With the college football season underway, I paneled a respected group of national college football reporters for a short roundtable discussion. The panel:
- Bruce Feldman, Fox Sports and The Athletic
- Pat Forde, Yahoo Sports
- Stewart Mandel, The Athletic
- Paul Myerberg, USA Today
- Andy Staples, Sports Illustrated
The panel was asked to go as long or as short as they wanted with their answers.
Deitsch: What are the two biggest stories heading into the college football season and why?
Feldman: First, Ohio State: This was a legit playoff contender before all of the Urban Meyer-Zach Smith drama blew up last month. I think Ryan Day, the interim head coach, will handle the first three games well and then Meyer comes back. It’ll be interesting to see whether they can win a loaded Big Ten and also how Meyer handles the media spotlight given how bad the optics were earlier this week from that press conference.
Advertisement
Second, Chip Kelly is back in college football. He’s been one of the biggest innovators in football in the past quarter-century. Not just in regard to scheme but also with several aspects of how teams get ready for games from a sports performance perspective. The latter is something I’m not sure if most folks realize how big of an impact Kelly had on teams around the country. (Many changed their practice schedules where a Friday-style practice is now on Thursdays and a Thursday practice takes place the day before games for example.) Kelly dominated the Pac-12 in his four seasons at Oregon, going 46-7 and 33-3 in league play. His last three seasons in Eugene, his teams finished No. 3, No. 4 and No. 2 and came within a last-second field goal of winning the national title. Kelly takes over a mediocre UCLA program that had been backsliding under Jim Mora. He doesn’t have a ton to work with roster-wise, and the schedule is really rough. Just getting the Bruins to 6-6 this year likely would earn Kelly Pac-12 Coach of the Year honors. People all around the football world are fascinated on what Kelly will come up with next. Also intriguing on the Kelly front is that the Bruins’ arch-rival USC is looking pretty shaky and there’s a feeling from many Trojan power brokers that they’d rather have the guy UCLA has running its program instead of Clay Helton.
Forde: The two biggest stories NOW are Urban Meyer’s suspension and the ongoing investigation at Maryland. It’s been a mess of an off-season, as it often is in the turgid waters of college sports, but these are two of the biggest messes in a while. I thought Tim Layden’s essay on the perspective-warping importance of football shined a pretty clear light on both the Ohio State and Maryland situations. My thoughts on Meyer’s suspension are pretty cut-and-dried (Urban Meyer keeping Ohio State job shows winning is everything). He’s handled the whole thing terribly, and the school hasn’t done much better. Courtney Smith becomes just another piece of collateral damage as the Ohio State football machine rolls on. I’m not here for the ‘overcoming adversity’ trope that is likely to attach itself to these first three games of Ohio State’s season.
The Maryland situation is worse, of course. (Not that there needs to be a ranking of the two.) Institutional negligence killed a young man, with a dangerous meathead culture as a potential contributing factor. I’ll be shocked if D.J. Durkin returns as head coach. Eventually, these huge off-field stories will give way to on-field stories. When they do, the two that most interest me are the quarterback situations for three potential playoff teams (Alabama, Clemson and Georgia) and how the nation might react to another season where it looks like the SEC could put two teams in the playoff. My prediction: It would not go over well.
Mandel: The Urban Meyer story is not going anywhere, even once he returns to the sideline in Week 4. It may get drowned out at times once the games start next week but it will continue to hover over the season, especially if Ohio State emerges as a playoff contender. On the field, you’ve got several unique and compelling quarterback races that won’t likely be resolved immediately but Alabama’s is unprecedented. In one half of one game, Jalen Hurts went from being a presumed four-year starting quarterback to complete afterthought in the inevitable ascension of Tua Tagovailoa. I’m fascinated to watch how Nick Saban manages the situation.
Advertisement
Myerberg: Start off the field: There’s always Urban Meyer’s upcoming redemption tour, which will almost inevitably inspire breathless reporting in print and on TV describing how he’s grown and changed and learned from his mistakes in the lead up to Ohio State’s appearance in the College Football Playoff. As always, the fight to improve the student-athlete experience is a dominant football storyline — not just in the big themes and topics, like player safety and name and likeness, but in areas like transfer reform, where we’ve seen significant change this past offseason. And can I add that from a media perspective, it’ll be interesting to see how The Athletic’s coverage impacts how readers consume the sport and how other outlets respond. Not well, would be my guess.
Ohio State’s again a major on-field story. How will the Buckeyes fare with Meyer gone and when he returns? A wider theme for this season is the return of the “traditional” offense, for lack of a better word. You’ll find among the top preseason contenders a turn away from the spread-based schemes that have gripped college football this century and a shift back toward some degree of tradition — meaning a traditional, throw-first quarterback running a less frenetic offense. See how Alabama has turned back the clock offensively after pushing the envelope, relatively speaking, during Nick Saban’s eventful collaboration with Lane Kiffin.
Staples: One of the biggest stories is whether some of the nation’s premier programs will go young at quarterback. The assumption after the national title game was that Tua Tagovailoa would beat out Jalen Hurts for the starting job at Alabama. That still seems the most likely scenario, but when you step back and realize that a guy with a 26-2 record as a starter may lose his job, it’s pretty mindboggling. Meanwhile, Kelly Bryant went 12-2 as Clemson’s starter last season and may lose his job to a true freshman (Trevor Lawrence). At Georgia, Jake Fromm did this very same thing to Jacob Eason last year. Now Justin Fields will try to do it to Fromm. It feels like a long time ago that Charlie Ward waited until his redshirt junior season to start for Florida State.
The other big story is how athletic directors handle hiring in light of the situation at Maryland. Most already asked candidates about their team culture and their preferred motivational tactics, but I expect those questions will become more probing. ADs also will be digging to find out how coaches treated players at their old jobs. The dog-cussers — and those who condone dog-cussing — are probably going to have a hard time finding head-coaching jobs anymore.
Deitsch: What is the first question you would ask Urban Meyer if you had a one-on-one with him and why?
Feldman: It would’ve been why he didn’t mention her or even address the issue of domestic violence when he was asked specifically about her especially since he’s someone who has been very vocal about talking about having a zero tolerance for domestic abuse and Zach Smith had been arrested for that in 2009, there were subsequent allegations of it again and his ex-wife had filed a protection order against him. Meyer did have more to say it two days later issuing a statement, so I’ll say my first question would be this:
It’s come out in text exchanges that AD Gene Smith was very direct in how you should handle Big Ten media days with regards to Zach Smith (“I would be careful. Do not get too detailed.”) Why did you elaborate on things when fielding those questions rather than sticking to what Smith suggested?
Advertisement
Forde: First question for Urban Meyer would be: What is your message to women, including the mothers of recruits, who will have problems with your years-long “blind spot” for Zach Smith?
Mandel: I would ask him why, despite so many documented instances of misconduct by Zach Smith during his time working there, did Meyer believe Zach Smith to be more credible than Courtney Smith when it came to the 2009 and 2015 domestic violence allegations. Especially since his own wife, Shelley, was so fearful of Zach Smith she said she was “afraid he will do something dangerous” on the day Meyer finally fired him.
Myerberg: Why should we — media, the not-irrational section of the Ohio State fan base, your bosses, the student-athletes on your team — believe in what you say?
Staples: Why, when Gene Smith informed you in 2015 that Zach Smith was being investigated by police because his then-wife accused him of domestic abuse, did you not inform Gene Smith that Zach Smith had been arrested in a similar situation while working for you at Florida in 2009?
This is the reaction any normal human would have when presented with an eerily similar situation. (Even if Meyer didn’t believe Courtney Smith, he could have spun the 2009 incident as evidence in Zach Smith’s favor when presenting it to Gene Smith.) But Meyer hid this fact from Gene Smith. Why?
Deitsch: What will be the game of the year in the regular season (including conference championship) and why?
Feldman: Washington vs. Auburn: It’ll be a de facto Tigers home game since it’s in Atlanta about a 90-minute drive from campus. The Huskies, even though, players don’t want to say that they’re carrying the mantle for the entire Pac-12, they are. The conference is coming off a dreadful 1-8 performance in bowl games last year. Worse still, some of their top teams have been embarrassed in early out of conference games (most notably USC getting hammered by Alabama; San Diego State beating both Stanford and ASU last year.) A win by Washington won’t completely fix the narrative about the Pac-12 being the weakest of the Power 5 conferences, but it’ll go a long way towards boosting the league’s credibility. For Auburn, they have a potential No. 1 pick and Heisman contender in Jarrett Stidham. He’ll be facing one of the best secondaries in the country. If he lights up the Huskies, he’ll be making a big Heisman statement.
Forde: Game of the Year would be an Alabama-Georgia SEC championship game — a rematch of a pretty amazing 2017 national title game, and with one or both in the thick of the 2018 College Football Playoff race. But since that game is not a certainty, I’d also nominate Ohio State-Michigan. Buckeyes figure to be a lightning-rod program all year, and Jim Harbaugh really needs to beat Ohio State. Big Ten East title and playoff hopes could be on the line for one or both.
Advertisement
Mandel: I’ve got to say the Iron Bowl. It’s a pretty safe bet at this point that Alabama will go into that game with playoff hopes like it does every year, and I think Auburn could be even better than last year’s team that beat the Tide and went to the SEC championship game. I love when that game has huge stakes.
Myerberg: Until proven otherwise, it’s the hypothetical matchup between Alabama and Georgia in early December to decide the SEC championship. They played for the title in January. They both look pretty good. It’s the SEC. People will be fainting in the streets. But these things rarely go according to plan. So my game of the year (on-the-schedule edition) is Washington and Auburn in Week 1, since it’s so close I can smell it and because it’s impossible to say a game in October is going to live up to expectations — I mean, do you really think an LSU game after Oct. 15 is going to matter? Also, Washington is going to go into SEC country and make a statement.
Staples: Ohio State at Penn State on Sept. 29. The last two Big Ten champs have recruited better than anyone else in the league, and this annual clash feels like Alabama-LSU felt six or seven years ago.
(Top photo: Collegiate Images/Getty Images)
