I mean, I love college football as much as anyone. But I can’t think of a major sports championship event that I look less forward to than ours. The day sucks. The time sucks. It lacks tradition. It lacks gravitas. It lacks ... Saturday.

Things work. Or they don’t.

The next 18 months in Happy Valley are going to be fascinating.

Have said it for years: there is no perfect system for this sport. But this one would be bad.

One of the joys of watching Penn State football over the past decade or so was knowing you were always going to field a great-to-elite defense. I don’t know what this is that I’m watching tonight.

Not this decade, but let me tell you a bit about Minnesota 1999 …

Have said repeatedly that this is the best way to enjoy a college football Saturday.

For Penn State, winning 10-11 games a year was definitely worse than getting physically dominated by Northwestern.

Game is not over. Season is early. But it’s going to be fascinating to see how things play out for Penn State, and whether the right decisions have been made. And this is not specific to Matt Campbell.

Hi from Fayetteville. They have Yuengling here?

This would definitely solve all of Rutgers’ problems.

And it’s going great. Just great.

Reminds me of this. xitter.cf/Footballtweet/status/1…

‘This is our last chance to do this [thinks for a second] … at least this season.’

Been a lot of places. Oregon is great. Wisconsin is great. LSU is great. Ole Miss is great. Penn State is great. But cannot recommend Lehigh-Lafayette more for a true college experience.

This is very deserved. @audsnyder4 does an amazing job. I am a subscriber to her Substack and it’s worth it.

‘Plays’

Look I’m not an expert or anything. I just love the sport of soccer, I’ve played it on and off my entire life, I coached all four of my kids in a mid-level ‘travel’ club that was very much more of a community club — affordable, a way for kids to play the game, make friends, etc. We had some really good teams, some not. I enjoyed coaching all of them. We developed a wonderful community in our tiny town of parents and kids who just loved the game. That in itself is a win. There has been so much negativity these past couple of days about youth soccer in America, so just want to share a grassroots perspective. The costs were never an issue for us at our club. I’m talking like less than $200 plus unis for a basic fall season. Several hundred or more if you were on one of our teams playing in big tourneys etc and playing through the whole year of course. But we had a lot of dedicated women and men who had great soccer backgrounds and were happy to dedicate their time free of charge to share their love of the game with a new generation. Our cost structure was intentional — we were committed to our community. 90 percent of our players came from our township of 21,000 people. A few things I saw over the years: The truest thing that our culture gets wrong at the younger ages is prioritizing size/strength over skill (or potential skill) or soccer acumen (or potential acumen). Because from U8 on all I saw was a desire to build a team to win. Play long ball, put the huge kid at center back, whatever. It was rare to see a coach think about a long term development plan that didn’t focus on winning meaningless games when kids are 7. I fell into this trap. When you are in it of course you care about that, but it’s irrelevant. There were in my 10 years of involvement with our club only two coaches who took the long term approach. It felt unconventional, but like a long term investment, their efforts paid off. They built teams who over the years became something special. They developed technically, and tactically. They could all see the entire game in front of them. They won big tournaments and competed for state titles at U13 with kids who at U8 other coaches wouldn’t have put on the field or even taken on their team. One of these coaches, my friend Brent, who coached both of my daughters, has sadly passed. He was a wonderful coach to every kid who played for him, no matter their abilities. The soccer world could use more Brents. So much focus on the idea of chasing this fabled ‘college scholarship’ in their future. Ugh. There is a lot wrong with the way we handle youth soccer. The money is a joke. But there’s also a lot of good in there, and a lot of people who put in so many hours of their time, and deal with a lot of stress, to put a team on the field each week AND make sure those kids walk away still loving the sport. Some of my fondest memories are my days seeing my players, win or lose, walk off the field having learned something, gained something, or made a memory. We can do better but we aren’t doing terribly either. The growth of the game from when I first kicked a ball playing CYO in Cleveland, a soccer backwater, more than 40 years ago is a testament to that. I have two boys and two girls. The growth in participation for girls between when my older started and what we see now in our club, and other clubs, is truly amazing. Let us not forget that winning the World Cup is really, really difficult. It’s not like half the planet has won the thing. The overreaction to our loss betrays a misunderstanding of our current place in this sport. This was an amazing month watching the USMNT. This game is a wonderful game, truly The Beautiful Game. Let’s appreciate the month we had and think about how we can do better — for our next generation of players — together.

This kinda feels like Alabama playing a night game at Kinnick for the first time.

In general, in the soccer community, we honestly don’t care about your insipid thoughts.