A quick note before we get into it: starting today, you’ll be hearing from The Precedent a little more often. Every Monday during the college football season, you’ll get “Weekend Precedent,” a rundown of what happened over the weekend along with updated rankings. Then every Friday morning, look for “Weekend Viewing Guide,” a preview of the games worth your time that weekend. Same newsletter, same voice, just more of it during football season. Now, onto the weekend that was.
Weekend Recap
One housekeeping note before diving in: this recap and this week’s numbers cover games played through Saturday. Three more Week 1 games are still ahead as of this writing, Washington State at Washington, Louisville against Ole Miss in Nashville, and Wisconsin against Notre Dame at Lambeau Field, all on Sunday, plus one more Monday night. Those results will show up in next week’s numbers rather than this week’s. Consider this the first 47 games of Week 1, not the whole picture.
Week 1 did what Week 1 is supposed to do so far. Across those 47 games and 2,389 combined points, it exposed who actually built something during the offseason and who is still running on reputation. Home teams won at an 80.9 percent clip, and only 10 of the 47 games, about one in five, were decided by a single score. Most weekends aren’t this lopsided this early.
Start in Baton Rouge, where Lane Kiffin’s LSU debut turned into the sport’s first real statement game. Sam Leavitt threw for 230 yards and ran for 113 more with two scores on the ground, and LSU’s defense held Clemson to one first down in the entire first half. The final was 51-10, LSU’s fourth straight opening-week win over a program that used to define the sport, and Clemson has now dropped four consecutive season openers without scoring more than 10 points in any of them. That’s not a slow start anymore. That’s a pattern.
The game carried an extra layer of theater. A Louisiana judge had granted an injunction clearing former Ole Miss players Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris to return to college football at LSU. The SEC didn’t just object. It sued. On Thursday, the conference filed suit against LSU, Kiffin, and university leadership in federal court in Alabama, accusing the program of running a “deliberate and coordinated campaign” to recruit players who’d already signed NFL contracts. Kiffin left both players off the roster for the opener anyway, unwilling to test the SEC’s patience before the legal fight plays out. He didn’t need them. LSU led 31-3 at halftime, and when ESPN’s Holly Rowe wrapped an interview with him at the break, Kiffin walked away, then turned back to a hot mic and said, “Imagine if we had pro players.” He’d also used the two-hour weather delay to his advantage, refusing to shorten Clemson’s stay in the visitors’ locker room. “That locker room sucks over there,” he said afterward, treating the discomfort as a legitimate part of the game plan.
Michigan needed a much stranger path to 1-0. Trailing Western Michigan 12-7 in the final seconds, Bryce Underwood’s first Hail Mary sailed out of the end zone with the clock reading zeroes. Officials reviewed it, put one second back on, and Underwood connected with Utah transfer JJ Buchanan on the second attempt to win it, 13-12. Western Michigan played the better game for nearly sixty minutes. The extra second is the part people will remember.
Oregon needed 378 yards and three touchdowns from Dante Moore, including a 62-yard go-ahead strike, to get past Boise State 34-27. The Ducks survived. Boise State looked like a team that could cause real problems for someone in the playoff picture later this year.
Everyone else with something to prove mostly proved it. Ohio State ran up 56 points on Ball State behind Julian Sayin and Jeremiah Smith. Texas put up 59 on Texas State, with Arch Manning throwing four touchdowns. Miami’s Darian Mensah threw for 401 yards and five scores in a 45-6 rout of Stanford. Georgia, Alabama, Penn State, Texas A&M and Iowa all posted comfortable wins that told you exactly what you expected to hear.
Not everyone got the easy version of Week 1. Auburn survived a Baylor two-point try at the goal line to win 17-16. Colorado beat Georgia Tech 14-13 on a blocked field goal as time expired Thursday. And Rutgers, reportedly paying $1.55 million to host a home opener, lost to UMass, a 29.5-point underdog that hadn’t won a game in sixteen tries.
Rankings Talk
Since this is the first issue where numbers show up alongside the writing, it’s worth explaining what you’re actually looking at.
Starting this season, The Precedent is tracking its own ranking system for college football, the Precedent College Football Ratings, built from a simple formula: a team’s win percentage multiplied by the win percentage of the teams it’s played. The idea is to reward teams for beating good opponents, not just for winning games against whoever happened to be on the schedule. A team that goes 3-0 against three good teams should rate differently than a team that goes 3-0 against three bad ones. That’s the whole premise, and over the course of a season it tends to separate the teams that are actually good from the teams that just look good on paper.
One thing worth being clear about up front: the score of the game doesn’t matter to this formula, only the result. The objective is to win, not to cover a point spread, so a team that wins by one point gets treated exactly the same as a team that wins by fifty. Blowouts don’t earn bonus credit and close calls don’t get penalized. Winning is winning.
Here’s the catch for week one specifically: the formula can’t do its job yet. Week 1 actually spans two separate weekends of games, so a handful of teams, Memphis and USC among them, have already played twice. But that’s still a small enough group that it doesn’t move the needle. Almost every team is sitting at either 1.0 times 0.0, if they won, or 0.0 times something, if they lost. Nobody has played a big enough slate yet for the math to tell anyone apart. That’s not a bug and it’s not the system failing on its debut. It just needs more games in the bank before it can carry real signal, and from that point on, this section is where the actual numbers get discussed.
For now, what we can talk about honestly is the raw win-loss record, and that tells its own story. The SEC went a perfect 9-0 in Week 1’s first 47 games. The Big Ten went 12-1. Every other conference finished with a losing or middling record, and the newly reconstituted eight-team Pac-12, the one that added Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, San Diego State, Utah State and Texas State, opened its first season together at a rough 1-4.
The preseason poll held up better than the weekend’s chaos would suggest. Not a single team in the preseason AP Top 25 has lost yet, and USC is the only ranked team already sitting at 2-0. The bigger story is what happened just outside the rankings. Ten teams that received preseason votes without cracking the Top 25 have already played, and nine of them lost. Clemson picked up 112 votes and is 0-1. Boise State (43 votes), TCU (11), Oklahoma State (8), Georgia Tech (4), California (2), Liberty (1), Tulane (1), and Western Michigan (1) all opened 0-1 as well. UNLV (4 votes) is the only one of the bunch that’s even 1-1. That’s about as clean a gap between “ranked” and “almost ranked” as you’ll see all year.
The Rankings
Conference standings by raw record (FBS games only), Week 1
SEC: 9-0 (1.000)
Big Ten: 12-1 (0.923)
ACC: 8-6 (0.571)
Big 12: 4-3 (0.571)
American: 4-5 (0.444)
Mountain West: 5-7 (0.417)
Sun Belt: 2-4 (0.333)
Pac-12: 1-4 (0.200)
Mid-American: 2-10 (0.167)
Conference USA: 0-7 (0.000)
Team ratings will show up here once there’s enough separation in the data to say something meaningful. With 51 of 138 teams still waiting on their opener, that’s likely another week or two out.
Loose Ends
Indiana’s Josh Hoover played through a bloody face and still threw four touchdowns in the defending champs’ opener.
Hawaii is the only team in the country sitting at 0-2. Everyone else who’s lost has only played once.
Memphis and USC are the only two teams at 2-0.
Florida scored more points than anyone in Week 1, putting up 66. Mississippi State (62), Texas (59) and Pittsburgh (59) followed.
Three FCS teams beat FBS opponents: The Citadel over Charlotte in triple overtime, Tarleton State at Bowling Green, and Idaho State at Utah State.
The scoreboard took a beating elsewhere too. Louisiana Tech hung 80 on Northwestern State, Virginia Tech put up 73 on VMI, and Kansas State beat Nicholls 71-3.
Arkansas’ mascot Tusk VII sat out a heat-advisory opener, and a game elsewhere ended in a tie when a 108-degree heat index made overtime untenable.
FBS newcomer North Dakota State opened 1-0. Fellow newcomer Sacramento State opened 0-1.
Looking Ahead
Ohio State and Texas both did exactly what they were supposed to do against overmatched openers, which sets up the first real test of the season. The two meet next Saturday in Austin, and it’s the first game all year where nobody can hide behind a soft schedule. That’s where Weekend Precedent picks back up next week.
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Written by Bob Sloop