College football pick-six: Overreactions, premature speculations and WTFs

Overreaction of the week

Now that roughly 7 percent of the college football season is complete, let us address the proverbial woolly mammoth in the room: If Alabama does not possess the most talented quarterback in America in Tua Tagovailoa, then the discussion about it is at least going to drive the sports-chatter economy for the next week or so — at least until the NFL kicks off and we can temper it with unhinged arguments about Nick Foles. 

This is an unprecedented development for the Crimson Tide, who usually rely on quarterbacks who are straight character actors. And it is also frightening: It is, as I confessed in a late-night moment of weakness and perhaps amid a minor surfeit of bourbon, as if the Warriors added Kevin Durant, Boogie Cousins and then added on an army of meticulously trained grizzly bears.

Of course Tua was going to start over Jalen Hurts. If you ever actually thought otherwise, well, I have a perfectly serviceable Blake Bortles to sell you. And presuming Tua stays healthy — and presuming he keeps performing wild tricks like this one — I’m not sure if anyone in the country will manage to stay on a competitive level with Alabama, at least not before the SEC Championship game or perhaps the playoff.  In fact, Saban may be sitting on potentially one of the greatest teams of his career, which means this could be one of the greatest teams in college football history. And if that’s not an overreaction to end all overreactions, then how else do you explain Saban losing his mind postgame over an innocuous query about his quarterbacks?

The tendency was to chalk Saban’s latest rant up to the authoritarian-coaching bent that was the rage of college football’s offseason. But the truth is Saban only rants like this when he knows he’s sitting on a pile of gold. And Lordy, is he ever.

Distant playoff watch of the week

So here’s a contrarian thought from a dude who hasn’t always been known to play nice with Michigan: What if the truth is that the Wolverines are not, in fact, that bad? What if the truth is that Notre Dame is actually an elite college football team, and we’ve just become so accustomed to the Irish falling on their own overscheduled sword at some point during the season that we’ve forgotten what an elite Notre Dame team actually looks like?

Allow me to remind you that the Irish lost by one point early last season to a Georgia team that turned out to be pretty damned potent. Allow me to remind you that the Irish’s two other losses were to a pretty good Miami team (on the road) and a decent Stanford team (on the road). And allow me to remind you that Notre Dame’s toughest road games this year are likely against a young Virginia Tech team and an I-have-no-idea-what-it-is) USC team in the regular-season finale. Is this a playoff team? I have no idea, but it’s not a completely wild notion.

Also, let us remember this: The other players in the Big Ten East besides Michigan are Penn State (which nearly collapsed against Appalachian State and caused me heart murmurs ), Ohio State (drowning in dark cultural subtexts) and Michigan State (which fended off what-conference-are-they-in-again-I-forget Utah State Aggies by a touchdown on Saturday). All is not lost, Harbaugh-ites, though the chickens are certainly circling the barn.

Randall “Pink” Floyd dude of the week

There is only one elite quarterback in the country who literally has a clock running on his football career, and that is Oklahoma’s Kyler Murray, who has been drafted by the Oakland A’s and will therefore play a single season of football before shifting over to a sport where he’ll run only in straight lines. This is a shame because Murray appears to be pretty damned great at scrambling all over a football field, as he did in Oklahoma’s 63-14 shellacking of the Tweeting Kiffins on Saturday.

It is very possible that Murray will be at or near the top of the Heisman conversation all season, and it is very possible that we will find ourselves asking, This dude really gonna give up football?

In a way, though, it’d be pretty cool if he does win the Heisman and then drops the mic on this sport altogether.

WTF of the week

The awaited return of Texas as a national power has now been awaited for so long that it’s become a tired Twitter meme, and coach Tom Herman was merely fed the schadenfreude on Saturday when, after the Longhorns’ 34-29 loss to a Maryland team that arguably shouldn’t have even been playing football on Saturday, he declared it be no big deal.

Maybe Herman is actually three dimensions ahead of us all. Or maybe it’s time to start considering the possibility that the state of Texas is now a free-for-all, what with Jimbo Fisher sucking up cash and five-star recruits in College Station, and TCU holding steady, and Baylor perhaps on the rise again and Oklahoma seemingly going nowhere. Maybe in the modern era even the blue bloods in this sport will have to endure generational declines.

Off-topic recommendations of the week

A promising young Penn State running back named Ricky Slade scored a touchdown this week, which led me to this video of British glam rock band Slade’s original version of “Cum on Feel the Noize,” which led me to one of the great under-the-radar binge watches of all-time, "Life on Mars," the BBC program (not the inferior American remake) that melds detective fiction and science fiction, often to brilliant ends, amid one of the great glam-heavy soundtracks you’ll find anywhere.

Note to Penn State’s Blue Band: You may want to learn this one.

Your weekly shot of historical context

Nebraska’s season opener against Akron was reduced to nothing more than a psychedelic Faux Pelini conjuring due to weather issues. So the Huskers will open the Scott Frost epoch next weekend against Colorado, which was one of those great rivalries that those of us who are ancient enough to recall the Big Eight have fond memories of.

Back in 1982, the Buffaloes hired Bill McCartney, who immediately declared Nebraska his chief rival, which would be kind of like Vanderbilt calling out Alabama today. And yet it worked: The Buffs stood toe-to-toe with the Huskers throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even now that they’re in separate conferences, this game still feels like a retroactive measuring stick. And it’ll make for a far cooler first win for Frost if it actually happens.