College Football Preview: Existential Angst Watch 2024

A list of teams likely to give their fans an existential crisis

Mercifully, next Saturday will mark the beginning of the 2024 college football season. For the next several weeks, millions and millions of fans across the United States will engage in the time honored tradition of staking their emotional wellbeing on the outcomes of ball games played by men too young to buy beer.

But when all is said and done, many of these fans will be crying tears into rapidly emptying beer cans. Not because their teams lost a bunch, but because they were so certain that their team would win, leaving them to question their vision of the world, their purpose for being, and why oh why they give so much of a shit about football—or anything, really. They won’t eat. They won’t sleep. But even if they did the buffalo wild wings won’t have as much as a kick as they used to, and the only thing they’d dream of is miss field goals and dropped catches. They might present as angry and indignant, but it’s all to mask a deep sadness.

This is not depression, this is sports-induced existential angst. I’ve developed a list of five fanbases most likely to comedown with this debilitating condition this season.

If you know fans of these teams, keep them in your thoughts and prayers.

Fans of many teams already suffer this condition—a silent majority of Michigan State and Florida fans, for instance, look upon the state of the programs with indifference—and they do not appear on the list below. This list is for teams which have some degree of expectation around them, but are unlikely to meet them and will instead cause fans to write the most insane posts you’ve ever read on the internet. I’m talking about the kind of thing that would get you arrested in Europe.

First up—

#5: The School They Call SC

The University of Southern California Trojans—though alums insist on calling it “SC,” presumably either because “U” was declared “so 1990” by some influencer in Beverly Hills who I’ve never heard of or because they don’t remember the first letter—is not in a great spot.

They’re replacing Caleb Williams, a quarterback who was more or less solely responsible for the success the team had in 2022 and then the significantly smaller amount of success they had in 2023. They were held back by an offensive line that can be charitably described as “rickety” and a defense befuddled by tackling as a concept.

There’s always the possibility for improvement, but SC Trojans Head Coach Lincoln Riley’s recipe for success has always been:

1. Find generational talent at QB

2. Lunch

3. Google “what is tackle”

4. Teach the offensive line how to block, or maybe don’t; it’ll be fine

Riley’s been lucky to have had four incredible quarterbacks in a row, but at some point that luck is going to run out, and it might be this year. They have four big games on their schedule, and they’re very losable unless Lincoln Riley can conjure a competent defense and offensive line for the first time in his career.

#4: Colorado

I’ve already written about my skepticism about Colorado Buffaloes coach Deion Sanders and the hype that exploded around him and his team when they went on a three game win streak against very bad teams.

Eight brutal losses later, the enthusiasm around the Colorado Buffaloes has largely subsided. As Bill Connolly at ESPN puts it:

Aside from shockingly good player and team ratings in EA Sports' CFB 25 video game, it appears most of the Colorado hype has subsided. The Buffaloes received just one vote in the preseason AP poll. They were picked 11th out of 16 teams in the freshly expanded Big 12. Their win total at ESPN BET is 5.5, and the under has far better odds. For now, the hype train is out of steam.

Colorado was a notable program in the 1990s, but hasn’t been relevant since Bill McCartney retired from coaching the team to focus on purity rings or something. Sanders was meant to return the team to glory, and it seems everyone bought into it, but it remains to be seen if he actually can.

Outside of Sanders’s two sons and the truly spectacular wide receiver/defensive back Travis Hunter, the roster is unspectacular and given Sanders’s recent evasion of questions about team chemistry, it feels very, very likely this team isn’t going to gel.

They don’t have a lot of slam dunk wins on the schedule, and their first game of the year is against North Dakota State, which plays in a lower division but routinely upends the Division-I A teams that do schedule them. Nevertheless, if Colorado opens the season with a loss, the wheels on the hype train will pop off and a wizard will turn the rails into Twizzlers.

#3: The Pac-12. I mean 2.

The Washington State Cougars and Oregon State Beavers were once part of the vaunted PAC-12 conference. But now all the other champions have left the building, departing for conferences with lucrative television contracts, leaving the Cougars and Beavers to Weekend At Bernie the conference’s brand name and legal entity as a last ditch effort at relevancy (and a semi-lucrative television contract).

The NCAA does not recognize conferences with fewer than eight members, but allows for a grace period of two years. The most likely outcome here is that The Pac-2 “absorbs” the neighboring and less prestigious Mountain West Conference, which they have formed a scheduling pact with for the time being. Based on the ongoing hypercapitalismization and NFL-ization of college football, though, this Mountain Pac Conference won’t be a TV draw or especially competitive and eventually fold because they have no money.

Which is, in a word, sad. Both Washington State and Oregon State have small but passionate fanbases (WSU fans have flown a flag on the traveling set of ESPN College Gameday for 20 years) and have a history of shattering expectations on occasion. That probably won’t be the case this year. Key 2023 contributors on both teams left for greener pastures full of NIL-deals and NFL prospects.

The fanbases seem to recognize that the party is over, based on a scan of Twitter when the news broke and this podcast episode I listened to while cleaning dishes, but I expect reality to fully set in if either struggles against San Jose State, a team whose stadium has been under construction for what feels like five years. Because they have no money.

#2: Texas A&M

But you know who does have money? Texas A&M. They really want you to know that they have money.

Texas A&M is known for a few things. They graduated Rick Perry. They have a weird, psuedo-military thing club that feels more Boy Scout than ROTC. Oh. And they have money. It’s oil money, by the way—that money they have. And they’ll be gosh danged if they don’t use it to buy their way into football relevancy, something they haven’t had since Hitler invaded Poland.

Their head coach used to be a man named Jimbo Fisher. Two years earlier they gave him a contract extension that guaranteed him $95 million if they fired him, with that amount declining each season.

Despite highly rated (and expensive) recruiting classes, the team struggled mightily. Jimbo acted weird to the media, and the boosters, and the oil barons got so sick of his garbage they fired him. They owed him $77.5 million dollars to not coach football.

Their new coach is a man named Mike Elko, whose main claim to fame is making Duke football look competent by beating a rapidly collapsing and ludicrously overhyped Clemson team in primetime.

Texas A&M will continue to recruit well since they spend the fifth highest amount of money on NIL deals (which are not supposed to be recruiting inducements even though everybody knows they are recruiting inducements), but color me skeptical that Elko will be given enough time to get his program into gear before the oil barons start threatening to rocket him into the sun for the crime of going 8-4 in his first year at the helm.

#1: Teh Ohio State University

(NOTE: Teh Ohio State University is not a typo. It’s just what I insist on calling them ever since they hired a doofus crypto guy as their commencement speaker.)

Ryan Day is entering his sixth year as the head coach of the Ohio State Football Buckeyes. He’s a passing game guru. A spread coast wizard. But he has a problem.

It’s not his record. That’s stellar. Just look at his remarkable win percentage: 87.5%. And it’s not that he can’t recruit. His classes are always at the top of the rankings.

It’s that he can’t beat Michigan.

Yeah, sure, he won in 2019, but that was 2019. But what did he do after that? He blew it against Clemson in the playoffs.

Michigan and Ohio State didn’t play in 2020. Michigan ducked the Buckeyes. They skipped out just because practically the whole team had COVID. Wimps.

Then 2021 happened. Michigan steamrolled the Bucks by doing this retro thing called “running the ball.” It was the first time Michigan had beat the Buckeyes in a meaningful game since 2003.¹

So he adjusted. He hired a new defensive coordinator and built a game plan around stopping the run.

And when they played in 2022, it looked like it was going to work until Michigan steamrolled the Bucks by doing this retro thing called “using the run to set up the pass.” Drat. Foiled!

The Ohio State faithful were getting desperate now. They were posting angry crap on Twitter. The message board posts were unhinged. People were earnestly asking if Ryan Day, who had lost 6 games in his career as a head coach up to this point, would be able to keep his job if he lost another game to Michigan.

It was getting to Ryan Day too. When he and the Buckeyes beat Notre Dame in the early parts of the 2023 season (on a last second play that would not have worked had Notre Dame remembered you’re supposed to have 11 men on the field, not 10), Day went on what can only be described as an unhinged rant berating Lou Holtz for criticizing his team.

This is what Lou Holtz said, which echoed popular sentiment:

"You look at coach Day, he has lost to Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, and Michigan twice and everybody beats him because they’re more physical than Ohio State.”

This is what Ryan Day said on national TV:

“I’D LIKE TO KNOW WHERE LOU HOLTZ IS RIGHT NOW. WHAT HE SAID ABOUT OUR TEAM, I CANNOT BELIEVE. THIS IS A TOUGH TEAM RIGHT HERE. WE’RE PROUD TO BE FROM OHIO. IT’S ALWAYS BEEN OHIO AGAINST THE WORLD, AND IT’LL CONTINUE TO BE OHIO AGAINST THE WORLD. BUT I’LL TELL YOU WHAT: I LOVE THOSE KIDS. WE’VE GOT A TOUGH TEAM.”

Then the 2023 iteration of the rivalry rolled around. Michigan’s head coach was suspended for hamburger and vacuum repairman crimes (don’t think about it). The interim was a man who had head coached for a handful of games and was juggling two other jobs on gameday. Surely—surely!—Ohio State would come out on top.

But no. Michigan won. And they won because they played more physically. One family of Ohio State fans posted a TikTok video showing them happy before the game, and then lying facedown on the carpet after losing.

This fanbase is not doing all right, is what I’m saying.

And neither is the Ohio State program. Ryan Day reportedly castigated an administrative staffer who was leaving the program (for Michigan). His running backs coach departed (for Michigan). He is seemingly adjusting his offensive approach to be more ground dependent, but I’m skeptical hiring Chip Kelly, who was famously run out of the NFL for poor decision making and bailed on his job at the UCLA football program because he doesn’t like dealing with young people, is going to turn things around.

And if he loses again, Ohio State fans will be out for blood. Personally, as a Michigan alum, I think Ohio State fans should just get some weed from that tattoo parlor and let Ryan Day coach for as long as he wants to keep losing to Michigan.

1. Michigan won the annual matchup with Ohio State in 2011, but it of dubious legitimacy. Ohio State was recoiling from NCAA sanctions for a semi-ridiculous scandal about players trading team memorabilia at a tattoo parlor for money, tattoos, and—gasp—marijuana.