College highlights just getting started
Here comes October again, and as woolly college football Octobers go, this one looks woollier than most. Texas and Oklahoma are about to take their deeply deserved spotless records and crash into one another on Saturday morning in Dallas. If the Pacific Northwest is the best place going in an East-biased land that pays it insufficient attention, it’s about to get a heyday the Saturday after that once Oregon and Washington finish their byes and meet with cherished dislike.
Kentucky, having lifted itself bit by bit and grit by grit, goes off now to Georgia, that national-champion home of steep tests. And speaking of blaring tests, Maryland will take its first 5-0 record since 2001 to Ohio State, a place where 5-0 records go to tremble.
Texas hasn’t done any real trembling at all, an impressive turn of early-season business brimming with the win of the year coast-to-coast: the one at Alabama. “I think we’re gaining confidence in a variety of styles of which we’re playing,” third-year Coach Steve Sarkisian told reporters in Austin after a 40-14 win over unbeaten, good and No. 23 Kansas, with a 661-260 edge in yardage. “I think we’ve played some pretty good teams, that I think we’ll look back at the end of the year and realize, so far the teams that we’ve played are all gonna probably be bowl teams.”
Average win against Rice, Alabama (road), Wyoming, Baylor (road) and Kansas: 36-13. Average Oklahoma win against Arkansas State, SMU, Tulsa, Cincinnati (road) and Iowa State: 47-11. Score last year: Texas, 49-0. Let the booming begin.
Let the byes begin in the Pacific Northwest, probably the hottest hotbed of all given Oregon (5-0), Washington (5-0), Washington State (4-0) and Oregon State (4-1 after a big win over Utah), in the last season before the whole thing crumbles into a mangled stew of conference realignment.
The two with byes, the Ducks and Huskies, played a doozy last year in the first seasons for two excellent new coaches, Oregon’s Dan Lanning and Washington’s Kalen DeBoer, with the Huskies scoring 10 points in the last threeplus minutes to win 37-34. If every game has a life of its own, now comes a game with a boffo life.
“Every game has a life of its own,” Bo Nix, that 23-yearold quarterback of 53 college games at Auburn and Oregon, told reporters in Eugene. “Every game, you know, has to be treated like the Super Bowl. And you know, it’s a good thing for us that, you know, we can kind of reset with this off week and can go into it fresh and ready to go but I believe they’re in the same boat.”
(That boat is probably on absurdly pretty Lake Washington next to Husky Stadium.)
Nix continued: “It’s gonna be an all-out battle. It’s gonna be an all-out brawl, especially after last year and especially after both teams have started this year. I’m extremely excited about it. I know they are, too. But you know, for us, it’s the next thing. It’s the next 20 miles of our march.”
If there’s an opposite of teetering, it’s what Kentucky displayed on Saturday against Florida in a 33-14 manhandling history would find startling. History, that prude, says that for 31 consecutive games between 1987 and 2017, Florida beat Kentucky. It would say Florida leads Kentucky 53-21 in the series. Yet Kentucky has won four of the last six and three straight, emblematic of one of the great coaching jobs of the young century, that of 11th-year Coach Mark Stoops.