Tempered Excitement

We here at Sunday Morning Quarterbacks are completely behind the idea of turning the Labor Day Weekend into a college football extravaganza. With the NFL willing to wait until the week after the holiday to begin its season, for optimal television ratings, the college game has to look at this weekend as an opportunity to showcase itself. Sure there is a bit of desperation inherent in the plan, a "come watch us as we are the only game in town" element to the weekend, but with just enough nice match-ups to choose from, the college football fan is excited. Just do not pay too much attention to some of the blowout scores scrolling by on your television. College football's dirty little secret of big-time programs fattening up on schools that do not have the talent to compete is easy to forget amid the hype for Virginia Tech-Alabama.
And please do not expect the finest football. That is the biggest problem with the use of this weekend as a showcase for the sport. The kids--and yes Mark May we are discussing very young men--are not quite ready to play. August camp is as much for conditioning and re-learning the playbook as it is for lessons in how to play the sport of football. With the inherent turnover each year in the sport, units have to take time to jell, newly appointed starters and backups need to prepare for greater responsibility, and freshmen have to stop rubbing stars out of their eyes and begin hitting people. To expect them to be ready to play their "A" game out of the gate is ridiculous.
And yet there was May, a Hall of Fame player himself, tearing into North Carolina State at halftime of the team's eventual loss to South Carolina Thursday night. Citing a crucial fumble, blocked punt and dropped pass in the USC end zone, May made it clear that as much as the Gamecocks defense deserved credit for the struggles of the Wolfpack offense, it really was the team's lack of preparedness that had done them in. And there was no excuse for that. Really? As I heard that I wondered how May's own Pitt teams fared in openers and needed to look no further than the Panthers' opening win in May's final season, 1980. Opening my author's copy of The USA Today Encyclopedia of College Football--available where good books are sold--I noticed that the Panthers began the season with a 14-6 win over Boston College. That seemed to be a low number of points for an offense featuring Dan Marino, Randy McMillan, Jimbo Covert, Russ Grimm and one Mark May. So I sped to the section of the book detailing the 1980 season and the opening sentence of the recap of the Pitt-BC game immediately caught my eye. "Still shedding early season kinks, foes combined for 16 TOs (turnovers)." I add emphasis now to the number 16. Marino threw five interceptions. Mike Mayock of the NFL Network was a key member of that Eagles secondary, so perhaps he can shed light on how ready Pitt was to begin that season. How those Panthers were so much more prepared than the Wolfpack were Thursday night. And did I mention that the game was played on September 13, which is a much more reasonable start date for football?
Of course the bigger game played Thursday night followed as Boise State knocked off an Oregon squad that then knocked off running back LaGarrette Blount from its two-deep for the rest of the season. While it is true that Boise could not afford a loss if it hopes to play in a BSC bowl game come January, the win did not guarantee them anything. The Ducks looked like a 7-5 or even 6-6 team Thursday night and if they struggle this year the benfit of beating them goes out the window. They have plenty of time to improve, of course, although losing Blount does not help even if they are deep at back. They lost this game at the line of scrimmage, a problem that is tough to fix. As for Boise, they looked good but not like world beaters the other night. And while Oregon was the big profile team on their schedule, they do have some tough opponents coming up with games at Fresno and at Bowling Green--who had an impressive win over Troy the other night--later this month and trips to Tulsa and Louisiana Tech in midseason. How crazy will Ruston, Louisiana be on a Friday night in early November? The Broncos do get Nevada at home late in the season, but needed 4 overtimes to beat the Wolfpack 69-67 two years ago on the blue field.
So, please, let's play the games. This will not be the first time I need to make that statement.