Every year, college football’s opening weekend hands you a stack of information you’re contractually required to overreact to and then quietly disown by October. A team beats a bad opponent by 40 and you decide they’re back. A team loses to a worse opponent and you decide the coach should be fired by Tuesday. Sometimes both of those judgments turn out correct, which is the part nobody warns you about. Week one lies to you constantly, except when it doesn’t, and this year it apparently also lied to the officials about what time it was.

We’ll get to the clock. First, the Tigers, two different sets of them.

Lane Kiffin’s first game as LSU’s head coach ended in a 51-10 demolition of Clemson, the kind of laugher that makes you wonder if Clemson actually showed up. The more interesting story was who didn’t play. Tight end Dae’Quan Wright and defensive tackle Zxavian Harris, two former NFL players who’d just won a court injunction clearing them to rejoin college football under the sport’s new eligibility rules, got left off LSU’s roster anyway. Kiffin cited “the big picture” (LSU’s favorite phrase for decisions it would rather not fully explain). Clemson’s own lawyers had sent a letter threatening breach of contract if LSU played them at all. Whatever the legal reasoning was, the football reasoning evaporated by halftime. LSU didn’t need Wright, didn’t need Harris, and could have played both of them for the fun of it without changing the outcome.

Rutgers had a controversy of its own, and it wasn’t nearly as forgiving. The Scarlet Knights opened as 29.5-point favorites over UMass, a program that went 0-12 last season and hadn’t won a game since 2024. They lost anyway, 37-21, surrendering 30 unanswered points somewhere in the middle, in what’s now officially the worst defeat of Greg Schiano’s second stint as head coach. A four-touchdown favorite does not blow a game like that against a team that bad by accident. Schiano’s seat is hot enough to have its own smoke alarm at this point, and the humiliating part is exactly who did it to him.

Now, the encouraging news for the sport at large: it does not begin and end with the Big Ten and SEC, no matter how loudly those two conferences would like you to believe otherwise. Miami hung 45 points on Stanford Friday night, with Darian Mensah throwing for 401 yards and five touchdowns in his Hurricanes debut, and Malachi Toney setting the program’s single game receiving record (234 yards, three touchdowns) in the process. Notre Dame let Wisconsin hang around for a half at Lambeau Field, up just 13-10 at the break despite being a three-touchdown favorite, before winning 41-13, the kind of final score that makes the first thirty minutes look like a fluke. SMU needed a field goal with 21 seconds left to beat Florida State 27-24 on Monday night, after Kevin Jennings threw two interceptions but still finished with 430 yards and three touchdowns. Texas Tech, the reigning Big 12 champion, beat Abilene Christian by 23, comfortable enough, but roughly 20 points short of what Vegas expected, with Will Hammond looking a little rusty in his return from a season-ending knee injury. Put those four programs in one room and you have a legitimate, non-Big-Ten, non-SEC case for the playoff, even if none of them looked quite finished making it.

The actual Big Ten and SEC teams mostly did what they were supposed to. Georgia beat Tennessee State 63-3 behind a defense that’s going to be a problem for people all year, while the offense, an efficient 15 of 16 passing day from Gunner Stockton, remains the more interesting question mark. Texas throttled Texas State 59-7, an appetizer before next week’s Ohio State main course. Indiana, the defending national champion, looked exactly like a team allergic to modesty in a 52-16 win over North Texas. Oregon was the outlier, tied with Boise State in the fourth quarter (this was supposed to be a laugher) before Dante Moore threw for 378 yards and looked every bit the Heisman contender he’s supposed to be, saving the Ducks from a genuinely ugly upset.

And then, Michigan.

You know the play by now. Bryce Underwood’s Hail Mary against Western Michigan appeared to die at the back of the end zone as the clock hit zero, on the stadium board, on the NBC broadcast, on every clock a human being in Ann Arbor could actually see. Officials reviewed it and put one second back, ruling that Western Michigan’s Micah Davis batted the ball out of bounds while a second still showed on the Big Ten’s own internal replay feed. Underwood then threw a second Hail Mary, an actual completion this time, for a 13-12 win. The Big Ten’s explanation leaned on a rule about loose balls going out of bounds, plus a camera sync process that supposedly locks every clock in the stadium together 85 minutes before kickoff. NBC, diplomatically, noted afterward that its own broadcast is not the official timekeeper of a college football game. Fine. But every fan in the building and every fan at home watched the same broadcast clock hit triple zero, and the version that gave Michigan a second life was a feed nobody else had access to. Does a MAC team get that same generosity in that spot? Everybody who covers this sport already knows the answer.

So: week one was mostly honest, occasionally a fraud, and briefly unable to agree with itself on what time it was. Welcome back.