College Football Sunday Summary Plays the Expectations Game

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We are battling the expectations through week four of the season here at the College Football Sunday Summary. We have teams living down to expectations. Others live up to them. And still others are asking, “What’s an expectation?”

College Football Sunday Summary

We’ll See Your Expectation and Raise You Our Legacy

Hey, don’t look now, but Clemson is not quite dead yet. The Tigers are 3-1 after going cross-country on a short week to beat Cal. Now, before we make too much of the resurrection of the program, Clemson does have to play Miami this week. And we are not going to lose our minds in projections. But Dabo Swinney’s team has shown slow progress week to week since losing the opener against LSU and having the coroner, make that sportswriters, declare the program dead.

Speaking of Reputations

Can we all back down from the Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele bandwagon and give the kid some room to breathe?

Last year, the Cal quarterback became a kitschy name for sports scribes as an up-and-coming quarterback. And maybe he will be. But right now, he is still just a guy in his second year who has some good days and some bad.

Sure, he is throwing at a 64% completion rate. But he has four interceptions against only seven touchdowns. And Friday night, at home, he had no touchdown passes and two interceptions in the loss.

The media is treating him like they are expected to find some new hidden treasure in them thar hills out west.

This is Something We Would Expect from Him

Minnesota coach PJ Fleck is a bit of a hire wire act. He is often openly exuberant in his love for his team. But in the aftergame joy after beating Washington on Saturday night, Fleck was hugging linebacker Maverick Baranowski. The player had blood on his mouth from the game. Living in the moment, as Fleck tends to do, he took some of Baranowski’s blood and wiped it on his own face.

There are probably health and safety reasons to not do that, not to mention it was just gross. But we would expect nothing less from Fleck.

We Didn’t Know Anything About Any Expectations

Most folks thought Florida would be an improved program this season. The Gators hired John Sumrall during the off-season. The coach from Tulane was good, young, and up and coming. But it clearly was going to take him a while to build Florida back from scratch. Or not. Florida is 4-0 overall, 2-0 in the SEC, and just beat Ole Miss Saturday night. There are still eight more regular-season games to be played. But Florida has already gone from no expectations to some lofty hopes from the fan base on a weekly basis.

Meeting Minimum Expectations

Every year the college football media tries to figure out what the school’s expectations are for NC State head coach Dave Doeren. And most years the team comes out somewhere below whatever we believe those expectations to be. And then we have to assume we are wrong because he gets still another year with another quarterback issue.

NC State beat App State this weekend. So the Wolfpack is now 2-2. They have beaten Richmond and App State. They have lost to the two P4 schools they have played, Virginia and Vanderbilt.

Clearly, there needs to be ongoing examinations of the expectations at NC State.

Expectations? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Expectations

We fully expect few people under the age of 50 will understand the 1940s movie reference. But nonetheless, it is becoming clear that Jake Dickert has no concern about other people’s expectations, only his own. With the Wake Forest upset of Louisville on Saturday, Dickert said he has zero focus on things like national perception of him or his team. On the other hand, he does think there should be talk about receiver Carlos Hernandez being among the best in the country.

So maybe some expectations are ok for some people, but not all expectations are ok for all people…or something like that. We are just going to pick and choose our way through them.

Expectations Come With a Price…Tag

We don’t mean to repeat ourselves, but the Michigan football program, booster Larry Ellison (the founder of Oracle) and his substantially younger wife are not getting their money’s worth out of quarterback Bryce Underwood. Ellison’s wife, a Michigan alum, wanted the quarterback for her program. Like shopping at the college football version of Tiffany’s, Ellison ponied up the “NIL” money for Underwood at Michigan.

The Wolverines got beat at home yesterday by Iowa. In the third quarter, with Michigan up by three points, Underwood threw an interception at the Iowa two-yard line. Any score would have extended the lead, and considering Iowa won by one point on the last play of the game, the mistake was costly. Not to him of course, but to those paying for his services.

We Didn’t Know What to Expect, But It wasn’t this.

President Donald Trump attended that Texas-Tennessee game in Knoxville on Saturday. We are not sure why it is just now news, but this week we learned that if the president, any president, has to change rooms, go to the men’s room, or anywhere else, his mobility causes the Secret Service to take over all communications in the venue until he is settled in again.

This includes the headset communication from the assistant coaches in the booth to the coaches on the sidelines, the officials for the game, and even the coach talking to his designated player with the speaker/microphone in his helmet.

We were hoping that if it was a close game at the end, POTUS could just sit tight so that the coaches could call the plays. But the president was gone by the end of halftime, so it mattered not. It was back to Air Force One where he is free to go wherever he wants without the pilot’s communications being interrupted.

But Texas EDGE rusher Colin Simmons had his own thoughts on bathroom breaks. In the second quarter, the Longhorns were up 10-3. Simmons sacked quarterback Faizon Brandon to force a potential fourth down… In a rather unusual celebration of the sack, Simmons mimicked urinating on the field.

He was flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct. But Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian blamed society for what Simmons did.

“Unfortunately, in our society right now, we live in the ‘look at me’ society,” Sarkisian told Awful Announcing. “All of you guys have your Twitter accounts, and as fast as you can type something because you want everyone to look at your account, and you get clicks. Well, that’s the world that we live in. So we’ve got to get to —it’s about the team and focus on the team, and not so much ‘look at me.’ So we’ll try to improve upon that, but five sacks was pretty cool today too.”

We expected more from you, Sark.

We Expect Big Things and Virginia Delivered

We try to leave the last segment for the schools doing cool or meaningful things with their uniforms. Yesterday UVA wore special patches on their jerseys and decals on the helmets to commemorate the three teammates who were killed in the tragic 2023 shooting.

Head coach Tony Elliott was in his first year when it happened. He went through nearly two years of holding the program together with bandages and care. Now the team is having great success under his leadership, and Saturday was UVA Strong Day for the game against Delaware. The patches honored the memories and the legacies of Lavel Davis Jr., Devin Chandler, and D’Sean Perry.

Main Image:  Randy Sartin-Imagn Images, ESPN on ABC

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