College Pigskin – 2026, Week 1

There isn’t much to talk about in week one. You know the drill. The big teams play at home, padding their resumes against jobbers.

Jobbers?

Maybe you remember the wrestling “jobbers.” That’s really what they were called, and their “job” was to make the headliners look good. Back in the day, the televised wrestling matches served no purpose other than to develop and market story lines for the live events. In the TV matches, no headliners clashed. The heroes du jour would defeat some poor jobbers in short order with “scientific” moves. The main villains would abuse other jobbers with trash talk and dirty tricks, while boiling over with braggadocio about how they would do the same to our heroes in the live events.

The same jobbers came out every week to get slaughtered. Among the notorious perpetual losers were such luminaries as The Duke of Dorchester, Iron Mike Sharpe, the Brooklyn Brawler, Barry Horowitz, and Leaping Lanny Poffo, who happened to be the son of one wrestling legend, Angelo Poffo, and the brother of another, The Macho Man. The first four usually lost to heroes, while Poffo normally squared off against heels. Four of those guys were at least trying to be colorful, with the nicknames and all. Iron Mike Sharpe even billed himself as “Canada’s Greatest Athlete.” (Sorry, Gretzky!) As for the fifth guy, I don’t know what the deal was with Barry Horowitz. He could have been “Bart Howitzer” or “the Florida Flash,” but no-o-o-o-o. He just remained plain old Barry Horowitz. That’s not a moniker likely to strike fear into your heart, unless he’s auditing your tax returns.

Anyway, discarding my light racism and moving on to the real topic of this post, college football also has its jobber matches. Uninspiring programs manage to make big bucks by traveling to the home stadiums of powerhouse teams, fully expecting to lose by 40 or more. You recognize some of the names: Bethune-Cookman, UAB, Austin Peay, Lindenwood, Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Southern Utah, Albany, Akron, Charleston Southern, Gardner-Webb, Western Kentucky, Western Michigan, Western Carolina … basically any team that starts with “Western.”

As a general matter of honor, there are two conventions that apply to jobber games: (1) the big teams usually only schedule these teams in the first weeks of the season, before conference play begins, although the SEC sneaks in a “cupcake week” in November; (2) the big teams shouldn’t run up the score any higher than 70. Sometimes the jobbers are so weak that the big teams go over 70 unintentionally, even when they play all of their reserves, because their fourth-stringers keep scoring. They try to tamp it down. They use every running back and every receiver. By the end of the game they’re calling plays for members of the marching band, but even that sometimes fails. Sometimes the chubby tuba guy rushes for a first down.

Unlike the wrestling jobbers, one of the patsy teams occasionally receives the smile of Lady Fortune and wins a game against a power team. A few years back, NIU defeated #5 Notre Dame on the Irish home field in South Bend. That was the first win in history for a Mid-American Conference team against an AP top-five team, following 51 consecutive losses. If you saw that coming, you could have been a rich man. NIU paid off 25-1 on a bet to win outright. It has not been reported how much action was on NIU to win outright, but probably not much, unless Nostradamus is still alive and follows American college football.

No such surprise happened this week, but maybe one should have. Western Michigan had mighty Michigan defeated 12-7, and the Broncos were celebrating on the field after Michigan missed a last-ditch Hail Mary. But it was not to be. Michigan got the do-over treatment formerly reserved only for the Russian Olympic basketball team. They were going to get more Hail Marys than a full rosary. Officials called for a review. Although TV replays showed the clock hitting zero before the ball hit the hands of a Western Michigan defender, officials ruled there was one left on the official game clock. Mary answered the second prayer, and the Wolverines got the W. Win or not, are they so weak that they almost lost to a MAC team? We’ll find out next week when they face Oklahoma.

The other jobber games went as expected. The big teams put up a lot of scores in the 50s and 60s, and their opponents put up a lot of single figures.

There were a few legit games:

– #2 Oregon took on always-tough Boise State, and emerged with a 34-27 win.

– #4 Notre Dame took on Wisconsin, which sounds like a good match, but the Badgers’ program has been struggling in recent years, so the Irish won by four TDs.

– Ole Miss and Louisville, both in the top 25, battled to a standstill. Ole Miss broke the tie with three seconds left.

– LSU-Clemson looked like it would be a good match-up, but LSU was much better than expected, or Clemson much worse, or both. It was a blow-out, 51-10.

Preseason rankings:

Sagarin has seven teams standing above the others.

1 THE Ohio State University A = 102.33
2 Oregon A = 101.04
3 Notre Dame A = 100.33
4 Indiana A = 99.79
5 Texas A = 97.91
6 Georgia A = 96.82
7 Miami-Florida A = 95.22

The human polls fill out the top seven slots with the same teams in a slightly different order.

– I suppose Oregon will drop behind the Irish after posting a close-call victory against Boise while Notre Dame was running roughshod over a Big Ten team. The Ducks may even fall lower than #3.

– LSU looked so strong they may sneak past some of the big seven above.

Scoreboard.

As I expected, Oregon dropped on both the computer rankings and the human polls, while Notre Dame improved on both.

The chart below lists the AP top 25, and their Sagarin rankings. The final column shows how many places higher they are rated by the sportswriters. I suppose that means that the teams at the top are theoretically overrated and the teams at the bottom are underrated, but:

(1) I don’t put much stock in the computers after one week. They don’t have enough info to make a worthwhile calculation.

(2) Humans love to vote up teams outside the Big Two (SEC and Big Ten) because humans are dreamers and want bullies to topple. I’m no exception. I would love to see Texas Tech, my nephew’s alma mater, topple the SEC and Big Ten powers, because I am a dreamer as well. I would also love to see Fordham beat Ohio State and Don Quixote defeat the windmill.

WTF o’ the week:

Texas Tech is favored by 26.5 over Oregon State. Sagarin suggests they are only about 13 points apart. Vegas is setting the odds as if it were a jobber game.