After a little appetizer last weekend, the college football season gets underway for real this week, beginning with 16 games featuring FBS teams tonight. The biggest games are Pitt–West Virginia tonight (the return of a classic rivalry), Georgia-Oregon, Cincinnati-Arkansas and Utah-Florida on Saturday, Florida State–LSU on Sunday and Clemson–Georgia Tech on Monday.

That looks like a compelling start to what should be a compelling season. Here are some of the biggest story lines to keep an eye on this year.

Alabama’s continued dominance

The Crimson Tide enter the season ranked first in the AP poll for the seventh time under Nick Saban. They already have a collection of talent few teams in the country can rival and now they’re playing this season with something to prove after losing to SEC rival Georgia in the national title game. A motivated Alabama team sounds like the rest of college football’s worst nightmare. This is a team that returns Heisman-winning quarterback Bryce Young and star linebackers Will Anderson Jr. (a leading Heisman candidate himself) and Henry To'oto'o. It isn’t a surprise that all four of our college football experts polled picked the Tide to earn the No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff, and three of the four picked them to win the title.

So who else could win the title?

Alabama championships (or, at least, championship-game appearances) have felt somewhat inevitable for a while now, but as last year’s game against Georgia showed, Bama is fallible. Richard Johnson thinks Ohio State will emerge victorious in January:

In a rematch of the 2020 national title game, Ohio State’s defense will look less outmatched facing a Tide offense that isn’t that much of a juggernaut. And that’s really all this Ohio State team needs to get the job done this year, considering on offense it’ll be able to basically score at will on anyone.

Lincoln Riley’s first season in L.A.

The pressure was already going to be on Riley and USC when he was first hired—and then the Trojans went out and signed up for the Big Ten (in 2024). After reaching such great heights under Pete Carroll in the mid-2000s, USC has only one top-10 finish in the postseason AP poll over the last decade. When you’re paying Riley a reported $110 million, you’re paying for national-championship contention. John Garcia Jr. and Ross Dellenger think the Trojans could be Playoff-bound in Riley’s first season in charge. Both guys point to the impressive collection of offensive talent USC has, led by quarterback Caleb Williams (who followed Riley from Oklahoma) and Pitt transfer receiver Jordan Addison.

Players to watch

Williams and Addison both earned first-team spots on our preseason All-American team. They’re joined by a bunch of guys from Alabama and Ohio State. The Tide have six players named first- and second-team All-American, including defensive backs Eli Ricks and Jordan Battle. The Buckeyes have four, all on offense. Running back TreVeyon Henderson, receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba and offensive tackle Paris Johnson Jr. earned first-team honors, while quarterback C.J. Stroud was named to the second team.

Don’t forget about the other guys

There are 131 teams in the FBS. Only one of them gets to win the national championship, but what makes college football so popular is everything that happens outside of the title picture. What will Wake Forest’s 6'5" receiver A.T. Perry, who caught 15 touchdowns last season, do for an encore? Can North Carolina State, ranked in the preseason AP poll for the first time since Philip Rivers’s senior year, actually live up to the hype? Who will be this year’s Bailey Zappe, the small-school quarterback who puts up ridiculous stats? There’s a lot to look forward to outside of Tuscaloosa and Columbus.

The best of Sports Illustrated

Today’s Daily Cover is one of my favorite annual SI pieces—Conor Orr’s predictions for every game of the NFL season.

Jon Wertheim calls Serena Williams’s second-round victory over Anett Kontaveit “one of the more stunning results I’ve seen in a long time.” … Orr isn’t buying Jon Gruden’s plea for another chance in the NFL. … Albert Breer explains why the Niners ended up holding on to Jimmy Garoppolo. … Avi Creditor breaks down USMNT striker Ricardo Pepi’s loan move to the Netherlands.

Around the sports world

Today is European soccer’s transfer deadline, and we’re keeping track of all the big moves here. … Talks between the Knicks and Jazz about Donovan Mitchell might not be dead after all. … White Sox manager Tony La Russa will be away from the team indefinitely due to an undisclosed medical issue. … A 16-year-old golfer in Wisconsin made two holes-in-one in a span of 20 minutes. … All sorts of celebrities came out to watch Serena Williams at the U.S. Open. … The Sabres are bringing back their “goathead” logo for their new alternate uniforms.

The top five...

… things I saw yesterday:

5. These facts about Serena Williams’s longevity.

4. Washington offensive lineman Nate Kalepo’s typical McDonald’s order.

3. Steven Kwan’s catch to start a great double play.

2. Brandon Nimmo’s home run robbery.

1. Mets closer Edwin Díaz’s entrance with Timmy Trumpet performing live.

SIQ

Today is the anniversary of Appalachian State’s famous upset over Michigan in 2007. The Wolverines actually started 0–2 that year, after getting blown out at home the next week by which out-of-conference foe?

Utah
Notre Dame
Oregon
Pitt

Yesterday’s SIQ: On Aug. 31, 1903, which New York Giants pitcher earned complete-game victories in both ends of a doubleheader for the third time that month?

Christy Mathewson
Luther Taylor
Jack Cronin
Joe McGinnity

Answer: Joe McGinnity. I couldn’t believe this fact when I first came across it. On Aug. 1 against the Braves, Aug. 8 against the Dodgers and Aug. 31 against the Phillies, McGinnity not only started both games of a doubleheader, he pitched the full nine innings in each game as his team won. He didn’t allow more than three runs in any of those games. I wish we had pitch-count data for games that long ago because I’m dying to know just how many pitches he had to throw in a single day.

Starting both ends of a doubleheader was not uncommon for McGinnity. He also did it twice in 1901 (Sept. 3 and 12) and once in ’06 (Aug. 16), but those three instances in August ’03 were the only time he had complete-game victories in both games.

And McGinnity is far from the only guy to earn two complete-game victories on the same day. It’s been accomplished 45 times by 37 pitchers, but not in almost 100 years. The most recent example was Dutch Levsen in 1926.

McGinnity accomplished the feat more times than anybody else, which probably shouldn’t be a surprise. His unusual pitching motion made him uniquely capable of such endurance. Here’s how Don Doxsie described it in McGinnity’s SABR biography:

Although he was one of the biggest men in the major leagues at the dawn of the 20th century, at 5-foot-11 and 206 pounds, he was hardly a power pitcher. In his prime years, he relied almost exclusively on a baffling, rising curve ball that was so dear to him he gave it a nickname, “Old Sal.” He used a peculiar underarm pitching style but also sometimes threw a devastating sinker with a more conventional overhand motion. John McGraw often said he thought the use of two radically different pitching motions may have lessened the strain on his arm and contributed to making him so durable. He said that when pitching his doubleheaders, McGinnity would sometimes throw one game overhand and work the other game with underarm motion.

“It was as different as if two pitchers had been working,” [Giants manager John] McGraw said.

McGinnity died of bladder cancer at 58 in 1929. He was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame in ’46.

From the Vault: Sept. 1, 1980

I’ve seen a lot of SI covers during my years as a reader and while writing this newsletter, and I have to say—this one is up there with the best of them. It looks like a cologne ad. Tell me you wouldn’t want to smell like the baddest cat in the game.

The player featured is one I honestly hadn’t heard of before. But on the eve of the 1980 college football season, Pitt defensive end Hugh Green was one of the most feared players in the nation, as Douglas S. Looney wrote in the cover story:

Conservative evaluators of college football talent say Green is the defensive player in what should be a vintage year for that category. Others proclaim that Green is so easily the best collegiate player—on offense or defense—that he has lapped the field. To Frank Broyles, athletic director at Arkansas, Green is “all-world.” Syracuse Coach Frank Maloney believes Green’s skills are so superior that “he just shouldn’t be playing college football.”

Looney argued that Green should have been a preseason favorite for the Heisman Trophy, a bold statement considering that no defensive player had ever won it before. Green ended up finishing second in Heisman voting behind South Carolina running back George Rogers. What makes that fact truly amazing is that, while voters around the country could pick up a newspaper and see Rogers’s stats, Green’s contributions weren’t visible in a box score. The NCAA didn’t start tabulating sacks until 2000. (The NFL didn’t even count sacks as an official stat until 1982.)

Green did add quite a bit of hardware to his trophy case that year, though. He won the Walter Camp, Maxwell and Lombardi awards. It was quite a career for a guy who wasn’t introduced to football until he was a teenager. Green was raised by his aunt and uncle in Natchez, Miss., and first started playing football as a way to stay out of trouble. Here’s how Looney described his life before Pittsburgh:

Back then, a big time for Green consisted of rolling a tire down the street with a stick during the day and sitting on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi at night. He used to spend a lot of time under the bridge that leads to Vidalia, fishing for perch and catfish, but even that was not exactly a thrill-a-minute activity. “I never caught much,” says Green. “I’d just beat at the water with my pole.” When he was 13, Hugh ran away from home. He slept overnight on a parked bus in Natchez. The next morning a policeman spotted him sitting in a tree overlooking the Mississippi, sulking. “How old are you?” the cop shouted up to the youngster. Said Green, “Thirty-five.” That witticism got him thrown into jail. A kindly judge later said to Hugh, who was obviously well built even then, “You ever tried football? That would be better for you than running away.” Green took his advice.

That judge had a good eye for talent. After his career at Pitt, Green was taken by the Buccaneers with the seventh pick in the 1981 NFL draft. He also played for the Dolphins during an 11-year NFL career and in ’96 was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

Check out more of SI’s archives and historic images at vault.si.com.

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