Just about the only constant in college football is change, and Saturday’s Week Zero schedule was a reminder. The light slate, that sets the stage for the first full week, has become a tradition, but like so many others in recent CFB history, it is going away.
Beginning next season, the entire college football calendar will move up, Week Zero will become Week 1, and teams playing abroad, or with a game in Hawai’i on the calendar, will no longer have the earlier August date available to them. It isn’t a major loss, all things considered, but there is something nice about easing into the season.
With the FBS season’s first eight games in the books, here are four takeaways from a pretty consequential Week Zero slate.
1. Sonny Dykes’s tenure at TCU seems to be getting stale
Entering the 2026 season, it was North Carolina coach Bill Belichick who many felt would be facing down a referendum when his Tar Heels squared off against TCU—the team that blew them out in Belichick’s college football coaching debut a year ago, 48–14—in Dublin. UNC still has plenty of questions to answer, but at worst it appears that the defensive whiz has improved that side of the ball by leaps and bounds, shutting TCU out in the final three quarters to win 15–10.
And still, that’s no excuse for the offensive performance put forth by Dykes’s Horned Frogs on Saturday, the program’s worst outage by total yardage (281) since TCU was drubbed by Georgia in the national championship game to end the 2022–23 season.
That was Dykes’s first season with the program, and it was a magical one; a 13–2 campaign that featured numerous dramatic wins, including a 51–45 classic victory over Michigan in the College Football Playoff semifinal at the Fiesta Bowl. Even with how bad the Georgia loss was, Dykes looked to have TCU back in the mix as a national power. That proved to be a fleeting notion, as the Frogs fell to 5–7 the following year, and while back-to-back 9–4 campaigns since are solid on paper, the program appears to be stalling out.
Dykes had little heat on him entering the regular season, and it is silly to overreact to one loss. But after a busy offseason in which TCU lost quarterback Josh Hoover, who Dykes openly bemoaned as turnover-prone, to national champion Indiana, replacing him with Harvard graduate Jaden Craig and switching to a more pro-style offense, the subpar output is very notable. Craig may not have thrown an interception, but he lost one of two fumbles, and other than some effective outside zone and stretch runs by Jeremy Payne, very little that the Frogs did worked. Throw in a heap of penalties, and Dykes’s team was outcoached and far less disciplined than Belichick’s, the exact opposite of how last season’s game looked.
Just a few short years removed from the national title doorstep, TCU fans are starting to feel restless. Throw in the poor headlines around the program entering the game, after it pulled the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s credentials over its coverage of a locker room fight, and pressure on Dykes is heating up.
2. The same can be said of Dave Doeren at NC State
As bad as the Horned Frogs’ performance in Dublin was, it was quickly overshadowed by Virginia’s absolute beatdown of the Wolfpack, 34–8.
Now, Virginia may be legitimately good. The Cavaliers are a year removed from an 11-win season, are about as experienced as any team in the Power 4 and seem to have hit on yet another transfer quarterback in Beau Pribula after Chandler Morris was a ringing success a year ago. But NC State is supposed to be a peer program to Virginia, and entering the season CJ Bailey was starting to generate some serious hype at quarterback after an impressive 2025.
Instead of putting his name on the Heisman map, Bailey’s game was a disaster—12 for 23 for just 84 yards and an interception.
Questions around Doeren are not new. His name started to pop up in hot seat conversations after a 6–7 season in 2024, his first losing campaign since ’19 and just the third of his lengthy run in Raleigh. But the team improved to 8–5 last year, and with Bailey back under center, there was legitimate hope that the Wolfpack could take some sort of leap. Instead, they laid an egg to start their season, and Bailey posted arguably the worst game of his college career. If he shows continued regression, it's a significant mark against Doeren and offensive coordinator Kurt Roper.
3. All Charles Huff does is win
Huff, a former Nick Saban assistant at Alabama, began his head coaching career at the advent of the NIL era in 2021 at Marshall. He took the Thundering Herd to four straight bowls, winning the Sun Belt with a 10–3 campaign in ’24 before leaving for Southern Miss after contract talks fell through.
He rebuilt the Golden Eagles on the fly, turning a 1–11 team into a 7–5 bowl squad in Year 1, and quickly parlayed that success into the job at Memphis—one of the best in the Group of 6. It didn’t take him long to pick up a signature win with the Tigers.
Memphis hit the road to begin the 2026 season and took down UNLV—a favorite in the Mountain West and a team commonly cited as a contender to earn the G6’s College Football Playoff bid—27–21. Now, the Tigers have a solid leg-up in the CFP race, and can take legitimate control of it in September, as Huff’s squad faces Pac-12 favorite Boise State.
4. It is so good to have college football back
Week Zero is just an appetizer, but we’ll certainly take it after a long, exhausting offseason filled with court cases, stalled out congressional bills and endless debate over the direction of the sport. Finally, some actual football.
North Carolina–TCU was a sloppy slugfest, but it was entertaining in its own way—and finished with some legitimate emotion from the ever-storic Belichick.
Bill Belichick emotion! pic.twitter.com/O75pIqp8yj
— Ross Martin (@RossMartinNC) August 29, 2026
Tony Elliott, whose seat was as hot as anybody’s entering last season, is now 12–3 in his last 15 games and Virginia looks to be building something real.
North Dakota State stepped up to the FBS plate and blasted a team that played for a conference title last year. Sacramento State … did not fare nearly as well, but we’re so interested to see what this MAC experiment looks like.
Stanford, a program that has been through the ringer with coaching controversy and the wild repercussions of conference realignment over the last few years, brought a favorite son home in Tavita Pritchard, and his Cardinal survived an incredible fourth quarter push by Hawai’i to give him a win in his head coaching debut.
Tavita Pritchard wins his debut as Stanford head coach pic.twitter.com/kpXkanwXzY
— RedditCFB (@RedditCFB) August 30, 2026
We have almost five full months of college football ahead, and after getting just a taste on Saturday, I can’t wait.
Miss any of the Week Zero action? Catch up with our live updates below.
College Football Week Zero live scores, updates, analysis
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