College football came back the way it always does: loud, unfair, and completely impossible to look away from. The CFB Week 1 takeaways making the rounds this morning boil down to three things, and each one tells you something different about the sport we just got back.
Start with Michigan. The framing everywhere is that the Wolverines got a gift on the last snap, and the argument over whether they deserved it is already doing laps. I don't have the full breakdown of that final sequence in front of me yet, so I'm not going to pretend I can adjudicate it frame by frame. What I can say is that the sport has always done this. Week 1 hands you one game decided by a moment nobody can agree on, and that moment gets relitigated on couches from Ann Arbor to Anchorage until Saturday erases it. A win is a win in the standings. It is not a win in the argument.
Then there's LSU, and the show that came with it. The reporting out of Baton Rouge described Lane Kiffin's debut as a smashing success, celebrities in the building, controversy hanging over the whole thing, and a team that looked the part. Kiffin has been a lot of things in this sport. Boy-wonder hire, punchline, rebuilder, offensive savant. Now he's the guy holding the keys in the most demanding job in the SEC, and he opened it like a premiere. Whether that's a program or a production is a November question.
The part I actually smiled at: UMass won a football game. That program has spent most of its FBS existence as everybody's scheduled breather, the road check the big boys cash in September. Every one of those wins matters more to that locker room than the top ten does to anybody.
What comes next is immediate. Kiffin's old shop hosts Louisville on Sunday night, playing on without him, and that's its own quiet story. Wisconsin is at Notre Dame in the same window, Washington State goes to Washington in the afternoon, and SMU is at Florida State on Monday to close the opening act.
I'm watching Ole Miss most of all. A program that just lost its architect gets its first real answer this week.
from the almanac: kiffin was fired by usc on the tarmac at lax in 2013 after a loss at arizona state. thirteen years later he opens as the main attraction in baton rouge. this sport keeps no permanent records.