Well, that was definitely one of the weirdest Week 1s I can recall.
I’m glad we got in a couple of fun games at the end in Ole Miss-Louisville and SMU-Florida State. Otherwise, I fear all anyone will remember is that one second in Ann Arbor.
According to the Big Ten, there is a secret clock that is more accurate than the TV clock. Why don’t they let the networks have access to the more accurate clock so we can actually know how much time is left in the game? — Nick D.
It speaks to just how clumsily this situation was handled by all involved that “secret clock” is now part of the college football lexicon. At this point, there’s probably no follow-up clarification anyone could offer that would put the genie back in the bottle. But I’ll try.
There aren’t two clocks; there are two video feeds of the stadium clock — the one you see on TV and the one the Big Ten replay command center sees. And those feeds are supposed to be synced, but in this case, they were off. Probably only by a fraction of a second, but enough to change the outcome of a football game.
And now we find out, three days after the fact, the replay officials are, in fact, supposed to use the TV version in this admittedly very specific situation.
The Big Ten, you’ll recall, sent out a statement two hours after the Michigan game that included the exact video their officials were seeing from the back of the end zone, with a video of the clock at 0:01 matched up alongside it. It was the league’s way of saying, “See, we got it right. Not our fault NBC was showing the wrong time.”
But on Tuesday, NCAA football secretary-rules editor Matt Young sent out an interpretation that said when officials are deciding at the end of a half whether time should be restored, “the replay official’s decision will be based on the embedded game clock contained within the (TV) program feed. If the broadcaster is unable to provide an embedded game clock, the replay official will use the game-clock graphic displayed as part of the broadcast feed.”
(Note: I can tell you from my 15-minute stint in television at Fox, the “program feed” is the one that comes straight from the production truck, before it gets transmitted by the network to the public. Figured that would come in handy one day.)
In other words, it ultimately didn’t matter which of the two feeds was “right,” because, based on this supposed protocol that no one had ever bothered to put in writing, they’re supposed to default to the TV version regardless. Information that really should have been brought to our attention YESTERDAY. (Well, Saturday in this case.)
Maybe Western Michigan can print out the memo and hang it in its locker room.
This whole maddening episode is the perfect convergence of every possible form of college football dysfunction.
While I respect the Big Ten for trying to be transparent by releasing the video/audio, the lack of explanation for why the officials were seeing a different clock than the viewers at home introduced a new level of conspiracy theories.
I blame NBC for going off the air that night without explaining anything, then going radio silent save for a two-sentence statement it had anchor John Fanta read on air the next day during the Apple Cup.
And I blame the entire college football officiating enterprise for being so disorganized. It was the Big Ten’s own officials working the game. They apparently didn’t follow a national protocol. Though perhaps that’s not their fault, because said protocol was never written down anywhere and was apparently just an “understanding.”
Just an all-out dumpster fire. And it’s only Week 1.
The Big Ten replay protocol explained
Bruce Feldman
I have asked this question for several years without an answer, maybe because the answer was too obvious. But is it finally time to do away with conference officials? Imagine the added outrage if it were NFC West officials who didn’t call pass interference against the Los Angeles Rams in the 2018 NFC Championship. — Steve M.
A thousand percent, yes. It’s truly embarrassing this is still a thing in 2026. It’s one of the many college football governance things that have no logical explanation other than “that’s the way they’ve always done it.”
The problem is that it would require the conferences to voluntarily give up control of something. Because, as we know, no one is truly in charge of college football, not even the NCAA. There is a national officiating coordinator, Ron Snodgrass, who tries to set national standards when it comes to administering and interpreting the rules, but then each conference hires, oversees and evaluates its own crews. Which inevitably leads to inconsistency and accusations of bias.
In a story Chris Vannini and I wrote last year about the state of officiating, SEC coordinator John McDaid, whose purview also includes the Sun Belt, noted that his office alone has to evaluate the same number of crews as the NFL (17), so it would be impractical to expect one person or office to handle four to five times that many crews nationally. Fair point.
But you’d think they’d be more motivated to figure something out, given the billions of dollars riding on the outcome of college football games. Nothing is more important than the officials’ credibility, yet they continue a practice that so obviously undermines their credibility, deserved or not.
And if nothing else — why on earth are conference officials working non-conference games involving their own schools?? They’re lucky that game involved a MAC school, given the Big Ten and MAC have the same officiating coordinator. Can you imagine if that same thing happened in a Michigan-Alabama game where the Big Ten provided the officials? People would riot in the streets.
College football is the nation’s second-most popular sport, enjoyed by tens of millions of people. Obviously, a game should never be decided by unsynced clocks. But if it does, the explanation should not come from the winning team’s conference in the form of a statement that looks like the opening credits of a mid-80s horror movie.
A statement regarding the results of tonight’s game between Michigan and Western Michigan. pic.twitter.com/DzJVN2ZLTc
— Big Ten Conference (@bigten) September 6, 2026
If Bryce Underwood continues his poor play, will this calm down the big spending on incoming high school recruits? They supposedly committed $12 million over four years on the kid, and it seems the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Shouldn’t that make boosters think twice in the future? — Patrick B.
It’s hard to see because Underwood’s Michigan deal was such a bizarre one-off situation. Frankly, it remains arguably the strangest moment of the very strange name, image and likeness era. The benefactor who helped flip the nation’s No. 1 recruit from LSU was none other than Oracle founder and one-time richest person in the world Larry Ellison and his sixth wife, Jolin Zhu, a Michigan alum whom no one knew he had married until Michigan’s collective put out a press release thanking them for the Underwood gift.
As I watched Underwood’s painful performance Saturday (pre-Hail Mary), I wondered if Ellison was going to divorce this wife, too, for spending their money on a QB who seemingly hasn’t improved from his first career start to his 14th.
Generally speaking, it’s probably not the smartest move to make a long-term financial commitment to a high school QB given the bust rate at that position. The 2023 class has become something of a case study in that department. There were five five-star QBs in that class, of which only one, Texas’s Arch Manning, remains at his original school, and two, Jackson Arnold and Malachi Nelson, have been major disappointments.
The irony, though, is that at $3 million a year, Underwood’s deal is already below market. The top QBs in the country are now making $5 million to $6 million a year. If he suddenly blossoms into a superstar over the course of this season, you could easily see his team pulling a Nico Iamaleava and demanding to tear it up, or else. Instead, depending on the language, Michigan may be locked into paying him for two more years, regardless of his performance.
Though I have to think if he gets benched at some point, both parties would want out of it.
Bryce Underwood’s lucrative NIL deal remains one of the most notable deals in the sport. (Junfu Han / USA Today Network via Reuters Connect)
UMass, which went 0-12 last year, manhandled Rutgers last week, a new low even for Rutgers. Looking into the crystal ball, which of these two historically poor programs has a better chance of making the College Football Playoff first? — Matthew W.
I give UMass a better chance of one day being the highest-ranked G6 team than I do Rutgers finishing in the top third of the Big Ten.
Is this the end for Dabo at Clemson? — Nicholas H.
Would Dabo retire? Seems like Clemson will never fire him, and I get that he took them to the mountaintop (twice!), but man that was just awful. — Max F.
As Dabo said Tuesday (while refusing to answer a perfectly reasonable question about his roster construction), you get 12 games. Given the state of the ACC (1-4 vs. P4 foes), I’m not ruling out the possibility Clemson turns it around and goes 8-4. And I’ll believe it when I see it that Clemson would pay $57 million to fire its two-time national championship coach for an ostensibly decent season.
But the team we saw get annihilated by LSU did not look remotely capable of winning eight games. Clemson was entirely noncompetitive, even more so than its 34-3 loss to Georgia in the 2024 opener. Swinney’s team gained eight first downs the entire night and allowed 309 rushing yards to a non-service academy. Then Lane Kiffin rubbed salt in the wound afterward by saying, “I thought it’d be like 35-7, 35-10. I didn’t know they’d be that dysfunctional on offense.”
Clemson needs to start bracing for the possibility this will be more of a 4-8 type season, in which case this becomes a much different discussion than “Dabo doesn’t contend for championships anymore,” and instead it’s “Dabo has run his program into the ground, and we see no evidence he’s capable of repairing it.”
There’s a particularly rough stretch fast approaching for the Tigers. In two weeks, they host North Carolina. You don’t want to lose at home to the ACC’s most dysfunctional program. But given the Tar Heels at least beat a Big 12 foe, it’s certainly a possibility. The conference schedule-makers did them no favors by then sending Clemson on a cross-country trip on a short week to play a Friday night game at Cal.
Say the Tigers beat Georgia Southern this week, but lose those two to fall to 1-3. Would you believe they then host Week 1’s most dominant team besides LSU in Miami? And then they’re off! Suppose they lose that game in a similar fashion to last week’s, drop to 1-4 and then have to sulk in that for two weeks. That’s when I’d truly believe Dabo is toast.
At this point, I should mention that Dabo is only 56. But I have an easier time seeing him getting fired (which I would not have said prior to Saturday) than I do picturing him on a sideline next year wearing a Baylor or Maryland hat. The day he’s done at Clemson, I assume he’ll either start popping up next to Jimbo Fisher on ACC Network or coaching a high school team in Alabama. And if that’s the case, perhaps the two sides could negotiate some sort of exit deal where he takes less than $57 million but gets to say it was his choice.
Dabo Swinney, Clemson are the biggest losers from Week 1
Manny Navarro
I know it is dangerous to read too much into Week 1 performances, but what grabbed your attention, particularly from the teams that struggled to put away lesser opponents? For me, seeing Oregon surrender over seven yards per pass attempt by Boise State, as well as USC’s surprisingly developed passing attack the last two weeks, has me thinking that the USC-Oregon game on Sept. 26 might be more of a toss-up than predicted. — Tony T.
That’s a fair assessment. I’d caution that Boise State is much better than either of USC’s opponents so far, San Jose State or Fresno State. But the Trojans took care of business, and their No. 1 recruiting class has already produced two instant-impact receivers in freshmen Trent Mosley and Kayden Dixon-Wyatt. I did not come out of Saturday panicking about the Ducks, but I admittedly did not expect Broncos QB Maddux Madsen to have as much success as he did. Though Boise has its own stud freshman receiver in Rasean Jones.
The thing is, hardly any teams we expected to be good struggled with lesser opponents. It was a whole lot of blowouts, outside of Oregon and Michigan.
I will say, I was not particularly impressed with No. 17 Washington against a rebuilding Washington State team. And Jedd Fisch already has a mini-crisis on his hands, as his top two running backs on Sunday, Jayden Limar and Quaid Carr, are already out with injuries. The next guy up, Troy transfer Trey Cooley, has only played in three games since 2024. The Huskies may have to lean even more heavily than they already are on QB Demond Williams Jr., who was their leading rusher against the Cougs.
But most of my big takeaways were how good some teams looked. LSU for one, but I was also at the Miami-Stanford game on Friday night when Darian Mensah and Malachi Toney looked like they were running routes on air. I have a feeling that offense is going to score 40-plus points every week in ACC play. Notre Dame will be the only team on its schedule with athletes to match up.
If SMU can get out of its own way, it’s going to be a force in the ACC, too. Either Florida State is painfully slow or the Mustangs are bursting with speed. They averaged 8.7 yards per play (to FSU’s 4.8) and got 20-plus-yard gains from six players. Running back Kendrick Raphael (Cal) and receivers Yannick Smith (East Carolina) and Jalen Hale (Alabama) were big additions.
And here’s one under-the-radar team: Colorado State. I did not expect Jim Mora’s new team, with its 76 new players, to lay the hammer down on rival Wyoming in its first game as a Pac-12 member. Former Oklahoma State QB Hauss Hejny threw five touchdowns. Which was four more than new Oklahoma State QB Drew Mestemaker.
Notre Dame fan here. Current get-in prices for LSU/Ole Miss and Miami/ND are $577 and $697, respectively. Other get-in prices for some games include: Texas/Texas A&M ($585), Ohio State/Indiana ($474), Notre Dame/BYU ($597) and Ohio State/Texas ($466). Has it ever been more expensive to be a college football fan? With all the $ flowing around college sports, surely we can find some room to be reasonable for the fans! — Jordan L
It’s never been more expensive to be a fan of any popular team, comedian, band or anyone else who performs in live events. See: This summer’s World Cup. That’s because there’s no such thing as “face value” anymore.
Almost every sports franchise/venue now uses “dynamic pricing,” in which the market sets prices rather than the other way around. The higher the demand for the game (like the ones above), the higher they can set the prices, because they know people will buy them. And they do that in part because if, say, Notre Dame decided to do their fans a favor and price all those Miami tickets for just $50, brokers would immediately buy them up, turn around and sell them for $577.
It’s particularly profound in college football because the vast majority of those major programs are filled with season ticket holders. And they’re not selling theirs for the biggest games.
As a consumer myself for non-college football things, it’s incredibly frustrating. Because there’s no outsmarting the brokers. Sometimes, if you buy too soon, you find out two months later you could have gotten the same tickets for half the price. And sometimes, if you wait too long, there are slim pickings by the time you get to the game.
My best advice: Try to buy directly from the school when they first go on sale, but if they sell out, don’t panic and immediately hop over to StubHub. The market is never higher than at that exact moment. Ideally, wait as long as you can bear because prices do eventually go down. Here in the Bay Area, even pedestrian Golden State Warriors tickets are ridiculously expensive, but a couple of times I’ve waited and bought them in the car on the way to the game.
I’m sure the commenters may have some tips of their own.