A College Football Preview for People Who Don't Watch College Football

Let me show you the ways of my people.

College football has returned, and if you’re a big fan of the sport like I am, it’s a thrill to have it back. Those long, languid, aimless days of summer are mercifully behind us, and they’ve given way once again to action-packed Saturdays of wall-to-wall gridiron action.

If you’re not a college football fan, though, it might all be a bit much to process.

Much of my early audience as an online writer comes from the college-football corners of the internet, and it can be easy for me to forget that many people haven’t spent decades marinating in this strange and silly sport. You might, in fact, find it quite bewildering to log on the the internet on a Saturday morning in mid-August and find people foaming at the mouth over a game between Georgia Tech and Florida State that’s being played in Dublin, Ireland.

I’d like to help with that.

I’d like to share with you—the non-college football fan—a few predictions, some things you can look forward to this season, and put them in terms you won’t need a PhD in SP+ to understand.

For the rest of, hopefully it’s a reminder of why we love this stupid sport so damned much.

Ohio State is going to dominate the field

I’m not talking about the actual game, mind you.

Yes, the Buckeyes stand to be a serious contender both for the Big Ten championship and a top playoff spot. I think they’ve got an opening this year—archrival Michigan has lost their head coach and starting quarterback, and there’s a window for OSU to reverse a painful three-game losing streak to That Team Up North.

That’s beside the point, though.

The first thing that makes college football special—and thus worth watching at all—is the tradition and pageantry it delivers. It looks, feels, smells and sounds different than professional football, and there’s nothing that gets my blood pumping quicker than the sound of a marching band’s drums in the distance.

The first college football game I ever attended was at Ohio Stadium, and the first sign that it wasn’t like the NFL games I’d attended to that point was The Best Damn Band In The Land.

Ohio State’s marching band is an army that would be the envy of many small countries, and to see them march across the field on a Saturday afternoon, spell out the state’s name in cursive, and hear the crowd roar as a sousaphone player struts out to “dot the I” is a spectacle worth beholding in person at least once in your life.

A star will make their presence known in Boulder, Colorado

One of the biggest storylines of the 2023 college football season was the arrival of “Coach Prime” —former NFL star and MLB player Deion Sanders—as head coach of the Colorado Buffaloes. Sanders made a big splash in his first head-coaching stop at Jackson State University, a historically-black college in the sport’s second level of competition, the Football Championship Subdivision, where he went 27-6 in three seasons.

He arrived in Boulder with great fanfare and no small amount of controversy, unapologetically gutting the (admittedly, lousy) team’s roster and stocking it with fresh recruits—including his very-talented son Shedeur Sanders as starting quarterback. The team jumped out to a 3-0 start, and had national sportswriters braying about a playoff berth.

(They then lost eight of their last nine games to finish the season at 4-8, a result that was not surprising to people who actually watched the team play.)

No, I’m not sold on Coach Prime’s approach, and though I expect some improvement in their fortunes in 2024, I don’t think they’ll come close to sniffing a playoff spot.

The real star in Boulder is Ralphie, a live buffalo mascot who charges across the field prior to Colorado home games.

This right here is a perfect representation of what differentiates college football—it’s great spectacle, it feels hyper-local to the school, and it absolutely would not be allowed if it wasn’t something that they’d already been doing for decades.

Saturday will belong to whoever’s the most prepared.

College football coaches are notorious workaholics, even by the standards of sports managers. They’re monomaniacal lunatics known for sleeping in their offices and working themselves to death, people who should never be asked a question about anything other than the following week’s game. Nick Saban, the greatest college football coach of all time, could barely let the confetti settle from a championship before hitting the recruiting trail again.

Again: not who I’m talking about.

While those coaches are grinding tape and charting X’s and O’s, ordinary fans—or, perhaps I should say extraordinary fans—are working just as hard to make gameday special.

A couple years ago, I had the pleasure of traveling to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to join my friend Zach Rau and the DVA Tailgating crew as they set up before sunrise to cook gallons of gumbo and etouffee on a patch of grass in the shadow of Tiger Stadium.

Saturday, From Scratch

You wouldn’t need to know or care a thing about Ole Miss or LSU—the two teams playing that day—to understand that something like this doesn’t just happen.

I probably won’t make it down south this year, but I’ll surely be cooking up a batch of Zach’s gumbo some Saturday this fall.

RECIPE: Chicken and Sausage Gumbo

(It can be done, you just need preparation, patience, and confidence.)

Someone’s going to make a leap in the Big Ten

The list of actual, viable top contenders in college football each year is usually pretty small and static. Even with the expansion of the College Football Playoff from four teams to twelve this year, there’s only a half-dozen or so teams that are expected to compete for a title in any given year.

Below that, there’s a second tier of teams that are often very good but can’t quite break through—until they do.

Prior to their recent title wins, Clemson (champions in 2016 and 2018), Georgia (2021 and 2022) and Michigan (2023) all spent more than a decade frustrated in this second tier, desperate to finally put it all together.

Is there anyone else poised to make that move this year?

We might get a preview in September, with one of the most intriguing matchups of the season. Alabama—long the 800-pound gorilla of the sport—is in transition following Saban’s retirement after 17 seasons. New head coach Kalen DeBoer, fresh off a playoff run at Washington, will lead the Tide as they make the rarest of journeys: an SEC team playing a true road game up north on September 14th when they visit the Wisconsin Badgers in Madison.

Wisconsin’s spent much of the 21st century in that often-good-never-great tier, largely overshadowed in the Big Ten by Ohio State and Michigan. They’re entering their second year under head coach Luke Fickell, who previously took dark horse Cincinnati (my alma mater) to a College Football Playoff berth in 2021. They were an uneven 7-6 last year, and may be several years away from real contention (if ever), but the Crimson Tide’s visit to Camp Randall is a big opportunity for them to make a statement.

Of course, even if they don’t make a leap, their fans will.

At the end of the third quarter in every home game, Wisconsin fans jump en masse to the 1992 House of Pain song “Jump Around”, something that’s wild to behold on television and gives me just a little bit of the vapors as an architect.

Someone’s going to fall into a trap

Much like that Wisconsin-Alabama matchup, there are certain games that are easy to flag as Big Games months before the season even starts.

One of the biggest games on the calendar comes on October 12th, when (current) #2 Ohio State visits (current) #3 Oregon in a game that would’ve been a Rose Bowl matchup in past years but is now—improbably—a Big Ten conference tilt.

The game is likely to have a significant impact on the playoff picture, potentially determining which team gets the Big Ten champion’s first-round bye—but it’s sure to be a great game no matter what happens.

Six days later, Oregon will play a Friday night game in West Lafayette, Indiana against Purdue. The Boilermakers went 4-8 last year, but they’ve long been known to swing a pillowcase full of doorknobs against unsuspecting titans in the past.

(Just ask Ohio State.)

This is a textbook “trap game”—the sort of seemingly-insignificant matchup that comes right after a high-emotion, high-importance game and can see an exhausted top team get blindsided.

Tread carefully, Ducks.

Old scores will be settled

Conference reshuffling in the past two decades has seen some of the sport’s oldest and most-passionate rivalries fall by the wayside, but others persist.

These are games that may or may not have an impact on the title chase, but matter deeply to fans; a whole year of trash-talking hangs in the balance. These are games with names like the Apple Cup, the Egg Bowl or the Backyard Brawl, and they’re played for trophies like Paul Bunyan’s Axe, the Iron Skillet and the Old Oaken Bucket.

I first understood the madness behind this sort of rivalry when my family moved to Columbus, Ohio in 1996. I toured my new high school the Friday before the Ohio State-Michigan game, and saw the school resource officer take a student out of orchestra class in handcuffs for wearing maize and blue.

(It was a joke, and well-received by its target, I should note. Also, Michigan won that game and ruined previously-undefeated OSU’s chance at a title that year, as was their style at the time.)

These are often not rational rivalries, and this is where I tell you how much I despite Miami University—the one in Ohio, not the one in Florida.

Miami and Cincinnati have played nearly every year since 1888, a rivalry older than any person on Earth. After all this, the all-time record in the Battle for the Victory Bell stands at 60-60-7, an unconscionable-to-me tie after Cincinnati’s sixteen-year winning streak in the game was broken last year (with me in horrified attendance).

I wasn’t mad when I took this picture, but I was LIVID about three hours later

The rivalry may actually be ending soon—at Miami’s behest—and so there are two chances left to settle up that record.

Cincinnati has played in a College Football Playoff. They are (last year notwithstanding) one of the winningest teams of the past 15 years. They are in the Big 12, an ostensible power conference.

And I will be furious if we don’t claim the Bell for good.

A mouse is going to roar

As noted above, the sport is moving to a 12-team playoff format this year. I personally do not care for this—I think it dilutes the regular season and pushes the sport spiritually closer to the NFL, something I do not want—but it does offer an opportunity for a new team to make themselves known.

Most of the dozen playoff spots will go to teams from the sport’s two megaconferences, the 18-team Big Ten and 16-team SEC, but spots are guaranteed to the top five conference champions in the sport. With only four widely-acknowledged “power” conferences, this means someone’s going to get their first crack ever at playing for a title. This could be Boise State, Appalachian State, Fresno State, Texas-San Antonio—or someone even more unexpected.

Heck, there’s even a path—albeit narrow—for the vile and contemptible Miami-Ohio to make the playoff, and I threw up in my mouth a little bit typing that.

Some of the best stories in sports are when the truly unexpected teams roar—Leicester City winning the Premier League, that sort of thing—and the idea that South Florida could take a swing at Georgia or Clemson in a winner-take-all game is compelling.

Aesthetic perfection will be achieved

College football is a beautiful sport.

The aesthetics of a fall Saturday are unparalleled; classic stadiums filled with passionate fans draped in their teams’ colors, marching bands and mascots and settings unlike anywhere else. The visuals stir me every time.

Ohio State’s scarlet and grey against Michigan’s maize and blue.

USC and UCLA both wearing their home colors when they play, an image of southern California at its Technicolor best.

Majesstic mountains looming in the background at BYU, Montana, Colorado or Utah.

Black and gold stripes of color-coordinated fans in the stands in Iowa, orange and white checkerboards of the same at Tennessee, or a pure white-out in Penn State’s Happy Valley at night.

The sun setting over the San Gabriel Mountains during a New Year’s Day game at the Rose Bowl.

These are the iconic images of the sport, but to me—sincerely—it’s just as scenic when played under a gunmetal-grey November sky, with tens of thousands gathered for a game that won’t have any impact on a playoff picture or trophy chase, people simply gathered in defiance of fall’s gathering clouds, cheering on their team to win today, because winning today would be enough.

That’s my sport, and it’s beautiful.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)