The mascot code and other takeaways from college football's wonderful return
Even a stuffed duck has to live by a code
I’m going to show you something I still have nightmares about.
I was a mascot at Syracuse University, and the benefit to wearing a giant orange around your entire upper body is that it becomes very hard for it to fall off your body. However, it did almost happen a handful of times, and induced massive panic each occurrence.
Now, as a head wearing mascot, this is very obviously far more likely, but the Oregon Duck, aka Puddles, is one of college mascoting’s royalty. So to see this happen is empathy and panic inducing for this retired mascot, and I hope the kid is able to sleep and not wake up in a panic reliving this moment. Because I sure would.
To the football! Shameless plug for my Syracuse Orange podcast.
Team I’m Most Interested In - Florida State
Look, when you take down Alabama, people will notice. When you take down Alabama as a double digit underdog? People really notice. When you take down Alabama coming off a 2-10 season where your only non-FCS win a four point win over a very bad team? People are looking for a reason to jump back on the bandwagon.
The Seminoles jumped up to 31st in SP+, and are now ranked 14th in the country. They look like they have a quarterback who can do a lot of what Jordan Travis did in 2023 during their undefeated run through the ACC. They look like they fixed a lot of the offensive line issues that were an obvious hole in 2024. Their defense looked great, even if Alabama clearly has issues at quarterback. After the Clemson defeat to LSU (more on that in a minute), people are looking for a new team to wear the ACC crown. The ‘Noles have a fairly soft schedule for the next month (East Texas A&M, Kent State, Virginia) before getting the Miami Hurricanes at home.
Team I’m Most Concerned With - Baylor
The Big 12 is about as wide open as you can expect, so no team should be counted out, but Baylor’s preseason hype around making noise in the conference title race just lost a lot of steam. Auburn is not a bad football team by any stretch of the imagination, but we’re not that far removed from a conversation about firing head coach Dave Aranda and things can snowball very quickly.
Auburn absolutely destroyed Baylor on the ground, and the defense did very little to cause any sort of concern for the Tigers. This is a major issue considering defense is Aranda’s side of the ball, and the story of the offseason story was that he was taking more control and trying to innovate. The offense was not bad, the but rushing attack was not effective and if the defense is going to be a weakness, the ability to control the tempo of a game becomes a key factor for the offensive gameplay. Unfortunately for Baylor, things do not get any easier in Week 2: they face 17th ranked SMU and their top 15 offense according to SP+.
Team I’m Most Confused With - LSU
I spent most of last season doing the Level Up! podcast predictions being wrong about Brian Kelly’s Tigers, and that did not stop this season. I assumed Clemson would handle business at home, but not only did they lose, but they looked bad in the process. But! The numbers would tell you otherwise:
This feels a lot like what we went through last season with the Tigers: the wins never really match the stats with big wins, and then the losses to superior teams come hard and fast. The Tigers have six(!) more games against teams currently ranked in the top 25, and I’m not sure they’re good enough to go through that stretch unscathed. But do they go 4-2 in those games? There’s certainly a part of me that thinks they could go 2-4. But SP+ has them as the 5th best team in the country right now. Maybe this is the year Kelly finally turns a major corner.