LOUISVILLE up ten to 
USC 2-0, the only league team with two · Illinois and Purdue the only 0-1
Oklahoma QB John Mateer, 
Northwestern S Adrian Maddox, 2 INT, 
UCLA QB Nico Iamaleava
Michigan State 56, Grambling State 7 · 618 yards, 18 TFL, one penalty‘Out Of The Poll’
Good morning. Two weeks ago Notre Dame was third in the country. This morning Notre Dame is not in the Top 25 at all. Miami got them for forty-two to six and then unranked Wisconsin got them for thirty-eight to ten, and the voters have finished with them. Coach.
It's over. That's my whole thing this week. It's over, they're not going to fix it in October, and everybody can stop waiting for the week they wake up.
It is September.
I'm aware what month it is.
You said the same sentence in twenty nineteen about a team that made the playoff.
Different team.
It was the same sentence.
Brady, go.
I'm going to be straight with everybody. Yes, I played there. Yes, I care about that program. And no, this isn't fine. Thirty-eight to ten at home to a Wisconsin team that isn't ranked, a week after the Miami thing. They have been physically handled two weeks in a row now.
And look, I've been in a building the week after. When I was there we lost games like that and I can tell you what Monday feels like. It's very quiet and everybody's polite and nothing is actually being said. And you either get through it or you don't, and you find that out in about ten days.
Ten days is a long time to wait to find out something everybody already knows.
Then say what you know.
They're not tough. I watched two games. They're not tough. That's it, that's the whole scouting report, I don't have a chart for it.
You don't have a chart for anything.
Never needed one.
Joel, do the football.
There's a specific thing happening here and it's structural. It's personnel, and it's leverage at the point of attack.
Both games, they're losing the interior of both lines. Miami did it, Wisconsin did it, and Wisconsin did it with less talent than Miami has, which is the part that should scare that building. When your interior gets displaced, the entire design of the offense stops mattering. Your run game is a coin flip, your protection clock shrinks, and then the quarterback is playing a completely different sport than the one the play was drawn for.
And Wisconsin didn't do anything exotic. They lined up in the same personnel group over and over and dared them to stop it. That's a very old-fashioned way to beat somebody and it worked twice in a row.
That I agree with. Every word of that I agree with.
The other thing is what falling out of the poll actually does to them. They play a schedule that was built when they were a top-five team. Every one of those opponents now gets to circle them, and none of those wins put them back where they were. That's an awful spot to be in and it's the middle of September.
They have Michigan State in two weeks.
Yeah, that'll fix it.
Say what you mean.
I said it.
The first in-season poll. Miami is number one, up five. Ohio State two, Oregon three, Georgia four, Indiana five, Texas six, Texas A and M seven, Oklahoma eight, LSU nine, BYU ten. Alabama eleven, Michigan twelve, USC thirteen. Louisville jumps ten spots to fourteen after beating Ole Miss thirty-nine to seventeen, and Ole Miss drops nine to eighteen. Notre Dame and SMU are out. Joel, one minute on the top.
Miami earned it and I don't have a quarrel with it. Two things travel from what they've done. The front is real and they've got a quarterback who is not going to give the game away. You win a lot of games with those two things.
Louisville's the one I'd sit up for. Going into Oxford and winning by twenty-two is a much harder thing to do than the number fourteen suggests, and if they'd been ranked eighth going in nobody would blink at them being in the top ten this morning.
Ten spots for one Saturday. That's not a poll, that's a group chat.
That's what a poll is, Urban. It's people voting.
I know what it is. I'm saying it out loud.
Brady, Ole Miss down nine.
Nine is a lot for losing one game to a good team. And I want to point something out, because I've been on both sides of it. The people voting watched about four minutes of that game. They watched a score go final and they moved a name. I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm saying it's September and nobody sat with that ballot very long.
Big Ten. Everybody's one and oh except Illinois and Purdue, who are oh and one. USC is two and oh, they played in Week 0.
Michigan is the one people are going to talk about and it's the right thing to talk about. Seventeen to nine over Western Michigan. They won, and they needed all sixty minutes to do it, and that might just be September. It might be something else. We'll know by the end of the month.
Seventeen points.
Seventeen points.
At home.
Moving. Players of the week.
National offensive player of the week, Oklahoma quarterback John Mateer. Twenty-eight of thirty-six, three hundred and twenty-three through the air, two passing touchdowns, and then twenty-two carries for two hundred and three yards and seven rushing touchdowns. That is nine total touchdowns in one football game. Brady, you played the position.
I did, and I want everybody to hear how insane that is. Seven rushing touchdowns is a career for some starters. Seven in an afternoon means his coaching staff made a decision at some point in the second quarter that they were just going to keep doing it, and then they kept doing it, and nobody stopped it.
The part that jumps at me is he took twenty-two carries. That's a running back's day. That's a lot of hits on the guy you can't replace. I'd have loved it at twenty-two and I'd have been sore until Thursday.
It's also a real Heisman event, because the board is going to move on the strength of one Saturday and one number. He's not in the top four this morning. He will be in somebody's top four next week.
The board, for the record, is Jeremiah Smith one, Julian Sayin two after six touchdowns, Dante Moore three, Arch Manning four.
A receiver's still leading it.
A receiver's still leading it and he's the best player in the country.
Then he should win it.
He should. Nobody's arguing with you.
Feels like it.
National defensive player of the week, and Big Ten defensive player of the week, Northwestern safety Adrian Maddox. Seven tackles, two interceptions, two pick sixes.
Two. In a game. From a safety.
The Big Ten offensive one is Nico Iamaleava at UCLA.
Anything on that?
No.
Alright.
Michigan State opened with fifty-six to seven over Grambling State. Six hundred and eighteen yards, nine point four a play, eighteen tackles for loss, one penalty in the entire game. Their opening quarter was seven-seven and their opponent did not record another first down after that first possession. Coach, first.
They beat Grambling State.
They did.
Then that's my answer.
You've got more.
I've got the same amount I had in August. Hand them a real football team and then we'll all know something. Six hundred yards. Against who?
You can only play who's on the schedule.
And I only have to believe what I've seen.
Joel.
I'll take the other side of that. There's stuff on that tape that holds up regardless of who they were playing.
Start with the first drive, because it's the interesting part of the whole afternoon. Grambling's whole offense is option football, and Michigan State handled the option. Three times they handled the actual read. What beat them was misdirection off it. Two big runs to the fullback going against the flow, one of them thirty yards for a score.
And that happens for a specific reason. They were loading the line of scrimmage, they were bringing extra bodies down to take away the pitch and the keep, and the cost of doing that is you have nobody standing at the second level. Misdirection is designed to attack exactly that. So they got the read right and the structure wrong, which for a first-year staff in a first game is about as understandable a mistake as there is.
And then?
And then they stopped doing it, and Grambling never got another first down. That's the part I'd write down. Not just that they fixed it, but that they fixed it inside of a quarter, in a first game, with a staff that has never done this together.
One more thing on them. Everybody spent August being told this was a four-two-five defense. They didn't play it. They played three down linemen, they played four, and there were snaps with five and two linebackers behind it, which is a front you basically do not see in this league anymore. Against an option team that's a completely defensible choice, and the point is it was ready in Week 1.
It's Grambling, Joel.
It is Grambling. I'm telling you what a staff had prepared, which is a separate question from who they had prepared it against.
Every one of these is a separate question with you.
Let me do the offense, because there's a quarterback thing here I actually like. Redshirt freshman, Leo Hannan, first career start, nineteen of twenty-three for two hundred and fifty and two touchdowns. Eighty-two percent. And he ran it six times for twenty-four and most of those are him keeping a drive alive on third down.
Now, the completion percentage is going to be lower against a team that can cover. Everybody knows that. But the thing you can't fake at any level is when a guy gets rid of it. He was on time. First career start, home crowd, and he was not late. I was late in my first start and I remember it.
The other number is one penalty. That's not opponent-dependent and I'd make more of it than anybody's going to. That's how a team practices.
Zero sacks allowed, and the center is a converted six-foot-seven tackle making his first career start at the position.
Which everybody, including me, said was going to be the problem. It wasn't the problem on Saturday. Ask me again when somebody puts a real nose tackle under him.
Somebody will.
The fourth quarter got some attention. Alessio Milivojevic, who lost the job in August, comes in with the game gone and goes four of five for a hundred yards and two touchdowns, and the Michigan State sideline came apart for him.
That's a good locker room. That's a good sign and I don't care what the score was. When the guy who got beat out has the whole bench running down the sideline for him, that tells you something you can't get from a stat sheet. I've been on teams where that doesn't happen.
It happens everywhere when you're up forty-nine.
It does not happen everywhere, Urban.
Alright.
Nobody from Michigan State won a national or a conference award this week.
No, and they shouldn't have. You get those for what you did it against. Their running back went for a hundred and forty-seven on sixteen carries and that gets you nothing in a week where a guy scored nine touchdowns.
Saturday, Michigan State hosts Eastern Michigan, who are one and one. The Eagles are quarterbacked by Noah Kim, a seventh-year graduate student on an NCAA waiver, and Noah Kim was Michigan State's starting quarterback in twenty twenty-three. Brady.
Seventh year. I want to start there. Most people who play this sport are done at twenty-two and thinking about the rest of their life, and this guy has been in a locker room for seven straight seasons at three different schools trying to hold onto the same job.
And twenty twenty-three at Michigan State was not a football season. Everybody knows what that was. He was a twenty-one-year-old kid handed a starting job in the middle of an institutional collapse, and he took it and played, and then he left and kept playing.
I'd ask people to be normal about it on Saturday.
He'll get booed. That's the deal. Everybody in that stadium paid.
Coach.
What. He's the quarterback for the other team. They boo the quarterback for the other team. Nobody's being cruel to him, it's a football game. If he throws for three hundred they'll stop.
There's a piece of this that has nothing to do with feelings at all. Nobody currently on the Michigan State staff was there in twenty twenty-three. Not one. So the opposing quarterback has more institutional memory of that building than the head coach does.
Doesn't help him block anybody.
No. It's just an odd fact.
Eastern Michigan, one and one. Chris Creighton's been the head coach there for thirteen seasons.
Creighton's good. That's a good coach. I'd say that anywhere.
That's the nicest thing you've said this morning.
He earned it. That job was unwinnable and he won at it.
And they've got Michigan kids all over that roster, which matters more on this particular Saturday than it does in October.
Anybody want to make a prediction?
No.
No.
They should win comfortably, and if they don't, then we've got a much more interesting show next week.
That's Big Ten Now. Saturday, all day, all over this network. Thanks for being with us.
