Week 3 in college football had your usual crazy plays, fans who needed to be consoled (here’s looking at you, Florida State and Florida backers), and teams that took out their frustrations on opponents, sending them back home with more than just bruised egos.
It’s Report Card time. The same thing goes as far as grading from last season: High marks will only be given for the spectacular, and failing grades have no chance of being reversed.
Here is the Week 3 analysis of how fans, teams, players, and coaches fared:
4 million reasons to lose
Kent State’s athletic department is obviously financially savvy — to the point where they can’t tell anyone with a brain that they care about what happens to their team on the football field.
How else can you explain what has happened in the first month of the season?
After next week’s game against Penn State, the Golden Flashes will have collected $4.05 million in guarantees from their three FBS opponents. Their Happy Valley trip will earn them a cool $1.6 million.
So far, the results from those checks have resulted in a 55-24 loss to Pittsburgh ($1.1 million payday) and a $1.35 million payment for a 71-0 loss to Tennessee in which the Golden Flashes gained a grand total of 112 yards and had just eight first downs — despite not turning the ball over once. The Volunteers, with 740 yards of offense, got in some extra practice before their game next week at Oklahoma.
Oh, Kent State also lost at home to FCS St. Francis (Pa.).
Can’t get mad at the consistency, but at least some of Kent’s MAC counterparts are making out like bandits, with Toledo collecting $1.2 million for pounding Mississippi State and last week’s Northern Illinois upset of Notre Dame earned them $1.4 million.
Make it rain: Expulsion
NCAA has a heart, at least for this week
While the NCAA can be archaic and heavy-handed in its approach to … well, everything—especially rule enforcement—the organization that screams about amateurism will, every once in a while, make the right move. Not only because it makes sense but because if it didn’t, the NCAA would be ridiculed and become more irrelevant than it has already become.
This week, the NCAA approved the use of a helmet this season for deaf and hard-of-hearing players who play for Gallaudet University, a school in Washington, D.C.
The helmet technology lets coaches call plays on a tablet from the sideline. The display screen placed inside the quarterback’s helmet allows the signal-caller to relay that information to their teammates.
‘It’s great that the NCAA has approved it for the season so we can work through these kinks,’ Gallaudet coach Chuck Goldstein said to The Associated Press. ‘We have time, and we’re excited about it — more excited than ever. And I’m just glad that we have these things, and we see what we need to improve.’
Let’s hope the NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel approves the helmets for permanent use moving forward, just like it approved coach-to-player communications for the FBS level in April.
Good looking out: A+
Don’t hit send
Going to make this one short and sweet. Fox televises college football, but its social media team forgot which teams are actually in the FBS.
Fox’s in-game graphics team had issues as well.
Google is free: F
They said it
Here’s what Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy, who is a man and 57 years old, had to say about how linebacker Obi Ezeigbo ended up in Stillwater after playing at Gannon University, a Division II school in Erie, Pennsylvania.
‘Do you want me to go back into coach talk, or do you want the truth? He was very inexpensive,’ Gundy said. ‘The number of players that we go after that were ready to play at this level, we can’t afford.’
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‘I’m only out here right now so I don’t get fined,’ Arizona State head coach Kenny Dillingham said in his on-field postgame interview after beating Texas State following a bizarre end-of-game sequence.
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Colorado State quarterback Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi, with this week’s Foot In Mouth Award, chiming in about in-state rival Colorado. The Rams lost 28-9, their seventh straight loss in the series, with Fowler-Nicolosi contributing two interceptions to help the losing cause.
‘They got a rude, rude awakening real quick. I think it goes to show the hype, the media train, all that only gets you so far. At the end of the day, you have to line up 11 guys against our 11 guys and we’ll find out who wants it more. We’ll see how far Instagram followers gets them,’ Fowler-Nicolosi said in the lead-up to the defeat.
The worst and best of the rest
It’s called the blind side for a reason:
Sandra Bullock blocking: F
Definition of butterfingers:
Fumble, Fumblelaya, Fumblerooski: A+
Yap, yap, yap, yap:
Giving fans and viewers the business: D-
Seat is hot in Tallahassee:
Picture = 1,000 words: Gap year needed
Pickin’ and sixin’:
Reservations for 6: A+
Quarterback on umpire violence:
Keep on truckin’: Straight to graduation
Feline outgains Air Force:
Cat scratch fever: A
Stats for you
11 – Turnovers for Temple in its three games this season.
17 – Age of Alabama wide receiver Ryan Williams, who had four catches for 78 yards and a touchdown in the Crimson Tide’s 42-10 win over Wisconsin.
66 – Points allowed by Purdue against Notre Dame, the most ever in its 137-year history of playing football.
69 – Combined ages of Arizona State head coach Kenny Dillingham (34) and Texas State’s G.J. Kinne (35). Dillingham’s team won the game 31-28.
72 – Age of North Carolina head coach Mack Brown, the oldest coach in the FBS.
$1.3 million – Payout Memphis earned for game against Florida State, which the Tigers won 20-12.
The Dog of the Week
(If you want your dog featured, don’t hesitate to send a pic here.)
Now to the game: Northwestern State at South Alabama
OK, you know where this is going. Because South Alabama needed to beat someone after losing its first two games of the year against opponents in the upper echelon of college football, the Jaguars scheduled Northwestern State of the FCS.
The 87-10 destruction that took about three hours is ridiculous on its face but doesn’t even begin to detail the shame in the actual playing of the game — and that the pups had to sit and watch makes this fiasco even worse. The two teams agreed to play an 8-minute fourth quarter, leading to some interesting interpretation of the rules regarding sportsbooks and payouts. After all, the Jaguars were five-touchdown favorites, so betting the over should have been a foregone conclusion.
Besides taking a miserable five-hour bus ride back to their Natchitoches, Louisiana, campus, it certainly could have been worse for the Demons.
South Alabama had six touchdowns called back — yes, six — because of penalties while still setting a Sun Belt Conference record for points in a game.