College Football Angst Watch, a weekly recap of the existential misery caused by college football fandom, will return for the 2025 college football season. Last year, I followed five teams throughout the year to keep tabs on how miserable their fanbases were and make jokes at their expense. Those teams were Colorado, Texas A&M, USC, and Ohio State.
I quickly discovered this format was limited. It turns out that once a narrative crystallizes around a team, you get pretty limited in terms of comedic material. There are only so many variations on “USC can’t tackle” and “Texas A&M should rebrand to ‘Oil Fascist University.’”
This year will be different. Each week’s newsletter will be about the most angsty team of the week. I expect that this will include at some point the following teams:
Penn State: Everything is lined up for the Nittany Lions to make a title run, which means they’re going to find a way to blow it because this program is uniquely cursed.
Texas: Everything is lined up for the Longhorns to make a title run, which means they are also going to find a way to blow it. Their new starting quarterback is wildly overhyped. His name is Archie Manning, but I just call him Nepobaby Overratus. He will probably be perfectly adequate, but the people who’re tabbing him as the number one overall pick are basing that on one datapoint and one datapoint alone: His uncle is Peyton Manning.
Alabama: For the last twenty years or so, ‘Bama fans have considered a 10-2 record disappointing. Then their head coach retired and they went 9-4 in the first year under his replacement, Kalen DeBoer. Things will get very unpleasant in the Alabama booster corps if the team’s fortunes do not improve.
Louisiana State: Their head coach is Brian Kelly, a man who once jokingly threatened to execute his entire team. The Tigers will underperform, he will get very angry about it, and his incoherent raving will go viral.
North Carolina: Bill Bellichek of New England Patriots fame is now the head coach. His weird relationship with his significantly younger girlfriend has been well covered in the media. These are either going to go very okay for the Tar Heels or the bottom is going to completely fall out. There is no telling which it’s going to be.
Miami: The Miami Hurricanes enter the season expected to have one of the best, if not the best, offenses in the country. They also enter the season with an extremely middling defense. They are going to disappoint at some point, and the fanbase will melt down.
But we have to start with…
OHIO STATE
Rankings of Note: #3 in AP Poll, #1 in SP+ (8th on Offense, 3rd on Defense), my least favorite team.
Recent History: Won a national title in 2024. Also lost to a Michigan football team in a game that can only be described as “Yaxty Sax on the gridiron.”
Fanbase Angst Level: 20,015 out of 10 (Baseline 5, +1 for living in Ohio, +1 for Ohio’s speed limit being 65 in most areas, +20,000 because *hums yakety sax*, -1 for coming off a national championship)
Ohio State fans can relax about: Not winning a national title. They did it.
Ohio State fans should angst about: The possibility of losing to Michigan for the fifth time in a row.
Ohio State’s last game: Beat Notre Dame for a national championship. The joy from winning it lasted about 10 minutes.
Ohio State’s next game: The #1 Texas Longhorns, quarterbacked by Nepobaby Overratus Archie Manning, will come to Columbus.
At the onset of the 2025 college football season, the Ohio State fanbase is the most miserable group of people in the sports world. It’s an undisputed title. They are coming off a national championship, but they’re still unhappy because the NCAA did not obliterate the Michigan football program at the conclusion of their two-year investigation into signgate.
For the blissfully unaware, “signgate” refers to a scheme concocted by a low-level Michigan staffer named Connor Stallions to send his buddies, family members, and the occasional intern to games so that they could record and deliver to him video of the hand gestures, signals, and in some cases literal signs that are used to tell the players on the field what to do. This violates an arcane and poorly defined rule about in-person advanced scouting, but that most teams steal signs in-game and then trade that knowledge with other programs somehow doesn’t. This is considered acceptable for some reason, even though it is, by definition, in-person advanced scouting.
Despite this, then, being a relatively minor “crime,” extremely online Ohio State fans wanted the Michigan football program to be severely sanctioned by the NCAA. Suggested punishments included everything between vacating Michigan’s 2023 national title (even though the NCAA does not organize the national championship and has no authority to vacate it) and firing drone strikes at Ann Arbor until the city was left a smoldering ruin.
The NCAA did not vacate the title. Instead, the NCAA levied a heavy fine based on a formula that was created by someone who likes algebra too much. The upshot is that it could amount to $30 million.
When they did not get the nuclear firestorm they wanted, the comment sections on articles about the news posted to Eleven Warriors, an Ohio State football blog, were apoplectic. The mods of the Ohio State football subreddit closed up shop entirely for the day rather than try to moderate the ensuing torrent of vitriol from commenters. T
Here’s my favorite comment from Eleven Warriors:
I just watched the 60-minute condensed version of The Game 2024 and I want to throw up. We can never play like that again or lose like that again to them. The only justice will be seeing them get their asses beat every single year until we don't even remember losing to them.
— BurkeBuck
The national media fracas around the NCAA fine has been an equal thing of beauty. The Athletic’s college football editor had the audacity to publish a column headlined “Michigan’s loss of integrity is biggest hit in Connor Stalions scandal, not NCAA penalty,” reconfirming my position that self-serious sports pundits should be treated the same way you treat an over-stimulated fifth grader explaining the plot of his favorite anime. You smile and nod and occasionally go, “oh, wow, that’s crazy.”
You can tell most of them have not read any part of the 72-page document detailing the NCAA’s investigation. If they had, they’d realize the document is rife with inconsistencies and contradictory reasoning.
It also reveals that the investigation began when a private investigation firm approached the NCAA with information on the scheme, but the report does not seem particularly interested in important narrative questions like “who paid them to do this and why?”
Perhaps most gallingly, the report concludes that Stallions’ ludicrously complicated scheme impacted the on-the-field results of Michigan’s football game because, if it hadn’t, Stallions wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to obstruct their investigation into it. The report also concludes that it is impossible to quantify how the scheme impacted the on-the-field results of Michigan’s football games, so we might as well assume that it impacted the games quite a lot.
The problem is that we have evidence to suggest Stallions played no role at all in the team’s success. Michigan played half the 2023 season with Sign Stealer Stallions on staff, and the second half—the much harder half—without him. The publisher of MGoBlog looked at Bill Connelly’s SP+ metrics, an imperfect but generally agreed-upon excellent measurement system for comparing college football teams. He concluded:
Michigan's SP+ ranking at the time Stalions was fired was 25.1, which means Connelly projects that Michigan would beat an average D1 team by 25 points. By the end of the season Michigan's SP+ rating rose significantly to 31.3. The defense—the unit Stalions was supposedly helping—was projected to give up 13.5 points in a game against an average D1 school. By season's end that had fallen by almost a touchdown to 7.2 points.
Very simply, Stallions had no impact on the football team’s success, no more so than any other program’s sign-stealer guy. There is no argument to the contrary. Anyone suggesting Stallions is notable or interesting for any reason other than he’s the football equivalent of Robert De Niro’s character in The King of Comedy is someone you can ignore until the heat death of the universe.
The only intelligent response to this mess has come from Jim Harbaugh, who left Michigan after the 2023 title game to be the head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers. When asked about the NCAA’s investigation at the press conference after a Chargers preseason game, he answered by saying, extremely casually, “uhhh, like I said to you last year, I’m not engaging.”
Sadly, the rest of us are deeply stupid.