It’s OK now to get excited about Memphis football season
This most unusual Memphis football preseason began with chaos. With entire conferences choosing not to play college football this year. With questions.
“Are we going to play?” the players would ask first-year Memphis coach Ryan Silverfield, and he didn't have a good answer. Nobody did a month ago. All he could really guarantee was that day and that practice. That's how precarious this grand football experiment in the age of COVID-19 seemed back then. It still does, really.
But now, there's a schedule out. There are COVID-19 protocols that are working. There are schools that played a college football game Saturday. There are less than seven days until the Tigers will do the same. There are fans wondering if they'll get to be there and there are fans disappointed that more can't be there.
There is a feeling that this most unusual of preseasons is about to become the most unusual of seasons.
“It looks like, smells like and tastes like football is coming,” Silverfield declared earlier this week.
It's OK to get excited about the 2020 college football season.
We've reached the point where it's kosher to actually start talking about whether the Memphis football team can pass its first football test of the 2020 season against Arkansas State on Saturday instead of how many positive COVID-19 tests it had recently.
Even with a pandemic still ongoing, with entire high school football teams from Alabama to Georgia to Indiana to Alaska to Utah to Missouri to right here in Collierville forced to quarantine, with racial injustice protests still unresolved, with this no-good, wretched year refusing to be anything but no-good and wretched, don't feel bad talking about this football season like it's a series of games with a winner and loser and not a series of nasal swabs with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line.
This season is happening. Or at least it's starting. Might as well embrace it. Because this Memphis football team could be special.
It could catapult quarterback Brady White, running back Kenny Gainwell, wide receiver Damonte Coxie and place kicker Riley Patterson to the top of the Memphis record books and onto all-america teams. It could feature a defense that's better than ever under the school's most accomplished defensive coordinator (Mike Macintyre) in recent memory.
It could end with another American Athletic Conference championship and maybe, if we're lucky, another marquee bowl game. It could be the sort of first season that propels Silverfield to the sort of memorable tenure his two predecessors enjoyed with the Tigers.
It could bring the city together under one cause for the first time since this pandemic changed our lives. It could be a welcome dose of joy if these Tigers are as good as they could be. It could provide everyone around here with some much needed hope if these Tigers pull it all off safely.
That's been the most encouraging part of watching the past few weeks unfold. The plan Memphis and the AAC put in place to combat the spread of COVID-19, for the most part, has been successful. The worst fears of the Big Ten and the Pac-12 have not been realized.
Unlike high school football, there seems to be a responsible way to make this work. Memphis athletic director Laird Veatch said earlier this week that the football team's most recent batch of COVID-19 tests produced zero positives. It's why, even as the end to this season remains somewhat shrouded in mystery, the start to this season is now within our reach.
And the Tigers stand to benefit as much as any team in the country. They're going to play in prime time on ESPN against Arkansas State. Their second game, less than two weeks later on a Friday against Houston to open AAC play, is the only game on the college football schedule that night.
By then, if Memphis doesn't lose to Arkansas State, there's a decent chance it will be ranked among the top 15 teams in the country.
Using the current national polls but eliminating the schools from leagues that aren't playing this fall, Memphis would be ranked No. 19 in the Amway coaches poll and No. 17 in the Associated Press poll.
Sports Illustrated has the Tigers pegged at No. 13 in its preseason rankings. That's already higher than Memphis was ranked at any point during last year's historic campaign.
The devil is in the details, of course. This all sounds great until there's a coronavirus outbreak, until a game or a season gets canceled because too many players on one team are in quarantine. This won't be easy. But it feels a lot easier now than it did a month ago. It feels, if not normal, at least closer to normal.
Take Silverfield. He was asked this week about the Tigers' offense. How would he and offensive coordinator Kevin Johns put their own touch on an attack that was so prolific under Mike Norvell the past four years?
To which Silverfield mentioned “unique ideas” and “different plays” and “quite a few things that you guys are going to say that's quite a bit different, a few different wrinkles,” without actually mentioning what those ideas or plays or things or wrinkles might be.
“Hopefully,” he added, “we're looking forward to showing that on (Sept.) 5th.”
Never before has a coach treating his game plan like a state secret sounded more reassuring than paranoid. It means the most unusual college football season we'll ever see really is almost here.