Greetings everyone to what amounts to, in terms of games played, the end of week 1. There have now been 82 college games played through 4 weeks. 2 teams (Texas St and UTEP) have played 4 times while 176 haven’t played yet (that will reduce with the conferences starting later). In all, 81 teams have played at least 1 game. I say this is the equivalent of 1 week because if 2020 had been a normal year, we would have around the same number of late August/first week of September (week 0 and week 1) games.
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The SEC joined the ranks of active conferences this past week adding to the ACC, Big 12, American, Conference USA, and Sun Belt (along with some of the independents and scattering of rebel FCS squads). In some ways, I bet this feels like the early days of college football: the late 1800s when schedules were 2-5 games long, usually. Virginia, Virginia Tech, Baylor, TCU, and East Carolina finally got to play after a few postponements/ cancellations.
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If 2020 had been a normal year, this week would have been the initial rankings – the beginning of 4 posts a week that, I sincerely hope, were entertaining enough to generate discussion. After all, what is more fun to talk about this time of year that <fill in your favorite team or conference> football. This year, however, we are still weeks away from a meaningful ranking. We simply need more teams to play more games – awesome even, cough, without the GCR, but necessary for the GCR algorithm to work. Once we get teams to play 4-5 games, the math will do its thing. The sheer number of cancelled games even after restart along with conferences having different start dates is going to take its toll – but, we will persevere and give it the old college try. That means the rankings may not be available every week, but I will publish as soon as I can.
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The great news is more conferences are returning: Big 10, Pac 12, MAC, Mountain West. That means all of the FBS will play at least a truncated schedule sometime before mid-December. We are still waiting for the FCS plans, but at least the Big Boys are going to be back in town. The other rumor I’ve heard is that all FBS teams who play at least one game prior to December 1 will be eligible for a bowl game (the 6 wins to be eligible clearly will not work this year), so, to quote Jim Carrey, “you’re saying there’s a chance”. Yes, Jim, there’s a chance for everyone. I’d love to see 2 really bad teams play in what could be renamed, just for 2020, as the Toilet Bowl. Why not? It’s 2020. We can put up with anything they throw at us, right?
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That’s it for today. As more teams are playing (a new 2020 record of 32 games in one weekend – whoo hoo!!!), I’ll post at least weekly until there is enough information to post more often. Cheers, and onward we push! Thanks for reading, sharing, and commenting, G
