The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

What to make of this strange college football weekend? 2020 is unpredictable.

Perspective by
Reporter
September 27, 2020 at 4:35 p.m. EDT
LSU Coach Ed Orgeron had a lot to think about after his team’s loss to Mississippi State. (Gerald Herbert/AP)

BATON ROUGE — Provided the world remains extant around 2070, imagine some elderly men around Manhattan, Kan., yammering about that Saturday in Norman, Okla., they saw through the TV back in September 2020. Someone will mention the novel coronavirus pandemic, and several someones will start arguing about Kansas State's impossible 38-35 win at Oklahoma from 35-14 behind and how many men the Wildcats lacked from their pregame, two-deep roster.

Someone, of course, might peg the number at close to 40.

The correct answer seems to be eight, but it does point to another unforeseen — and trivial — effect of the pandemic. The novel coronavirus will attach itself to college football’s rich, vivid, naughty lore for reasons more than just that it shook a season into a mess if not a joke. It will add sparkle to old victories because teams overcame inconvenience, and it will subtract pain from old losses because teams suffered inconvenience.

Okay, the latter might sound impossible, but all this did seem true Saturday alone in Norman; Blacksburg, Va.; Baton Rouge; Provo, Utah; and back to Miami, among surely others, and it’s bound to be true in coming weeks and months.

In Norman, the visitors threw around the choice word for all known individual or team sports problems — “adversity” — and said other things mercifully.

“I can’t even explain,” senior defensive back Jahron McPherson said.

“It’s indescribable,” said kicker Blake Lynch, whose 50-yard field goal won the thing with 4:32 left.

“People were so selfless,” quarterback Skylar Thompson said of the two weeks since Kansas State opened with a 35-31 home loss to Arkansas State, a fact that magnified the shock of Saturday.

Week 4 winners and losers: Oklahoma’s playoff hopes might be done already

All felt what they felt because of an ancient dynamic coursing through all of college football — that of the lopsided series where one side, usually a kingdom, wins perennially over another, always not a kingdom. Kansas State and Oklahoma have played each other 101 times in the history of our bizarre American habit of students and football and masses watching. Oklahoma has won 76 times, with four ties. From 1971 to 1992, before Kansas State became Bill Snyder’s miracle, Oklahoma won all the times.

That might sound dull and often is saved for the tailgates, but that does magnify the meaning when the non-kingdom ups and wins. It gets people saying things such as, “People dream about these moments all the time, and for me, I dream about this all the time,” as said McPherson. Tack on a bale of uncertainty and the loss of eight two-deep players because of something both invisible and catastrophic, and the upset gathers more oomph.

In Blacksburg, Virginia Tech saw more than its 23 players out and its scheduling uncertainty before the 45-24 win it forged against North Carolina State. As a place that has just seen the retirement of one of the country’s all-time defensive coordinators, Bud Foster, it saw the absence of its new defensive coordinator, Justin Hamilton, and then the former Football Bowl Subdivision head coach who would have replaced him, linebackers coach Tracy Claeys. The 29-year-old new cornerbacks coach, Ryan Smith, took over, and it just went to show that if you can hire somebody around the age of 30 who played at William & Mary, that cradle of coaches, then by all means do so.

LSU did that last year with Joe Brady, and it went well.

Saturday went less well in Baton Rouge, and it had little to do with Brady having gone off to run the Carolina Panthers’ offense at 31. Mississippi State won at Tiger Stadium for the first time since 2014 and the prowess and thrilling 56-yard run of one Dak Prescott, but there was so much more, especially in yardage: With its new coach, Mike Leach, and its new quarterback, K.J. Costello, it whipped around passes for 623 yards, the most ever for any SEC school in one day, with receivers and the great back Kylin Hill running around like mad.

“It was scheme,” LSU Coach Ed Orgeron said to remove heat from his youngsters. “You know, a lot of times they caught us in man [defense], they had some crossing routes, but we just couldn’t cover the guys.” Yet if one was sitting around at home or in the four-fifths-empty stadium wearing purple and gold, why, one might have wondered.

Mississippi State dumps No. 6 LSU, 44-34, in a season opener fitting for 2020

One might have wondered how star cornerback Derek Stingley Jr. might have helped, had he not gone to the hospital on the eve of the game with an illness LSU termed “acute” while unthreatening and not coronavirus-related, before his release Saturday. Then one might have wondered more: Might it have helped some to have Kary Vincent Jr., the starting nickel safety from the 2019 national champions who intercepted four passes and made 48 tackles and then became an “opt-out” with the virus raging in late summer?

Surely some people will wonder for decades about the opt-outs.

Some of them might even be kind about it.

In Provo, as Jay Drew of the Deseret News pointed out, Zach Wilson threw a 70-yard touchdown pass to Dax Milne during BYU’s 48-7 win over Troy, the oddity being that they share a house with other players, except that Wilson aims to move out to live alone, because he had the virus back in the summer and he doesn’t want to miss time should somebody else catch the virus in a county where it’s bad and get his eligibility snared up in the contact tracing.

That’s a lot to ponder and affect a season, especially one with a schedule still in flux after it got wrecked with summertime conference shutdowns. But at least in Miami, Florida State fans lived a dream of so many fans through these past 151 years of this nuttiest sport.

For so many years and so many times, fan bases have yearned to live their lives without head coaches they have deemed unworthy of their support and their palaces. Well, first-year coach Mike Norvell couldn’t make the trip to Miami after his positive test, so after an unsightly 52-10 loss to his team’s ACC and eternal rival, he spoke from an office in Tallahassee.

“This is something that completely falls on me,” he said, meaning it fell all the way up an elongated state and over into the panhandle.

And while players said the right things about the loss and their 12 penalties for 113 yards, tight end Camren McDonald did say, “You’ve always felt like the situation is under control when Coach Norvell is there.”

So as official college football statistics tell us everything from the best punters to the single most important annual matter in American life — plus-minus turnover ratio — but don’t tend to give us the relevant coronavirus numbers, maybe they should.

Read more on college football:

Which college football conferences are playing and who’s still on the sidelines?

LSU football had Louisiana on top of the world in January. Then the rest of 2020 happened.

This college football team has now had five opening games. They’ve all been called off.