Thank whatever deity you pray to that a summer of realignment and NCAA legislation and every coach complaining about transfer portal tampering is mercifully over. Football is finally back, if only in the Week 0 variety to whet the palate. College football doesn’t have a preseason, but unless you’re a Ravens fan the past few years, the NFL’s preseason games aren’t worth watching. So while many teams are playing a schedule that may seem of preseason quality (looking at you USC [vs. San Jose State] and Vanderbilt [vs. Hawai‘i]) at least Notre Dame’s playing somebody. The Irish kick off the annual rivalry with Navy in Ireland for the third time after meeting across the pond in 1996 and 2012.
And so we kick off our season of picking games against the spread, because there’s nothing like a little friendly competition between colleagues. Each week after this one, we’ll pick a group of games and anchor it with analysis of the game of the week. We’ll keep track of our records over the course of the year for either bragging rights or extremely public shaming on the internet.