You’re Nuts: What was the most surprising moment in Week 1?

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The first full week of the college football season is in the books. Now it’s time for some knee-jerk reactions. Some teams showed they were deserving of the preseason rankings they were given, while others looked like they had no business in the top-25. There were players who solidified themselves as a serious threat to the Heisman Trophy and other awards. A number of coaches impressed in their first game at a new school, and other coaches’ seats got even hotter than they were heading into the season.

Today we want to know what the most surprising thing was that you saw across the first full weekend of college football. With it being a wild weekend of action spread across five days, there shouldn’t be a lack of stories to come out of what we saw on the field. Ohio State handled their business in the 56-3 win over Ball State, but maybe Julian Sayin and Jeremiah Smith were even stronger out of the gate than many were expecting. Michigan is going to need a lot more than a clock operator adding a second to beat the Buckeyes this season.

In the Big Ten, there was a lot that raised some eyebrows. It all started on Thursday night when Rutgers was decimated by UMass, who was 0-12 last year. Boise State pushed Oregon on Saturday, followed by UCLA looking good in Bob Chesney’s first game as head coach of the Bruins. Nationally, former Buckeye Lincoln Kienholz looked good in his first start at Louisville, dueling with Trinidad Chambliss and Ole Miss in Nashville. Miami, Texas, and Notre Dame left little doubt as they kicked off their season, and then there was what happened in Baton Rouge.

Today’s question: What was the most surprising moment in Week 1?

We’d love to hear your choices. Either respond to us on Twitter at @Landgrant33 or leave your choice in the comments.

Brett’s answer: LSU steamrolling Clemson

I can’t imagine Tyler in Spartanburg is handling Clemson getting run off the field by LSU on Saturday night very well.

It’s no secret that Dabo Swinney’s best days at Clemson are behind him; I just wasn’t expecting to see the end so soon. After how the Tigers played on the road at LSU on Saturday night, it’s hard to imagine Clemson improving much on the 7-6 record they posted last season. The issues for the Tigers are magnified when considering Swinney’s reluctance to explore the transfer portal to fill some glaring holes on his team.

Clemson still has to take on Miami, Florida State, South Carolina, and a number of other tough opponents. I’d be shocked if the Tigers are anywhere close to contention for a College Football Playoff spot this season.

On the other sideline on Saturday night, Lane Kiffin made his high-profile debut with LSU. To add to the suspense, weather delayed the opening kickoff by two hours. Once the game did start, the Tigers put the rest of the country on notice. Sam Leavitt has the ability to be a problem for LSU’s opponents, as long as he is able to stay healthy throughout the season. If there was one team I had to pick as a serious threat to Ohio State’s title hopes this year, it would be Lane Kiffin’s team.

I had a feeling LSU would win and cover the spread on Saturday night; I just wasn’t prepared for how lopsided the game would end up being. Not only did LSU beat Clemson 51-10, but the home team outgained their opponents by 499 yards. An even crazier stat is that LSU had 30 more first downs than their ACC foe. This isn’t some weaker conference foe that the Tigers blew out of the water; it’s a program that has won two national titles in the last 10 years.

What makes what we saw from the Tigers on Saturday night scary is that this is just the first game they played under Kiffin. They’ll likely only get stronger, especially if the controversial former NFL players Kiffin brought to LSU are ruled eligible to play. We’ll find out a lot more about LSU in a couple of weeks when they travel to Oxford to take on Ole Miss, but if they play anywhere close to how they played against Clemson, a lot of Ole Miss fans are going to leave the game in Oxford disappointed they didn’t get the better of their former head coach.

Matt’s answer: The 1-second fiasco in Ann Arbor

I was tempted to throw a curveball and go with the power outage at Doak Campbell last night, but come on, not only was that bull shit in the Big House the most surprising moment of Week 1, it was the most ludicrous, offensive, gas-lightingest bunch of hogwash that we have seen in college football since the last ludicrous, offensive, gas-lightingest thing that we saw involving those beacons of morals and integrity known as the Michigan Wolverines.

At this point, I’m not going to waste any time explaining all of the idiotic rigmarole surrounding what ended up being a field-storming worthy 13-12 victory by the Corn and Blue fans. But, if you somehow have lived under a college football rock during this Labor Day Weekend, here’s how it all broke down.

Sunday morning, I woke up to an asinine statement from the Big Ten Conference citing a super-secret clock that only they had access to that proved the decision to overturn the obviously correct ruling on the field was justified.

In part, the B1G said, “Following video review, it was determined Western Michigan’s #18 started his jump from an established out-of-bounds position (left foot) and made contact with the ball with one second remaining on the clock … Eighty-five minutes prior to the game, all broadcast cameras used for the replay system, including the camera on the game clock, are synced using a strobe system to ensure all cameras are aligned.”

The conference then supplied this janky-ass video as if it would somehow convince anyone of anything. This was released hours after the game ended and was markedly different than the video that we all witnessed of the exact same clocks on TV.

Now, I have no idea how the technical operations work for NBC’s broadcasts, or how the inner workings of the Big Ten’s modern replay process work. However, I did work for the B1G during the first season that the conference was piloting college football’s first-ever video review system and was in the so I understand that there are far more moving parts than we see on TV.

But here’s the thing: the standard to overturn a ruling on the field has always been “irrefutable video evidence,” and at this point the conference’s outcome was insanely futable. If you have to release doctored footage hours after the fact because you are being accused of obscene levels of bias, you have already screwed up. Video reviews should be, at worst, up for debate, but ultimately understandable; the only debate about this is whether it was gross incompetence or outright corruption… I’m leaning toward the latter.

As Fox’s Mike Pereira explains here, even if the ruling was ultimately correct, as the stadium game clock doesn’t have hundredths or thousandths of a second that could have theoretically remained when the ball was touched, the general rule is to default to the clock that the fans can see. While it might not be an official rule for the Big Ten or any other conference in college football, given the sporting environment that we live in today, it probably should be.

With sports gambling funding the vast majority of sports broadcasters these days, you don’t need a whole lot of tin foil to find a hat big enough to trip across conspiracy theories. Now, I’m not saying that the Big Ten replay officials were influenced because they had a hundo on the Wolverines to beat Western Michigan straight up, but there are plenty of people out there who are questioning the conference’s integrity because of the ruling.

When you factor this in with the slap on the wrist (and even that is being generous) that Michigan got for their blatant and brazen cheating operations, you understand why people are not giving the B1G the benefit of the doubt. With the video technology what it is, there should be no difference between what fans see and what officials see; the job of replay officials should be to take the universally available footage and apply (and explain) the rules. They failed in this situation to disastrous effect.

Between gambling implications, Michigan’s history of disreputable behavior, and the subsequent preferential treatment, the conference’s primary responsibilities should have been to get the call right (which they only did if you believe their super-secret clock explanation), promote transparency of the process (which they stumbled to do hours after the fact), and maintain the integrity of the game (which they absolutely failed to do).

And that, more than the overturned call itself, is why this was the biggest surprise of the weekend. College football officiating is going to be bad sometimes; replay officials are going to make mistakes; conferences are occasionally going to have to explain why something that looked obvious to millions of people was actually more complicated than it appeared.

But if your Orwellian explanation requires everyone to ignore what they saw with their own eyes and instead trust a mysterious clock that only conference officials have permission to view, some postgame video wizardry, and the unimpeachable institutional integrity of the Big Ten and Michigan Wolverines, you have officially lost the plot.

Maybe the conference really did get the call right; maybe there really was one microscopic sliver of time remaining that nobody watching at home could see, but when your defense boils down to, “Trust us, we have a special clock,” you probably shouldn’t be surprised when nobody does, especially when the beneficiary is Michigan. Funny how that keeps happening.

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