Broken Coverage for Week 3: Big Noon Saturday, Big E, and Big Games
The Football Gods owed us a joyful, memorable season after the dismal slog that was 2020. So far, they’re delivering.
Week 3 encapsulated all that we love about this sport; why, despite the NFL having superior talent and execution, Saturdays rather than Sundays are our holy days.
College football at its best is an experience more than just an event. The first three, full weeks of the 2021 season have underscored that, particularly in contrast to the hollowness of last year.
The electricity in Louisville and Gainesville for hotly contested games emanated through the TV; the eardrum-shattering noise in Happy Valley rumbled through my car speakers as I listened on the radio.
It didn’t hurt that all three were excellent games, of course. But Louisville-UCF, Penn State-Auburn and Alabama-Florida transcended the weekly routine of exciting college football games to be reflective of something more significant.
Fans of the game have spent the better part of a decade lamenting the scant few marquee non-conference games were moving to soulless NFL stadiums. Penn State-Auburn and Louisville-UCF (as well as UCLA-LSU and Oregon-Ohio State, the latter of which was to be the return match of a home-and-home before COVID intervened) served as reminders of just how much better the game is before campus crowds.
Alabama-Florida, meanwhile, marked the first regular-season meeting between the programs in seven years, and the first at The Swamp in a decade. Conference realignment for the sake of TV rights and the SEC’s refusal to give up on one of its body-bag games have rendered the scheduling so unwieldy, two of the conference’s premier programs can somehow go multiple presidential terms without playing.
As a throwback to the last time Alabama went to Gainesville, I give you that time a reporter thought it would be clever to frame a question for Will Muschamp in Star Wars parlance.
Non-conference games belong on campuses. Conference series should be played more than two times a decade. Perhaps those reforms will come back around thanks to moments like this past weekend underscoring why they’re so vital to the appeal of college football.
FOX SUX
Since expanding its rights to include in the early 2010s to include national telecasts over FOX broadcast waves, the NewsCorp entity has made efforts to encroach on ESPN’s college football monopoly. The launch of Big Noon Kickoff in 2019 has been the most significant effort, opening gameday with a marquee matchup to serve as a tentpole for an entire slate of games.
It’s a decent enough idea from a consumer perspective, starting the day with a high-quality matchup like Oregon-Ohio State (now from the participant side, well…)
Oklahoma’s sentiment aside, there’s at least the foundation for an ESPN alternative in college football for the first time since the days of Vs.
ESPN’s coverage of the sport has grown increasingly toxic over the College Football Playoff era, and the network exerts undue influence over the game’s direction, so earnest competition from an entity with deep pockets and the outlets on which to air a deep catalog of games is welcomed — necessary, even!
But for every positive step FOX takes, the network does something to remind audiences it’s a distant (and tacky) No. 2.
First, FOX announced just weeks before the season it was sending COVID misinformation peddler Clay Travis around the South to games the network largely wasn’t covering. While expanding the Big Noon Saturday brand beyond its own footprint makes sense for growing its reach — and ESPN’s College Gameday covers games the Worldwide Leader isn’t telecasting — the audience for this does not exist.
Even before he became a political hack, Travis was proven to be repellant to college football fans as an on-air personality. His stint hosting the long-ago defunct FS1 attempt at Gameday competition, FOX Sports Live: Countdown to Kickoff was so lacking in viewership, it’s rare that I have ever spoken to anyone who even remembers its existence.
More frustrating than the presence of Ratings Poison Clay Travis (h/t the late, great Norm Macdonald) is the padding out of game lengths to cram in as much advertising as possible.
The result are excruciatingly long games when it’s unnecessary. A one-touchdown contest between Oregon and Ohio State going four hours is one thing; USC-Washington State pushing that mark in a 45-14 blowout is mind-numbing.
For context on how dragged out the rout was, the second halves of USC-WSU and an outstanding Villanova-Richmond game began within a few minutes of each other. By the time Villanova completed a rally from down two touchdowns in the final seven minutes to win, USC and Washington had not yet finished the third quarter.
The longtime NFL trope of going from PAT-commercial-kickoff-commercial is a staple of FOX college football broadcasts. But whereas NFL games are specifically tailored to fit in a TV window of about 3:15, college football isn’t. The result are these marathons with endless commercials for FOX Nation and whatever new celebrities-wearing-masks crap I’ll never watch airing on the network’s primetime lineup.
FOURTH-DOWN PHILOSOPHIES
I have noted in the previous installments of Broken Coverage that this format takes inspiration from Gregg Easterbrook’s old Page 2 Tuesday Morning QB. Although he was a punching bag of the early blogosphere generation — Drew Magary in particular used to excoriate Easterbrook — I found TMQ entertaining and oftentimes insightful.
TMQ repeated one trope I did admittedly find cringey, though: A vehement advocate of coaches going for fourth-down conversions, Easterbrook routinely cited moments in games in which a team punted or attempted a field goal with a lead and eventually lost, using some variation of the same sentence: “And that’s when I wrote in my notebook, ‘Game Over.’”
Watching the terrific Villanova-Richmond game, in which the visiting Spiders scored three unanswered touchdowns after trailing 13-0 (the first three touchdowns Villanova gave up all season), UR drove in the fourth quarter with a chance to put the game away.
On a fourth-and-short in the red zone and leading 24-13, Richmond coach Russ Huesman opted for a field goal to push the Spiders’ lead to two touchdowns. I chuckled to myself, thinking, Easterbrook would absolutely write ‘Game Over’ in his notebook here.
Then as Dan Smith led Villanova on three touchdown drives in less than seven minutes, my mouth fell agape.
This was the kind of anecdotal moment that fuels anti-special teams sentiment. But while I’m an advocate of coaches being more aggressive on fourth downs, and believe with the benefit of hindsight Richmond would have won had it gone for it in that situation, I also understand why the Spiders kicked the field goal.
Every special-teams situation has context that should be considered. In this case, Richmond’s defense had been playing lights-out. After more than 30 minutes of game time without yielding a point, let a lone a touchdown, nothing suggested Villanova was primed to reach the end zone twice to tie, let alone three times to win.
In that same vein, I am of the opinion moments when a special-teams call change the complexion of a game to benefit get far less attention. Not far from Villanova-Richmond, West Virginia scored a huge win over Virginia Tech after building a big lead and holding the Hokies off in the fourth quarter.
Every point matters in a one-possession game that comes down to a red-zone defensive stand, including the late-second quarter touchdown West Virginia scored as a result of its punting game. Facing fourth-and-one at their own 34-yard line, the Mountaineers took a delay-of-game rather than go for it.
Using the extra five yards of space, Tyler Sumpter blasted a 68-yard punt that was downed at the Virginia Tech 3-yard line. A three-and-out and forced Hokies punt later, West Virginia took possession 10 yards closer to the end zone from where it faced fourth down and quickly drove for a touchdown on a tired Virginia Tech defense.
The sequence captured exactly why the punt can be and is still a useful part of the game when used properly. Sumpter earned his time with the Black Diamond Trophy.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have expressed my distaste in past newsletters for the philosophy of Presbyterian first-year coach Kevin Kelley. The ideology, which Easterbrook was the first of many national voices to promote, takes the promising strategy of being more aggressive on fourth downs and pushes it to untenable extremes.
After generating some misplaced excitement in blowouts of an NAIA and NCCAA team, Presbyterian demonstrated why I’m skeptical of The Coach Who Never Punts.
BIG tEn WORLD CHAMP
A Big Ten representative has not won a national championship in seven years, but the conference can claim a World Champion as of this week.
Former Iowa Hawkeye Ettore Ewen defeated Bobby Lashley on Monday to become WWE Champion, and the first alum of a Big Ten football program to hold one of the promotion’s top belts.
Kirk Ferentz breaks down Big E’s big win:
Big E is the first former B1G player to hold one of WWE’s World titles, joining the below company:
ACC: Joe Anoa'i (Roman Reigns), Georgia Tech
Big East: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Miami
SEC: Bill Goldberg, Georgia
Sun Belt: Windham Rotunda (Bray Wyatt), Troy
Div. I Independent: Steve Williams (“Stone Cold” Steve Austin), North Texas
Div. II (Lonestar Conference): John “Bradshaw Layfield, Abilene Christian
Div. III (NEWMAC): John Cena, Springfield College