To endure an offseason as a college football fan is to live within an ecosystem of daily panic, nearly constant tumult and, on the plus side, the occasional heated debate over what to name a chicken. These are fraught times for the sport, when each day brings the possibility of a star player switching teams or a marquee program swapping leagues. Since Kirby Smart hoisted the national championship trophy nine months ago, we’ve all been desperate for something solid — or at least something marginally more stable than Auburn’s athletic department.
And so, at long last, we were given actual football, and Week 1 delivered a necessary injection of stability. It was a reminder that sometimes the things we think we know are actually true.
Georgia is still good. After an offseason in which the Dawgs sent enough players to the draft to qualify as a better source of NFL talent than the Jacksonville Jaguars, surely they would take a step back without Jordan Davis, Nakobe Dean & Co., right? Nope. Instead, Georgia welcomed Oregon to Atlanta with an absolutely soul-crushing demolition of the No. 11 team in the country. A year ago, Dan Lanning was coaching the Bulldogs’ defense. This time, as Oregon’s head coach, he was on the receiving end of a thrashing that must’ve felt entirely too familiar. And Stetson Bennett, it turns out, is still so much better than anyone seems to understand. The Bulldogs signal-caller threw for 368 yards and then (we assume) retired to a leather chair, donned a smoking jacket and cracked open a bottle of 1945 Château Mouton-Rothschild.
Bryce Young and the Crimson Tide are still good too. Alabama may have fallen in last year’s title game, but it didn’t fall far. Young, who finished last season with exactly zero rushing yards (Side note: Can we please stop counting sacks as rushing attempts?) showed off his wheels on Saturday against Utah State, scampering 63 yards for a touchdown as part of a six-TD day.
Young’s closest competition for this year’s…
Source : espn
