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Amid much fuss about college football growing too professional, getting too volatile in its rosters, succumbing to dreary conference realignment or crying out for a czar even in a world with too many czars running around already, this weird concoction of a sport goes and does something weird. It hatches a new season rich in the virtue of freshness.
Everywhere you look, from Atlanta to Lubbock back over to Champaign and Bloomington and on down to Nashville - maybe especially Nashville - you might spot something newfangled and refreshing and maybe even funky. If there's staleness in the future because the big conferences keep hoarding power and money, that staleness has yet to alight.
"Surreal," Vanderbilt edge rusher and South Carolina native Miles Capers told reporters in South Carolina last Saturday night after Vanderbilt of Nashville clobbered then-No. 11 South Carolina, 31-7, and some welcome surrealism has blanketed a sport long dominated by aristocracies. It gives hope to the wish of ever-wise TCU coach Sonny Dykes, spoken in July at the media days of the newly delicious Big 12: "What makes the NFL great is there are probably 16 or 18 teams that have a legitimate chance to win a Super Bowl every year. Is that the case in college football? No, it's certainly not. We need to have as much parity in the game as we can possibly have."
One of the utmost expressions of parity this decade came from one of Dykes's teams, of course, when TCU reached the national championship game in January 2023 (and parity ran up against reality). At that time, Dykes indicated the transfer portal might help bring more surprising playoff teams even if the money imbalances might not. And while parity can look doomed when the bigwigs look richer, fans of semi-forgotten sorts such as Illinois (3-0) and Georgia Tech (3-0), among others, can speak of playoff hopes without sounding as if you would want to run away from them while screaming. In Vanderbilt (3-0), with its eight winning seasons in the past 65, the sport has a beacon of transfer-era creativity, a favorite to reach Alabama on Oct. 11 at 5-0.
The Big 12 seemed forlorn when Texas and Oklahoma left it for the SEC, and it's still alongside the ACC as financial underlings to the SEC and Big Ten, lending the worry that the giants might hog all the players in this new era of player compensation. Yet if Americans can look past the allure of the brands for a minute, the Big 12 has become the rowdiest thing going. A frisky team from a semi-forgotten program forecast as last place last season, Arizona State, wriggled out of a four-team logjam atop the league on tiebreakers, won the conference title game and danced with Texas in the goose-bumpiest of the 11 playoff games. Already this new season there's the kind of big game with a healthy eccentricity about it: No. 17 Texas Tech (3-0) at No. 16 Utah (3-0).
How's this for freshness: No. 9 Illinois will go to No. 19 Indiana (3-0) with both ranked at the same time on the same field for the first time since 1950. Illinois came to this season as a hip pick to thrive after its 10-3 run through last season and with its quarterback, Luke Altmyer, on preseason award watch lists. Indiana played the role of fresh darling last season and carried its 11-1 record right on into the first 12-team College Football Playoff bracket. "Look, last year, before the season started, we were the favorite in three games," second-year coach Curt Cignetti told reporters in Bloomington this week. "We were picked 17th out of 18 [Big Ten] teams. So every Big Ten game we went into, we were an underdog before the season started, maybe with the exception of Purdue. So last year's in the books. It's a new year. This is a good football team. We are a good football team."
Of all the good football teams, No. 20 Vanderbilt might melt a good heart most. Long overrun by its SEC brethren while it committed the sin of emphasizing academics over football, it's chockablock with novel storylines. The now-famous quarterback in a second Vanderbilt season and a sixth overall, Diego Pavia, arrived last season by way of New Mexico Military Institute and New Mexico State. A brilliant wide receiver with 12 catches, Tre Richardson, played junior college at Hutchison (Kansas) and Division II at Washburn (Kansas), meaning he has been first-team all-Kansas Jayhawk Community College Conference on special teams and Mid-American Intercollegiate Athletics Association at wideout. A compelling tight end, Eli Stowers, went through Texas A&M and New Mexico State. A key defender, safety CJ Heard, came from Florida Atlantic. Another, linebacker Randon Fontenette, came from TCU. A walk-on linebacker, Nick Rinaldi, hails from Massachusetts, and a running back with two carries for 79 yards and two touchdowns, Jamezell Lassiter, grew up in Rhode Island.
And the understated 43-year-old coaching them in his fifth Vanderbilt season originally came from baseball (as did Dykes). Clark Lea played catcher at Birmingham-Southern and Belmont, then fullback at Vanderbilt (2002-04), where he rushed nine times for 20 yards, caught three passes for 39 and derived inspiration even from a program that spent his three seasons scrounging for six wins. He is that rare soul who has coached linebackers at six places: Bowling Green, Syracuse, South Dakota State, UCLA, Wake Forest and Notre Dame.
He seems to have built this latest thing toward this moment not just brick-by-brick but grain-by-grain, even as that win over then-No. 1 Alabama last year might have counted as a whole brick. Now his team, with a dash of speed bygone Vanderbilts might have lacked, has gone on the Power Four road for two straight Saturday nights and held the home teams scoreless after halftime, outscoring Virginia Tech 34-0 in the second half and outgaining it 307-21 before whomping South Carolina to prove the former game wasn't all about a troubled Virginia Tech. Now Capers told reporters about how Pavia showed a telling level of self-confidence: "He told me all this week [before South Carolina], ‘I'm going to get you this win.'" He - and they - did, so they all face the trickiness of a home game with Georgia State, which up and beat Vanderbilt, 36-32, last year in Atlanta, three weeks before the Alabama heights. Lea talks of "jarring performances" - such as 36-32 - "that ultimately allow you to find your actual identity" and of hoping to avoid "a sense of arrival at any point during the season."
"[Georgia State] taught us an important lesson," Lea told reporters in Nashville, "and last year's team needed that as a reminder of the fact that we can't skip steps and we can't make assumptions and we can't leave it to chance and we can't roll the ball out on Saturday and expect to be better than anybody we play. It's not where our program is right now. We have to be focused, and we have to be intentional and purposeful in our work."
In those words lies one of the intrigues of this September: how Vanderbilt might cope with prosperity. That's certainly fresh.
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Previously:
• Three Jewish coaches reach a Final Four, 20 years after that day at a deli