Does it feel like 2020 still hasn’t ended? In the college football universe, it hasn’t. The 2020 FCS season kicked off in earnest Saturday with McNeese State beating Tarleton 40-37 in double overtime.
More on that game later, but for a moment, let’s think about what might have been. In an alternate dimension, we’re talking about the start of the Big Ten season, the PAC-12 season, the MAC season, the Mountain West season.
Did the sudden fall plans work out for those conferences? Probably. Ohio State got to exorcise its demons against Clemson and then have Alabama exorcise its demons against it. Everyone got to enjoy the dual pleasures of Indiana being surprisingly great and Penn State being surprisingly bad. On the West Coast, the PAC-12 was largely irrelevant and ignored by the rest of the college football universe. At the Power Five level, everything was normal.
At the Group of Five level, perhaps we missed out on what would have been an incredible spring MACtion season. More people could’ve enjoyed and appreciated, say, Buffalo. Or, out west, San Jose State. It could’ve been fun, but it likely wouldn’t have been much safer, virus-wise, or earned more cash. As it turns out, we weren’t very good at beating this whole plague thing within a calendar year. Sometimes a decision turns out to be good because neither alternative was significantly better. Sometimes you choose the more immediate bad choice rather than deferring to another bad one.
But we still have the FCS season. Will it get great TV slots? Hell no. Do you get Fox Sports Southwest? I don’t. I have Hulu, I don’t even get my own local Fox Sports stations.
So let’s get into it. Football is always a smattering of choices ranging from bad to worse to worst. Let’s see who was less bad this week.
Game That Happened
McNeese State 40, Tarleton 37
My running theory about LSU is that they’re good because they have good players and their coach can’t screw things up too much because they can’t understand a damn word he says. Does that work if you’re the quarterback? I don’t know what Cody Orgeron sounds like, but he can play some chaos football. QB O completed just 14 of 34 passes overall but threw for three touchdowns. He also rushed for 108 yards and two scores on 19 carries. What if we built the entire offense out of a coach’s son?
More interesting than that, let’s talk about how those touchdowns happened. Down 24-17 in the fourth, he scored on a five-yard run. Then Tarleton responded with a long touchdown drive to make it 31-17. Orgeron threw two touchdown passes in the last three minutes to tie it, then ran for a 19-yarder in the second OT to put an end to a field goal kick-off.
Tarleton played well enough to win but when you’re up against that kind of chaos, like, I don’t know what to do. Yes, you could say this is an example of a guy putting the team on his back, whatever, but QB O missed six more passes than he made and still accounted five touchdowns. I don’t understand it. I wish I had Fox Sports Southwest.
Braleon Bridges rushed for 112 yards and two touchdowns for the Texans. Steven Duncan passed for 217 yards and a score. My suggestion: Get an airboat and cruise the bayou with a boudin on a string. You’ll find a chaos quarterback.