Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college football (even-year sorcery sold separately in Evanston):
MORE DASH: Desperate Times | Power 3? | Week 1’s Best
SECOND QUARTER
THE BEST TWITTER ACCOUNT IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL
The math is clear: Teams play one game a week, which means there are six other days a week when that team does not play. And that makes the ratio of time spent talking about a team vs. time spent watching said team extremely high. Especially in the college realm, where there are five fewer regular-season games than in the NFL.
Thus, the message board function of fan websites migrated into the fabric of the sport. Anonymous fans howling in anger, communing in joy, disparaging rivals, making ridiculous predictions and spreading complete fabrications.
Now, we have the perfect conduit to bring the best and worst of the boards—which are often the same thing—to us. We have the Message Board Geniuses (11) Twitter account. If you aren’t following @BoardGeniuses, please correct that immediately.
The proprietor of the account combs them daily to find the most wild entries and presents it in matter-of-fact terms for our entertainment. The Dash spoke with the man behind MBG, who wishes to remain anonymous, since he has a respectable job and family to insulate from the absurdities he chronicles. He’s been a longtime board reader and a couple of years ago turned his amusement at the content into a social media platform.
“I’d see these just ridiculous takes,” MBG Guy says. “Then I figured other people would enjoy seeing them.”
MBG Guy is, of course, a college football fan—but he doesn’t root for one of the usual suspects. His allegiances lie with Utah State (12), which did prompt a tweet Saturday about firing Aggies coach Blake Anderson as his team fell behind terminally miserable Connecticut 14–0. (Utah State righted the ship and won 31–20, cutting short the insurrection in Logan.)
“Utah State fans are every bit as nuts as everywhere else,” MBG Guy says. “It’s just a matter of how many of them. Everyone has the exact same makeup of fans; you can find the same guy at every place. That’s one thing I found out.”
The differentiator: The programs with huge alumni and fan bases can impressively scale their absurdity.
MBG Guy’s list of the most reliably unhinged fans of 2022 starts with Oklahoma (13). “Over the winter, I would have said Oklahoma, and it’s not even a close race.” But as waves of NIL and collective controversies roiled the sport in the spring, Texas A&M, Clemson (14), Miami, Tennessee and Texas flexed their freak muscles. (Dash readers will notice a high correlation between those folks and the most desperate programs list in the First Quarter.)
Christopher Hanewinckel/USA TODAY Sports
Heading into the season, MBG Guy appraised Nebraska as “having potential [for the absurd], depending how things are going.” Then the Cornhuskers did what they did in Ireland on Saturday, and their message boards were a treasure trove of jagged emotions. MBG Guy devoted nine tweets Saturday and Sunday to chronicling the meltdown. (Among the Genius list of successors to Scott Frost: Urban Meyer, Matt Rhule, Dave Aranda, Lane Kiffin, Bill O’Brien, Luke Fickell, Mike Gundy, Matt Campbell. All of them, naturally, would crawl to Lincoln for the job.)
Coming off the heels of the NIL feuding, realignment reemerged in the dead of summer—and, well, MBG Guy had some material to work with. “That’s the gold mine,” he says. Among the most delusional in the realignment realm: Kansas (15) fans who were debating which conference they’d rather turn down in favor of the other: the SEC or Big Ten? Among the most angry: fans of Power 5 schools now on the outside of the nascent Power 2.
“The most amusing to me are the mid–Power 5 teams now coming to the realization the system maybe isn’t fair,” MBG Guy says. “They thought it was fair before, but now they’re seeing that some [schools] are worth more than others, and some might be left behind, and the deck is stacked against them. They’re figuring out what those outside the Power 5 have known for years.”
MBG Guy takes submissions, and he gets a ton of them. In addition to those, he will usually spend a couple of hours a day scouring for gems. He will time out posts in the morning to appear throughout the day.
The Dash wondered whether some of the wilder posts might be performative in nature, possibly even planted by rivals to make a fan base look especially stupid. He says he tries to vet posters to see their status within a fan community and appraise their legitimacy. Ultimately, though, that’s an inherent risk. “If it’s funny, I’ll post it anyway. It’s still funny.”
The testosterone flowing from unidentified keyboard warriors is always entertaining, but sometimes it becomes more real. MBG Guy found a Florida fan last year who gave out his stadium location at Gators home games—section, row and seat number—and challenged anyone willing to come fight him.
But one school won the distinction of having both finalists for what MBG Guy declared were the “two best posts of the offseason.” One was a fan volunteering that he had to “hold a fart in for seven hours today.” The other was a fan who had quite a theory on “the worst thing about Hitler coming to power.”
The latter of the two won. The theory: Arkansas was poised to hire Bear Bryant when World War II broke out. “Just think how much better the world would be if [Bryant] had gone back to his home state instead of ending up in Alabama.”
You guessed it, the fan base responsible for both posts is Auburn.
Message Board Geniuses has grown enough as a concept that MBG’s website now has some written content in blog form, is working on a podcast and even sells merch. You can get a #FireEverybody (16) T-shirt for $27.50—just don’t stop your message board subscription to fund the purchase.
Ultimately, MBG Guy is not trying to portray all message board posters as loons.
“There are plenty of people who post good information and news about their team or conference,” he says. “Most people are rational. I pull out some of the weirdos.”
Junfu Han/USA TODAY NETWORK
FOUR FOR THE PLAYOFF
Each week, The Dash will appraise the College Football Playoff picture as if today is Selection Sunday. The guesswork is heavy in the preseason, but we’ve got to start somewhere. The CFP as of the moment:
Peach Bowl: No. 1 Alabama (17) vs. No. 4 Michigan (18)
The Crimson Tide have many essential performers returning from a team that led the national championship game in the fourth quarter before succumbing. They added to that nucleus with some precisely chosen transfer portal options at running back, receiver, offensive line and cornerback. Oh, plus the usual high school recruiting haul. Nick Saban didn’t even have to replace a coordinator this offseason, so the coaching continuity is strong. It’s rolling, baby. This week: Utah State.
The Wolverines have opted for a novel approach to having two very good quarterbacks—they will go with incumbent starter Cade McNamara in the season opener against Colorado State and then switch to backup J.J. McCarthy for game two against Hawai‘i. Both are good enough to win against Mountain West competition or UConn in Week 3. Eventually Harbaugh will have to choose who will get the reps in the close games, but whoever it is will have a very good offense around him. This week: Colorado State.
Fiesta Bowl: No. 2 Ohio State (19) vs. No. 3 Georgia (20)
The Buckeyes play the marquee opener nationally. There are zero concerns about Ryan Day’s loaded offense, but plenty of curiosity about how improved Ohio State is defensively after coming up soft on that side of the ball in 2021. That’s why they paid coordinator Jim Knowles the big bucks to leave Oklahoma State. This week: Notre Dame.
The Bulldogs play the second-splashiest opener. Their historically great defense of 2021 is in a bit of transition but still has several studs on that unit from the championship team. Stetson Bennett returns at quarterback and has plenty of productive company around him. The best recruiting program in the country in recent years gets a chance to show off its talent assembly line this season. This week: Oregon in Atlanta.
Also considered: Much of the rest of the country. But at the front of that long list: Clemson, Utah, Notre Dame, Baylor, Oklahoma, USC, North Carolina State.
