College football pick-six: Week 1

Cliched storyline of the week

Technically, the college football season has already begun, though perhaps you did not pay close attention because the highlight of last weekend’s limited schedule — nicknamed “Week Zero,” as if it were, in fact, the genesis of a zombie swine flu outbreak rather than the start of the most brilliantly condensed and ridiculously controversial regular season in sports — was the sheen of Wyoming’s uniforms during its beatdown of New Mexico State (as Anna Wintour once told me over cosmopolitans at Elaine’s, brown and yellow is the most underrated color scheme since pink and black), and Hawaii’s attempt to create a team of punting replicants.     

Does this count as a “start” to the season? Sure it does. In fact, pretty much every major columnist seized on the opportunity to imagine a College Football Playoff based entirely on the results of Week Zero, because this is what happens when your offseason is eight months long. But on Saturday, we will be besieged by games of both the conference and non-conference variety; of both the excellent and the why-is-this-happening type. It will be overwhelming. And it will be great. And it will be this column’s job to condense everything that happens into a few neatly compartmentalized riffs that will attempt to mainline all of this adrenaline from week to week.

Distant playoff watch of the week

So it’s on to Week 1, which means the zombies have been unleashed from the barn, and the losers of several key non-conference games — Notre Dame vs. Michigan, Auburn vs. Washington, Miami vs. LSU, Virginia Tech vs. Florida State, etc. — will temporarily be considered playoff refugees. But here is something to consider: Of the 13 teams that have entered the College Football Playoff with at least one loss during the first four years of its existence, eight of those teams lost a game in either September or October.

That’s the thing about this sport — teams often start the season looking like something completely different than what they become in December. So the primary lesson is: Freak out over football being back. And then chill.

Randall “Pink” Floyd dudes of the week

In honor of perhaps the coolest quarterback ever to emerge from the fictional annals of a rural Texas high school populated by freaks, stoners and moon-towers, let us celebrate the true freshman quarterbacks who will make their debuts this weekend and will either immediately jump to the top of every trendy Heisman list in America or immolate in a cloud of message-board-driven hype. Among them are: USC’s J.T. Daniels, an 18-year-old SoCal prodigy who could either be the next Carson Palmer or the next Todd Marinovich; Adrian Martinez, who will serve as Scott Frost’s proxy as he attempts to prove that Nebraska’s football program has not been permanently rendered into a vast flyover wasteland; and Zack Annexstad, a true freshman walk-on who will start for Minnesota because it’s either that or P.J. Fleck starts the gopher from "Caddyshack."

The week in weird

Since all we have to work with in terms of weirdness so far is based on the detritus of a long offseason and the observed girth of FCS kickers during Week Zero, let us revel for a moment in the whiteboard in Jim Harbaugh’s office: