College GameDay picked Week 2's headliners from a set in Austin, and the Texas vs Ohio State call came back unanimous. Not split, not hedged, not one contrarian raising a hand for the sake of television. Everybody on Texas.
That is the part worth sitting with. This is a panel built out of people who have spent their whole professional lives finding the angle nobody else took, and on the biggest game of the weekend they all reached for the same helmet.
Who did College GameDay pick for Texas vs Ohio State?
The full crew, with Nick Saban and Pat McAfee and Kirk Herbstreit on the desk and actor Glen Powell in the guest chair, went Longhorns. A guest picker in Austin choosing Texas is roughly as shocking as sunrise, and the crowd behavior in front of the set will tell you the reception. Saban going along with the room is the eyebrow-raiser. The man spent a quarter century being professionally unimpressed with everybody, and he signed off on the home side without a fight.
The show has been doing this since it first hit the road in November 1993, when it set up in South Bend for Notre Dame and Florida State, a No. 1 against a No. 2 that college football is still telling stories about. Thirty-plus years later the format has not really changed. Chairs, a crowd, four opinions, one sign that gets on TV for the wrong reasons. That durability is not an accident. It is the closest thing the sport has to a front porch.
What else happened on the GameDay set in Austin?
A Texas fan hit a field goal on the show's kick and walked off with $1.2 million. Viral immediately, and deservedly. There is no version of that clip that does not travel, because the entire premise of college football is a regular person in a crowd of a hundred thousand suddenly being asked to do the thing the scholarship guys do.
Also on set: Texas senator Ted Cruz appeared to push a college sports bill and got booed loudly enough that it became its own story. I will leave the politics where I found them and note only the sports truth underneath it. A hundred thousand people who cannot agree on a quarterback depth chart agreed on that in about a second and a half.
What comes next in Week 2
The day is bookended by two helmet games: Ohio State and Texas on one end, Oklahoma and Michigan on the other. Four programs with a combined trophy case that would require its own zip code, all on the same calendar square, in September. The old regional order is gone and this is what replaced it. I miss some of what got lost. I do not miss this slate.
Underneath the headliners, the schedule has plenty worth your remote. Tennessee plays at Georgia Tech at 7:00 p.m. ET at Bobby Dodd Stadium, which is a genuinely awkward road trip and the kind of building where a fast Yellow Jackets start changes the tenor of a season. Texas Tech at Oregon State kicks at 7:30 p.m. ET. LSU hosts Louisiana Tech at 7:30. UCLA has San Diego State at 7:15, and the Aztecs have made more than one Pac-12-flavored night uncomfortable over the years.
Colorado is home for its opener against Weber State, at 1-0 and meeting the Wildcats for the first time in program history. First-ever meetings are a small thing that I never get tired of. Two schools that have existed for more than a century, finally in the same stadium.
What I am watching next: whether the unanimous read on Texas holds up in the actual football, and whether the Sooners and Wolverines close the night with something that earns the bookend billing.