Whew, boy.
Where do I start?
College football has officially returned to our lives, and on paper that should be a good thing. For many, Week 0’s annual trip to Ireland is a welcome addition to the television schedule, the ceremonial beginning of another season after eight long months spent waiting for the sport to return. It’s also an objectively hilarious way to begin college football every year, considering we pack up two teams, fly them across the Atlantic Ocean and drop them into a country where the weather seems almost contractually obligated to make the actual football as miserable as possible.
But any discourse about the location and conditions of the game doesn’t really matter because the teams playing in it ultimately dictate the narrative, and after watching TCU and North Carolina slog through four quarters Saturday, only one word came to mind.
Slop.
Pig slop. Hog slop. Cafeteria slop. The mysterious brown slop they feed prisoners in cartoons. Pick your preferred variety because it was all there Saturday, and it never really let up.
There are two avenues through which to dissect North Carolina’s 15-10 win. The first belongs to the Tar Heels, where Bill Belichick just picked up the first marquee victory of his college coaching career after being embarrassed by the Horned Frogs in the opening contest of 2025. North Carolina looked considerably more competent this time around, which is major news for a program that spent much of last season looking like it had absolutely no idea what it was doing.
Then there’s TCU, and my goodness, I don’t know what just happened.
Head coach Sonny Dykes spent all offseason talking about how his team needed to limit the mistakes that had cost it games in previous years, something that sounded wonderful considering those mistakes have become an increasingly annoying feature of TCU football. Then the Frogs actually played a game and committed 11 penalties, looked increasingly incompetent on offense and employed a quarterback who, at least through one afternoon, appeared to pale in comparison to the previous one who was (kind of) pushed out the door. So much for cleaning things up.
And that’s where I want to start because the Craig hype was rampant heading into the season. TCU folks raved about his intelligence — he did graduate from Harvard, after all — as well as his spectacular athletic build. He might not be as pure a passer as Josh Hoover was, but everything coming out of Fort Worth indicated that the offense would be more dynamic with him at the helm. Add in new offensive coordinator Gordon Sammis bringing another dimension to the running attack, and I was sold on the idea that TCU could become a much more consistent offense, even if it looked considerably different from what we had grown accustomed to with Hoover.
Of course, preseason expectations are only that, and once it came time for the dirty business Saturday, TCU failed time and again. Yes, Jeremy Payne was largely good, rushing for 142 yards on 25 carries, but even he became increasingly limited as the rain intensified and the game turned into the sort of slog that made moving the football even more difficult. That meant there were going to be moments when TCU needed Craig to make something happen, and when those moments arrived, he was largely absent.
Take the final offensive play of the game for the Frogs. Facing fourth-and-2, Craig rolled out of the pocket and seemingly had two options to keep TCU alive: 1) barrel his way forward and use the size and athleticism we had heard about for months or 2) throw across his body to a receiver who was, admittedly, wide open but represented a much less certain proposition than simply pulling out the do-it-yourself kit. He elected to use the latter strategy, and it went about as well as when Ross tried to convince Rachel they were on a break.
That play was a microcosm of the entire afternoon because TCU continuously found ways to make things more difficult than they needed to be. From inexplicable penalties to baffling play calling, it took every ounce of self-control I possessed not to storm out of the room and gouge my eyes out. Perhaps that’s a bit of an overexaggeration — and it also very clearly expresses my biases when analyzing this particular football game — but it’s not all that far from the truth. TCU was that bad Saturday, and by the time it was over, I found myself wondering whether this was the most embarrassing loss I’ve ever witnessed in my lifelong support of the school.
Maybe that’s wrong, too, because there are certainly plenty of contenders. You can start with the national championship game, where nobody necessarily expected TCU to go out and rip Georgia’s throat out, but losing 65-7 was so stinky that I’m still not entirely sure the program has washed away the stench. Then came Deion Sanders and Colorado marching into Fort Worth to open the 2023 season and immediately popping whatever balloon remained from that magical 2022 campaign. Losing 66-42 to SMU in 2024, complete with Dykes getting ejected in the process, stings quite a bit, and following that up with a loss to a miserable Houston team that same year wasn’t exactly pleasant, either.
There are several more, but listing them all out won’t do any good because they increasingly point toward the same conclusion: Dykes just doesn’t have what it takes to elevate TCU back to the ceiling everybody thought this program might consistently reach after 2022. That season was a fluke. Everybody probably knows it somewhere deep down in their hearts, but it has taken me a while to come to grips with it because none of the joy, happiness and wonder from that run can ever be taken away.
But that was four years ago, and everything we’ve seen since has made it increasingly evident that 2022 was the exception rather than the beginning of something.
I’m fairly confident in my opinion that TCU will be searching for a new head coach by the time December rolls around, and perhaps that sounds like an overreaction after one game until you remember what has happened to some of the other teams unfortunate enough to lose in Ireland. Nebraska felt it and eventually fired Scott Frost. Florida State entered the arena the year after being snubbed from the College Football Playoff, was upset by Georgia Tech and proceeded to go 2-10. Last year, Kansas State lost Farmageddon to Iowa State in Dublin, resulting in a ridiculous moment where its starting quarterback’s brother and father were getting into a brawl in a parking lot after the game. Ireland is not kind to losing football programs.
Obviously, none of that has any actual bearing on what happens to TCU from here, but when you add in just how bad the Frogs looked Saturday, it’s not difficult to jump to the conclusion that Dykes’ time in Fort Worth might be ending sooner than anybody anticipated. This wasn’t simply a close loss in terrible weather where one bounce went the wrong way. It was yet another performance filled with the same mistakes and inconsistencies that have followed TCU for several years, which makes the contract extension Dykes somehow received this offseason all the more confusing.
North Carolina deserves credit for taking advantage of all of — *gestures wildly* — whatever the heck that all was. I’m just not ready to suddenly proclaim that Bill Belichick has figured everything out because the Tar Heels beat a TCU team that spent much of the afternoon tripping over itself. North Carolina is still not particularly good, at least from what I saw Saturday, and while it looked considerably more competent than it did a year ago, the bar for improvement was sitting somewhere around the Earth’s core.
There will inevitably be plenty of conversation about Belichick turning a corner after this, and to North Carolina’s credit, it did look better coached, especially offensively with Bobby Petrino manning the sticks. Yes, the Tar Heels made some of the same boneheaded mistakes TCU did, but they simply didn’t make as many of them, and sometimes that’s all it takes to win an ugly college football game. I think North Carolina is probably destined for a better season than the disaster it endured a year ago. I’m just not convinced it’s going to be that much better.
So, what did we learn after the first college football game of the season? It’s going to be a long year in Fort Worth, and perhaps Belichick sticks around for another in Chapel Hill. Or maybe we’re all jumping to conclusion. One thing I do know for certain is that I’m out on the Dykes experience – at least at this current moment. It’s going to take a lot to rope me back in.
