The best college football game of the year has happened

For one half, the highest-profile college football game of the year — and therefore the most hysterically overrated — was a Megalopolis-level disappointment. Alabama, fourth in the nation for people allowed to guess such a thing and have their votes counted, trumped Georgia, which ranks second for the same people. Under the watchful eyes of High Lord Emeritus Saban and his companion Terry, as well as the entire ESPN roster of hyperkinetic parrots known as College GameDay, the Crimson Tide scored four touchdowns in 17.5 minutes and forced a safety and two turnovers, leading to a score of 30-7 halftime lead that included this play by Ryan Williams and spurred a massive national television audience of millions to immediately scream, “What else is on?”

But then Things happened because the only thing college football hasn’t completely ruined is football. Fueled by shame and fear of what their most loyal fans (plus Paul Finebaum) would say about them the rest of the weekend, the Bulldogs rallied in the most pyrospectacular of ways that are poorly summarized here:

Yes, Georgia went from trailing by 23 to leading by 1, because that’s how it goes sometimes, and then they lost it all on a play by Ryan Williams, who’s 17 freaking years old. In fact, let’s look at that last bit again, just because:

In fact, we recommend you watch the entire game yourself if you missed it the first time, because it reveals the real reason why the adults go to such elaborate lengths to ruin it – all under the guise of finally getting the players to pay, although it is clear that no one actually wants to do that. From NIL realignment to NIL pushback, to schools charging fans directly through ticket prices to pay players instead of colleges doing it themselves with their media billions, to congressional intervention over player compensation to avoid altogether in order to… well, do everything possible Make college football the NFL for people who don’t live close enough to an NFL team or too close to the Jacksonville Jaguars.

And the upper limit hasn’t even been reached yet. ESPN, which along with its network colleagues and streaming services helped create this mess, is rolling the dice next week by hosting GameDay in a place in the United States that no one ever thought would happen would, in an attempt to revitalize the West. The coastal market was devastated by the dissolution of the Pac-12. Yes, Berkeley, that most delightfully Trotskyist place of venues, the massive university that has the least connection to the siren song of sports, the only city where Kirk Herbstreit’s dog is the only member of the GameDay crew to draw a crowd would.

Yes, it’s a pretty bold marketing tool, and one suspects it will be an isolated incident, as the sport is more heavily based in the Southeast and Midwest than ever before, and is becoming more so with each new realignment story. In short, we’re not that far away from colleges moving to other states, so why the hell not? But why not Cal for a week? One suspects we’ll see soon.

However, this much is almost certain – the best game of the year has already been played, and Ryan Williams only became a company five months before his 18th birthday.