This article was written by Clay Travis and published on Sport & State, a new media company founded by Travis that is built around sports, culture, original voices, and live conversation.
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I’ve watched college football for my entire life, thousands and thousands of games over the course of my life. And I have never seen what happened in Ann Arbor on Saturday night. Western Michigan won the game, but then the Big Ten officials took away the win and allowed Michigan one last second to have one last heave into the end zone.
And Michigan caught the pass.
You’ve all seen the final plays a thousand times by now, but what I want to start with here in the Starting 11 is this: even the Big Ten’s official statement doesn’t make any sense.
This statement contradicts itself. We all saw the clock at zero without the ball being touched. If the clocks are synced, how is that possible? And why is this the footage used? And where is this clock from? They spent hours on this and it still doesn’t add up. https://t.co/2sLSOxisHE
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) September 6, 2026
The Big Ten says all cameras were synced, but clearly they weren’t. The clock on the television makes it clear the game ended before anyone touched the football.
The ball is clearly still in the air and untouched when the clock hits zero. It’s impossible for the Big Ten to defend the decision to put a second back on the clock here. Every instant replay review should have the replay officials live on camera. pic.twitter.com/Ak62T3oMoj
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) September 6, 2026
Plus, the footage the Big Ten cites above doesn’t even clearly show the ball being touched with one second left.
Look I can go all Zapruder film on this and I could spend the entire Starting 11 column on why this ending was indefensible and why the Big Ten’s explanation of their extra play makes no sense, but here’s an easy question for you: If Western Michigan had been throwing the ball into the end zone for a Hail Mary attempt to win, do you think the Big Ten would have put one second back on the clock for them to get an extra play?
I asked my Twitter followers. The immediate results were 93% said no.
If Western Michigan had been throwing the hail mary at Michigan, the clock expired on the field with an incomplete pass just like we all saw, do you believe the Big Ten would have given Western Michigan one second back and allowed them an extra play? Yes or no?
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) September 6, 2026
Western Michigan, in my always humble opinion, got completely and totally screwed.
I will always believe that they won this game.
Ultimately the argument the Big Ten settled on — hours after the game ended, mind you — was that on a clock no one else saw there was one second left in the game and that the reason there was one second left because a Western Michigan player touched the ball with one second left on an angle from behind the player where you couldn’t even see the touching occur.
This was their entire argument.
Again, as I stated above, I have watched thousands of college football games. Many of those games in an instant replay era have had clock-related issues. I have never seen the game clock clearly expire on television and more time be put back on the clock.
Not once in my life as a sports fan.
Have any of you?
I’d love to see the examples of this occurring.
Now the practical impact of this Michigan win may not end up being that substantial in the grand scheme of things because I think regardless of how this game ended, Bryce Underwood is not playing quarterback very well, not last year and not this year either. He reminds me of another former Michigan quarterback who looked like he should be all world but was never able to put it together in games — Joe Milton. Tennessee fans saw this Joe Milton too, a guy who could make the spectacular throw, but couldn’t make the consistent throw.
I expect Oklahoma to come into the Big House next week and win this game.
And so do the oddsmakers: Hard Rock Bet has Oklahoma as an early five-point favorite in this game.
I also expect Michigan to lose multiple Big Ten games, which would mean they aren’t a real playoff threat.
But there’s a world where Michigan makes the playoff and it happens because of this call.
We started off the week wondering if the playoff committee would hold pro players on the roster against LSU and ended it with what would they do if Michigan ended up on the playoff bubble because of this win.
Okay, on to the Starting 11.
For those of you who are reading this now and haven’t read me before, this column will be up every Sunday all season long. I’ve been doing it for years.
So if you love college football and want to read about it the day after college football games, bookmark Sport & State and plan on the column being up every Sunday.
With that in mind, let’s dive in:
1. Lane Kiffin and LSU absolutely destroyed Clemson.
The scoreboard was bad — 51-10 LSU — but LSU had 38(!) first downs to Clemson‘s 8 and 644 total yards to Clemson’s 145. The rushing totals were even worse — 26 carries for 40 yards for Clemson, 58 rushing attempts for 308 yards for LSU.
This was the bayou equivalent of LSU tossing Clemson into the swamp with an anchor wrapped around their dead body for the alligators to feed on.
Things were so bad for Clemson that Lane Kiffin had jokes as he left the field at halftime. “Imagine if we had pro players,” Kiffin said.
Lane Kiffin running off the field up 31-3 on Clemson. “Imagine if we had pro players.” This is well played. pic.twitter.com/0ZYaVF9PgB
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) September 6, 2026
After all the courtroom battles, LSU left its two pro players off the roster and after this performance, LSU would be crazy to play these guys and risk anything.
If you’ve got a potential playoff team, and LSU certainly has a potential playoff team, why risk anything with players you don’t need?
Having said all this, let’s pump the breaks for a moment, LSU goes to Ole Miss in two weeks. And the week after that, Texas A&M comes to Baton Rouge.
By the time September ends, we will have a really good read on this Tigers team.
But for now, it’s hard to argue LSU, given the paucity of big games between power conference teams, shouldn’t be the number one team in the country.
You’ll see my rationale on that below in a bit.
2. Let’s talk Dabo Swinney for a moment here.
Dabo’s Clemson team was one of the truly dominant teams of the final decade before NIL took over college sports in earnest starting in roughly 2022.
Starting in 2011, Dabo won 10, 11, 11, 10, 14, 14, 12, 15, 14, 10, 10, and 11 games.
Then came 2023, 9-4 overall, but just 4-4 in the ACC. Yes, Clemson bounced back to 10-4 and made the playoff in 2024, but last year’s Clemson team was 7-6, 4-4 in the ACC again. In the past three years, Dabo has lost more ACC games than he did in the prior decade.
Why?
Dabo has refused to adjust with the paying player era and I think it’s fair to say that, as a result, Clemson is no longer a top program in college football. (I tweeted this out and one of you commented there are no top programs in college football any more because every team is essentially a brand new team each year given the unrestrained transfer portal. That’s a fair take too.)
But I don’t think it’s untrue that Dabo has refused to adapt to the changed environment in college sports.
Last year the Tigers went 7-6 and this year’s team, which it’s worth noting didn’t even begin the season ranked, didn’t look anything like a top 25 team last night.
Nick Saban left college football because he saw what was coming. Dabo stayed and refused to change. Maybe you can argue that Dabo has done so well in winning multiple titles for a team that hasn’t consistently been a blueblood that he’s the only coach in college football who truly gets to choose when and how he goes out.
And if that’s true, again, Dabo’s earned the right to stubbornly fight the current environment as he sees fit.
But I think it’s clear his method isn’t working and isn’t going to work.
And it’s also worth thinking about what we have lost in this NIL era. Clemson’s pledge was that they were going to bring in top players and develop them. And it worked. By and large Dabo’s guys stayed out of trouble, went on to good NFL careers, and elevated Clemson’s entire university to a level where admissions have soared and it’s become a top destination for out of state students.
And college football like business itself has one lesson — adapt or die.
It’s a survival of the fittest world and Clemson’s dying right now.
3. Lane vs. Dabo felt like a direct battle between new and old school in college football.
Lane is an unapologetic mercenary.
He left Tennessee for USC after a year, got fired on the tarmac at USC, bailed on Alabama during a playoff run amidst a feud with Nick Saban, left Ole Miss in the middle of a playoff run last year and has so infuriated the entire SEC that the conference unleashed Paul Finebaum to tear into LSU on the SEC’s own network.
Wow @finebaum eviscerates LSU and its leadership on @SECNetwork. Says the other 15 schools would vote right now to kick LSU out of the conference and Lane Kiffin is behaving like a child. You don’t ever see this on the conference’s own network. pic.twitter.com/3mCsvQPLOh
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) September 5, 2026
I don’t know if most fans understand just how significant this attack on the SEC’s own network is. It’s one thing if ESPN or Fox or CBS have analysts ripping Kiffin and LSU, that comes with the territory, but for this to occur on the SEC’s own pre-game show is, frankly, unprecedented.
We have truly never seen the conference turn on itself like this.
That’s a sign of how furious the rest of the SEC is with Kiffin.
I’m not sure how things will end for Kiffin at LSU, but my general prediction would be, badly because that’s how most mercenary relationships end. Now look, I like Lane. He’s basically a football savant who, at times, struggles with things in his life that have to do with anything other than winning football games. Every decision he has made in his entire career has been about making it more likely that he wins football games. Once you understand someone’s top motivation, you can’t get upset when they act on their top motivation.
Lane craves winning football titles more than anything.
And he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win those football games, jump from one job to another, play pros, walk out on current jobs. Lane hasn’t changed, he’s maniacally focused on the only thing that matters — winning. You can criticize that, but can you blame Lane from the lesson he took from getting fired on a tarmac? So long as you win, nothing else matters.
Is he wrong?
Dabo represents another path, where your school and you create a lifelong bond and the university acts a fatherly steward for young, immature kids. There’s always been a dueling tension between the reality of college football — players have been paid our entire lives — and the fantasy we are all sold. He picked our school because he loves it like we love it! He’s one of us!
What NIL — which is really just pay for play — has done is expose the illusion. These aren’t lifelong bonds being formed on bucolic campus quads, it’s just which school will pay $50k more than the other school. The naked mercenary aspect of college football — the raw capitalism at play, frankly — strikes at the heart of the lifelong bonds that every fan reading this column right now feels for their favorite team.
If your favorite team is just, in essence, a for-profit team filled with employees showing up for work, why do you care so much? If you’re a shareholder it’s nice to see Amazon stock performing well, but no one tailgates in an Amazon warehouse parking lot. No one buys Amazon gear or works their entire life to donate to a for-profit corporation.
We all know that the hot young wife with the rich, old billionaire actually is in it for his money not his personality, but most of the time she doesn’t say it out loud.
Lane says it out loud.
Dabo says publicly what most fans feel, but gets wrecked on the field. Lane says publicly what most fans hate to hear, but wins big.
The truth is there’s now no loyalty anywhere in college sports and since the entire premise of college sports is fan loyalty to teams, that tension feels particularly combustible these days in all facets of the game.
So what would you rather do, win with mercenaries or lose with loyalty?
That’s the choice at play now for many schools.
And if you’re a coach or an athletic director, loyalty doesn’t pay the bills.
4. Auburn beat Baylor in one of the few exciting games between power conference teams.
It ended on this phenomenal goal-line tackle on a two-point conversion attempt.
Wow. What a tackle for the win by Auburn. https://t.co/SMpu9UsCfS
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) September 6, 2026
It was an ugly game, but at least power conference teams were playing, which I’m going to tee off below about in a moment.
5. Oregon outlasted Boise State.
I know Boise State has traditionally given Oregon headaches, but this wasn’t an aberration, Boise State ran with Oregon in week one.
The Oregon offense should be elite with Dante Moore this season. And he was great — 378 yards passing and three touchdowns. But Oregon’s failure to run the ball well despite having one of the top five quarterbacks in the country should be a bit troubling.
First downs were even at 18, there wasn’t a major turnover issue here either. Boise State lined up and ran with Oregon.
I picked the Ducks to win the Big Ten, but this wasn’t a performance that made me confident in that pick.
Given that Ohio State and Indiana both rolled against inferior opponents, put a star on this one.
6. Miami’s Malachi Toney isn’t human.
On the road at Stanford, Toney dazzled, putting up 12 catches for 234 yards and being utterly uncoverable by anyone in a Cardinal uniform.
I know Jeremiah Smith is going to be the top receiver taken next spring in the NFL Draft, but Toney, for my money, is the most exciting player in college football right now.
It’s only week 1 but we already have the two Heisman front runners 😤 pic.twitter.com/w2sMlvG6FC
— Hard Rock Bet (@HardRockBet) September 5, 2026
Every time he touches the football something special can happen.
Given Clemson’s decline, the ACC feels like Miami‘s to win. (Yes, I know, we’ve said that a ton of times over the years and the Hurricanes seem to always start September and October at full throttle before wobbling later in the season.)
But Miami only has one top 25 team on the schedule — a November 7 game at South Bend that looks like it could be an all-time game.
I may have to put this one on the calendar. Notre Dame is one of the few major college football venues I’ve still never seen a game.
And in an age when recruiting rankings have gotten better and better, Malachi Toney was a three star coming out of high school, ranked as the 61st best receiver in the country.
But you know who didn’t miss on him?
The top programs.
Miami, Florida State, Ohio State, Alabama and Auburn, among others, all offered.
I suspect his height and weight dinged him because he’s a five star for sure.
7. In the young quarterback debut world at power programs: Alabama and Tennessee fans both have to be happy with their new quarterbacks.
Faizon Brandon is the first true freshman to start at quarterback for Tennessee in over 20 years. (Trivia note: the last one was Brent Schaeffer.) Brandon threw three touchdown passes and ran for two more against Furman for a pretty phenomenal five TD debut. Alabama’s Keelon Russell passed for 256 and ran for 86 yards with one touchdown on the ground.
It used to be that we regularly had young quarterbacks to analyze, but in the transfer portal era so many teams break in veterans from other schools that truly young quarterbacks starting are becoming as rare as recruits who pick their college because they actually like it and not because of the money.
8. I may write an entire column on this, but this opening weekend of college football games stunk and we have to do better.
I love college football with a fervent passion.
If you told me I had only one Saturday left to live, I’d probably choose to spend it at a big college football game with my family.
So come noon when the pre-game shows ended, I was, as usual, posted up on my couch to watch as many games as possible.
And none of them were any good.
Worse than that, all of them were complete crap, a big conference school dominating a small school, across the entire nation. By halftime of the noon games there was barely a game worth turning. There was a grand total of ONE top 25 matchup on all of Week 0 and Week 1 — Sunday night’s Ole Miss vs. Louisville game.
That’s a failure of epic magnitude.
College football has an opportunity to steal attention away from the NFL early in the season. Before the NFL begins on Wednesday of this upcoming week, college football should be putting its best foot forward — we should be deluged in incredible games. The SEC and the Big Ten should play an opening weekend challenge, start it on Thursday and play games on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Make it a five-day event, create a brand new trophy for the yearly event, turn it into the Ryder Cup of college football, except play it every year, half the games on the Big Ten campuses and half on the SEC campuses.
Fans would go nuts over this.
We would all talk about it for months over the offseason.
Instead, most of the games were afterthoughts.
This is partly the result of criticism of the SEC playing easy games in November. The reason the conference did this was because they often opened with big, tough week one opponents, often on neutral site venues.
Now Week 1 feels like the NFL preseason, which no one cares to pay attention to at all.
We have to do much better.
The NFL would never make this error. They schedule their most prominent windows with the best possible matchups. College football, all too often, still doesn’t.
9. Credit to UCLA and California for playing a late night game most people didn’t stay up for.
I did.
Because I’m a glutton for punishment and also needed to win at least one bet on opening weekend. (My gambling performance was worse than the Michigan offense.) So I didn’t go to bed until 2:30 a.m. ET.
The Cal–Berkeley crowd was electric, the rivalry felt real and significant. It didn’t feel like a sterile afterthought as so many of the games this weekend did.
Nico played solidly for UCLA under Bob Chesney and Cal’s JK Sagapolutele was a lot of fun to watch too.
In a weekend where all too often there was no drama, this game was outstanding until UCLA pulled away late.
10. Rutgers was embarrassed by UMass and Colorado outlasted Georgia Tech on the opening Thursday night of the season.
UMass smoked Rutgers, winning as a 28-point underdog on the road to erase multiple years of FBS futility, and send Rutgers fans to the phone lines demanding Greg Schiano be fired.
Will the sports media ever apologize to Tennessee fans over revolting against the Greg Schiano hire? We were all told Schiano was the greatest coach in college football history and Tennessee would be lucky to have him. Fans knew otherwise. Yes, Jeremy Pruitt, the coach hired to replace Butch Jones, stunk, but Josh Heupel has taken Tennessee back to the playoff and notched multiple 10+ win seasons. The Vols are back. Just because Pruitt was a poor choice doesn’t mean Schiano wasn’t too.
Tennessee fans were right, the sports media was wrong.
Rinse, repeat.
As for Colorado, I like Deion Sanders.
I think he’s a genuinely good dude.
But my goodness, what was Brent Key doing late in that game settling for a 13-7 lead when you know a touchdown will beat you? That entire final three minutes was a mess — not milking the clock, calling timeouts on defense when Colorado had none, settling for a 45 yard field goal when you still had ample time to get closer — I love sports for many reasons, but one of my favorite lessons sports teach is you cause most of your own problems.
Much of life isn’t about beating someone else, it’s about avoiding screwing up yourself.
I always tell my boys, losing because someone is better than you, will happen in life. But losing because of your own mental errors should never happen.
The truth is most of us beat ourselves.
That’s a tough realization to have. But once you have it, it unlocks a great deal of potential, because of where it leads — personal responsibility. You control your success or failure in life, not anyone else.
And as much as Colorado won, I think Georgia Tech lost that game more than Colorado won it.
11. Ole Miss outlasted Louisville and Notre Dame smoked Wisconsin in the second half of Sunday night’s games.
Positive for the Rebels, Trinidad Chambliss picked up right where he left off — he’s one of the best deep ball throwers in all of college football. But the negative was their secondary was a complete mess for the entire second half, letting Lincoln Kienholz pick them apart for over 300 yards passing and another 69 yards rushing.
Yes, Louisville is solid — and this was the only top 25 match up of college football so far — but giving up 38 points is an ominous start to the season given how brutal the schedule is from here for Ole Miss.
As for Notre Dame, after a tight first half the Fighting Irish unleashed the storm on Wisconsin, utterly dominating them. It was over when a pick six turned a 20-10 game into a 27-10 rout.
Notre Dame has just three current teams in the top 25 on its schedule: at BYU, which figures to be one of the biggest on campus games in BYU history, Miami, which should be electric in South Bend, and SMU.
