For a half, the highest profile college football game of the year—and therefore the most hysterically overhyped—was a letdown of Megalopolis-level proportions. Alabama, ranked fourth in the nation by people who are permitted to guess at such a thing and have their votes counted, was stomping Georgia, ranked second by those same people. Watched in person by High Lord Emeritus Saban and his consort Terry, plus the full ESPN panoply of hyperkinetic parrots called College GameDay, the Crimson Tide scored four touchdowns in 17 and a half minutes, along with forcing a safety and two turnovers, for a 30-7 halftime lead that also included this play from Ryan Williams, effectively spurring what we will be told was a massive national television audience of megatybillions to cry out at once, “What else is on?”
But then things happened, because the one thing college football has not yet completely ruined is the football. Powered by shame and the fear of what would be said about them by their most devoted fans (plus Paul Finebaum) the rest of the weekend, the Bulldogs rallied in the most pyro-spectacular of ways, summarized inadequately here:
Yes, Georgia went from down 23 to up 1 because that’s just how it works sometimes, and then they lost it all on a play by Ryan Williams, who is 17 freaking years old. In fact, let’s look at that last play again, just because:
In fact, we suggest you watch the entire game yourselves if you missed it the first time because it displays the very reason the adults are going to such elaborate lengths to ruin it—all under the guise of them finally paying the players, though it’s clear nobody actually wants to do that. From realignment to NIL to NIL pushback to schools billing fans directly through ticket prices to pay the players instead of the colleges doing it themselves with their media billions to congressional intervention on avoiding player compensation as a whole to … well, doing everything possible to make college football into the NFL for people who don’t live close enough to an NFL team, or who live too close to the Jacksonville Jaguars.
And the cap hasn’t even been hit yet. ESPN, which with its fellow networks and streaming services has helped create these messes, is rolling the dice this coming week by putting GameDay in the one place in the United States that nobody ever thought it would go, all in an attempt to reinvigorate the West Coast market ravaged by the dissolution of the Pac-12. Yes, Berkeley, that most delightfully Trotskyite of settings, the jumbo-sized university least connected to the siren song of the sport, the one town in which the only member of the GameDay crew that would draw a crowd is Kirk Herbstreit’s dog.
Yes, it’s a fairly brazen marketing device, and one suspects that it will be a one-off because the sport is more southeast and Midwest than ever before and becoming increasingly so with every new realignment story. In short, we are not far from colleges relocating to other states because why the hell not. But for one week, why not Cal? One suspects we’re about to see.
This much, though, is almost certain—the best game of the year has already been played, and Ryan Williams just became a corporation five months before his 18th birthday.
