the best of the four. That's how it's worked every year I've covered it and I don't expect this one to be different.
While we're handing out hardware, the Week 0 national players of the week. Defense, Virginia linebacker Kam Robinson, two forced fumbles and two recoveries. Offense, TCU quarterback Jaden Craig, twenty-one of twenty-seven, three hundred and ten yards, four touchdowns, fifty on the ground, and he's a Harvard transfer, which I'm told will come up another nine hundred times this season.
Four turnovers created by one player. I don't care what the level is, that does not happen.
Two games with numbers involved. Twenty-fourth-ranked Louisville goes to Oxford to play ninth-ranked Ole Miss, and twenty-second-ranked SMU goes to Tallahassee. Sixty seconds each. Coach.
Ninety degrees at kickoff, first week of the year, and the road team has to be right for four quarters. They won't be. That stadium's been doing that to people my entire career.
It's a bad matchup for Louisville before you even get to the crowd. SMU at Florida State is the one I've circled, though. SMU's the ranked team and nobody in that building is going to behave like it. Florida State has had an entire offseason of being told what they are. I have no idea what happens. I like that I have no idea.
Give me Florida State. They're not the better team, I want to be clear. But Week 1, at home, in front of people who need it, that's the profile of the game that wrecks somebody's ballot every single year.
Last block, and my inbox says it's the one people actually want. Michigan State hosts Grambling State on Saturday. First game for Nick Mansour, twenty-eight years old, never played the sport at any level, calling the offense and the defense himself, with a redshirt freshman quarterback making his first career start. On the schedule it's nothing. Coach.
I don't have anything for you, Renee.
We're sitting here debating whether Michigan State can look organized against Grambling. That tells you exactly where that program is. That's the segment. There's nothing under it.
They'll be favored by a considerable number.
They'd better be. They win, somebody runs a graphic about the youngest head coach in America, and that fanbase spends a week acting like something happened. Nothing happened. I've beaten a hundred teams like that and I never learned one thing from any of them.
There's a football reason to watch part of it, and it's got nothing to do with the score.
There's no reason to watch it.
Let me do it. You learn nothing about how good they are. Nothing. The score tells you zero, because there's no Big Ten front lined up across from them, so don't watch the scoreboard.
But there's a category of thing that's visible in any game against anybody, and it's the procedural stuff. Do they get lined up. Do they substitute cleanly. When they want to play fast, do all eleven go fast, or is the H-back looking at the sideline. How many timeouts get burned for nothing. Who's on the field on third down, because that's what a staff actually believes about its own roster regardless of what the depth chart says. And the quarterback, I don't care about his numbers, I care whether he's late. Late shows up against anybody.
And the reason I care about it specifically in this game is that he's calling both sides of the football. There's no film on that. There cannot be film on it. He hasn't done it. Saturday is the first data anybody gets on the one genuinely unknown thing about this hire.
Don't build them a test they can pass.
I'm not saying it's impressive if they clear it.
You're saying there's a bar. There's no bar. It's Grambling.
I'm saying it's information if they don't clear it. That's a different sentence.
It isn't.
One more thing, and this is the actual football, and nobody's said it all week because nobody's watched Grambling play. They run the option and they're good at it. It's not a package, it's the program. They'll hand it off forty-something times and ask you to be right on every single snap. Gap discipline, run fits, tackling in space, everybody in his gap and nobody peeking. That is the hardest afternoon you can give a defense that has never played a snap together. So there's a version of Saturday where they genuinely look bad, and it wouldn't be a freak occurrence.
That part I'll sign, and it goes with the thing I've been sitting on since Sunday. They come to South Bend in two weeks. And nobody at this desk knows what Notre Dame is in two weeks. Is that a wounded team that's going to be gentle about it? Or is it a team that spends fourteen days being told it quit and then takes it out on the first body through the door?
The second one.
Usually the second one. And I know how I sound, I know where I went to school, that's still not a good draw for a twenty-eight-year-old's third game.
Ten minutes ago you told me that loss didn't tell us anything about them.
It doesn't tell you how good they are. It tells you exactly how they're going to feel.
Alright.
He signed a contract. Nobody made him take the job.
Thirty seconds. One thing each you'll actually be watching this weekend, and not the Michigan State thing. Joel.
Offensive line play. Week 1, everybody's got a plan and half of them can't block, and that's usually the difference between the teams we're still talking about in November and the ones we're apologizing for.
Young quarterbacks. Six or seven of them starting for the first time across this sport this weekend, and by Sunday night three have fanbases in love with them and three have fanbases looking at the backup. I remember exactly how fast that turns.
Tackling. Nobody's tackled anybody since January and about four ranked teams are going to find that out on television. One of them already did.
That's Big Ten Now. The league opens for real on Saturday and we'll have all of it. Thanks for being with us.
