Rutgers hosted UMass and lost Friday, then sent the Minutemen home with $1.5 million guaranteed. That figure ranks as the second-largest payout for a loss in college football history, a detail that elevated an already painful home defeat in Piscataway into an entirely different kind of accounting problem.
The loss also came with postgame fireworks. Rutgers ran the scheduled show regardless of the result, leaving fans watching celebratory pyrotechnics after a home defeat. USC arrives next, and a first realistic home win does not appear on the schedule until Howard comes to town the following week.
Colorado's Friday read differently. The Buffaloes blocked a Georgia Tech field goal, then directed extended postgame attention at the opposing student section. One player moved toward the stands before getting turned back. That move rarely ends well, and the history on it is consistent.
WNBA forward Sophie Cunningham used the opening of college football weekend to urge Mizzou fans to show up loud, calling the team hyped and ready to make noise in the new season. Cunningham had also spent the prior season welcoming veterans to Gainbridge Fieldhouse.
LSU-Clemson headlines Saturday's slate. North Texas-Indiana runs on FOX, with Baylor-Auburn and Boise State-Oregon filling the afternoon window. The early card is thin, and LSU-Clemson carries most of the weekend's weight. After Monday, a 48-hour gap precedes the NFL opener on Wednesday.
Out of Alabama, a 380-pound high school lineman surfaced this week as a marker of where prep football's physical profile now sits.
Ryan Reynolds had earlier linked the difficulty of living through the 1980s to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which ended in the 1960s. Reader responses arrived to correct the record. One reader placed the Challenger explosion and the rescue of Baby Jessica, who fell into a well and was recovered in a nationally watched event, as the decade's actual reference points. A second cited the 1983 television film "The Day After," a depiction of nuclear war that terrified audiences, as the real source of atomic anxiety in those years, and credited that dread with producing the decade's live-for-today attitude. A third named the music, the car design, and a three-pointer he sank at the buzzer to win an alumni game at his college against a Mariners squad that included pitcher Mark Langston.
The NFL season opens Wednesday.