Welcome to The Football Notebook, the place where I spend entirely too much time thinking about whether college football should continue sending teams across the Atlantic Ocean every August.
College football is officially back, the Premier League is humming along and the NFL preseason has mercifully reached its conclusion, which means this is probably the closest we’ve gotten all year to the full football experience. TCU and North Carolina played something vaguely resembling the sport in Ireland, Tottenham made me sad for the second consecutive week, Manchester United finally remembered that it is Manchester United and college football’s eligibility rules somehow became even more confusing.
Oh, and Jalon Daniels is an NFL quarterback.
There’s a lot to discuss.
Let’s open the notebook.
The Annual Ireland Game Referendum
About 15 minutes into the opening game of the college football season between North Carolina and TCU, I came to the swift conclusion that playing in Ireland is just not something anybody is a fan of. For one, fans had to spend thousands of dollars to go watch the slop — which the game seems to be every year without fail — while everybody back home is left watching a game that never really feels like the grand return of college football we spend eight months building it up to be. I feel like everybody knows this, but at the same time we convince ourselves it’s fine because college football is back, there are pretty shots of Dublin on the broadcast and the whole thing feels just different enough to make us overlook the fact that the actual football usually stinks.
Here’s the thing: Going to Ireland for a week sounds awesome, and if you have the money to turn a college football game into an excuse for a European vacation, I’m certainly not going to tell you that you shouldn’t. I’m sure it’s an incredible experience for the players, too, especially for the overwhelming majority of them who will never get another opportunity to travel overseas and play their sport in front of tens of thousands of people. All of that sounds great, and yet none of it has ever convinced me that this needs to be the way we start the college football season every single year.
There’s something especially strange about taking college football, a sport that is so intrinsically connected to where it is played, and removing almost everything that gives these games their identity. Part of the reason I love this stupid sport so much is because a game at TCU is supposed to feel completely different from one at North Carolina, and both are supposed to feel completely different from one at LSU or Penn State or Oregon or wherever else you want to go. That’s the charm of the whole thing. Instead, we took TCU and North Carolina, shipped them thousands of miles away from Fort Worth and Chapel Hill and played the game in a neutral stadium because, well, Ireland.
It becomes even more ridiculous when one of the schools willingly gives up a home game to make it happen. TCU was originally supposed to host North Carolina this season, meaning the Horned Frogs could have opened the year in Fort Worth in front of their own fans without worrying about transatlantic travel, unfamiliar surroundings or any of the other weirdness that inevitably comes with doing something like this. Instead, the university chose Dublin, and when you make that choice you are voluntarily introducing even more unpredictability into a sport that has never exactly struggled to produce it on its own.
That’s why I feel zero remorse for the athletic department and university after the defeat. There are plenty of things to say about what actually happened against North Carolina, and I already said most of them in my game column, so there’s no need to go through all of that again here. TCU chose this. It willingly gave away the comfort of a home opener to participate in an event that is just all about the money.
Spurs Are Down Bad, and So Am I
In the words of cyrus_bruce04, “… just cause you throw a load of unnecessary money does not get you a good team.”
He is, of course, referring to Tottenham Hotspur’s impressive monetary showing over the course of this summer’s transfer window. Spurs unfurled over $300 million of business in an attempt to quench the fan base’s thirst for relevance. Back-to-back 17th-place finishes do that to supporters, after all, and the club knew it. I was a fan of a lot of the signings and was hopeful that immediate transformation would take place.
Much like most things relating to Tottenham, I was wrong.
The squad has lost its first two Premier League matches of the season in quite embarrassing fashion, failing to score in each contest. Some of the new additions have looked out of their depth, though some have impressed. It’s a mixed bag, truly. Whatever the case, manager Roberto De Zerbi’s grand vision and plan hasn’t come to fruition yet, and that’s caused the rest of the Premier League to point and laugh because that’s just what people do to Spurs.
Saturday’s 2-0 defeat to Newcastle was especially frustrating because there were moments where Tottenham actually looked pretty good. Spurs were the better side for much of the first half and created opportunities, only for Newcastle goalkeeper Lukáš Horníček to keep everything out. Then Anthony Elanga scored in the 62nd minute, Yoane Wissa added another 10 minutes later and Tottenham reacted to adversity in exactly the way Tottenham has reacted to adversity for the last several years: poorly. The heads dropped, the attacking threat disappeared and another afternoon at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium ended with everybody wondering why they keep doing this to themselves.
De Zerbi actually identified the problem pretty clearly afterward. Asked whether mentality was the biggest issue facing his team, he agreed and called finding the right mentality his “biggest challenge.” He also pointed out something that should probably be printed onto a giant banner and hung over Tottenham’s training ground: You cannot simply buy mentality in the transfer market.
Some of the pointing and laughing is happening at me because of how I treated Newcastle United in the lead-up to the campaign. My preseason Corner Poll for the Premier League had Newcastle 17th — coincidentally where Tottenham had finished two straight years — and fans of the Magpies let me hear it. The noise became exceptionally loud following Newcastle’s victory over Tottenham this past weekend, which led to me releasing an apology video, somewhat in jest, online. Let the record show that I was incredibly gracious in defeat, though some still decided to kick me while I’m down, cyrus_bruce04 being one of those people.
Unfortunately, they might have a point.
For all the selling Newcastle did this summer, the team looks remarkably coherent under Matthias Jaissle. The Magpies are unbeaten through their opening two matches, Elanga has scored in both of them and some of the players who struggled last season suddenly look rejuvenated. Wissa has already gone as far as calling Jaissle the club’s best signing of the summer, which is quite the endorsement considering he’s been in charge for approximately five minutes.
Tottenham, meanwhile, has never felt more in the dumps. There is obviously still time for this almost entirely new squad to gel, and two matches are nowhere near enough to make a final judgment on a project this large. But there eventually comes a point where results are necessary. We’re not at that point quite yet, but it’s getting closer with every passing week, especially when the same mentality problems that plagued the previous version of Tottenham continue appearing with a new manager and a bunch of new players.
As for Newcastle, congratulations.
It appears I was quite wrong about that team’s tenacity.
Please stop yelling at me.
We Survived the NFL Preseason
The NFL preseason is finally over, which means we can all stop pretending that any of those games were fun to watch. I’ve asked plenty of people over the last couple of weeks what their opinion of the preseason is, and while some say they enjoy having football back on television, I haven’t heard from a single person who believes it to be an entertaining form of the sport. There’s only so much excitement I can manufacture while watching backups play backups, especially when the uniforms on the field are trying to convince me that I’m watching the Dallas Cowboys and Seattle Seahawks. I’m not. I know what Dak Prescott looks like.
That’s not to say the preseason is completely useless because it obviously serves a purpose for the people actually involved. Coaches have roster decisions to make, younger players need an opportunity to prove they belong and every August there are a handful of guys who turn three good weeks into an NFL job. Jalon Daniels, who we’ll get to in a moment, is a pretty good example of that. But the actual viewing experience is mostly three weeks of being reminded that the NFL is coming without ever being allowed to watch the version of the NFL we actually care about.
And there are plenty of actual games worth talking about once we get there. The opening week is weird in its own right, beginning with New England and Seattle on a Wednesday before the 49ers and Rams head all the way to Melbourne the following night, because apparently football leagues have collectively decided this is the year we need to put games on every continent possible. After spending an entire section complaining about college football going to Ireland, I suppose consistency requires me to at least acknowledge that playing an NFL game in Australia is also completely ridiculous, though not as asinine.
We’ll have plenty of time to get into all of that over the next week. For now, I’m just happy we’ve reached the point where the next time NFL teams take the field, the result will actually matter.
College Football Requires a Law Degree
If you want to be a college football fan in 2026, you must follow the courts.
I know, it’s terrible. How we got to this point is beyond me. I’ll never understand. Well, I do to some degree. There was always going to be a point when the NCAA’s bubble popped, it just wasn’t clear to all of us that when that eventually did occur that it would be semi-catastrophic.
It appears for now that former professionals — most notably former NFL players, or at least some from the college recruiting class of 2022 who played in the preseason or participated in minicamps — will be allowed to come back to school and play one more year. The conferences themselves attempted to rectify this after the NCAA once again failed to defend itself in court — no surprise there — but the judges stepped in once again and limited their ability to govern themselves, too.
The SEC, for instance, attempted to create its own guardrail by telling schools that players who had signed NFL contracts would not be eligible to participate in conference competition, even if the NCAA was forced to allow them back into college football. That lasted about as long as you would expect anything involving NCAA eligibility to last in the year 2026. A judge issued another temporary restraining order preventing the conference from punishing schools for using those players, leaving us in the remarkable position where neither the NCAA nor one of its most powerful conferences can seemingly decide who is actually allowed to play college football without checking with a judge first.
It would all be a little easier to laugh about if we weren’t already playing games. Months of actual football are sitting directly in front of us, and yet we’re still spending an absurd amount of time discussing temporary restraining orders, eligibility lawsuits and whether guys who spent the summer trying to make NFL rosters can come back to campus and suit up on Saturdays. I’m not naive enough to think the off-field nonsense surrounding college athletics is ever going away, especially after everything that has happened over the last several years, but it would be nice if the sport could at least figure out who is eligible before the season begins.
The focus of LSU’s home bout against Clemson this upcoming Saturday shouldn’t be whether a tight end who got cut by the Cleveland Browns will be suiting up for Lane Kiffin’s squad. The attention should be on Dabo Swinney’s attempt to revitalize Clemson or Kiffin’s march toward bringing LSU back to relevance, two actual football storylines involving two programs with legitimate aspirations this season. Instead, one of the biggest questions surrounding the game has absolutely nothing to do with anything that will happen once the ball is kicked off.
The only part of this whole saga I find even remotely entertaining is Kiffin’s continued foray into the dark arts. That man just knows what gets clicks, and going through this whole song and dance is another chapter in his long saga of finding his way onto the front pages. Of course Lane Kiffin would somehow wind up near the center of the first major eligibility controversy of the 2026 season. It’s only right.
Manchester Had Itself a Weekend
Both Manchester clubs picked up astounding victories over the weekend, with Manchester City taking down Crystal Palace 4-1 in somewhat humiliating fashion while Manchester United proceeded to almost one-up them with a 5-2 pantsing of Ipswich Town that was courtesy of a hat trick by Bruno Fernandes.
It’s the latter game I want to discuss more, though City’s win was notable in its own right for illuminating the fact that that squad still very much has the juice under Enzo Maresca. Rayan Cherki scored twice against Palace, and Maresca described his performance as “complete,” which feels like a pretty good way to describe what City looked like as a whole. There was a brief period last season where Manchester City stopped looking inevitable, something that almost felt unnatural after spending the better part of the previous decade watching that machine consume everything in front of it. We’re only two matches into this campaign, but the early evidence suggests the machine might be warming back up.
United seemed to be in a much stranger place after losing to Hull City in the opening matchweek. The doubters were already coming out of the woodwork because while it was just the first game of the season, it was also a loss to a newly promoted side in Hull that everybody, including myself, believed was going to be sent straight back down to the Championship. So, when United went down 1-0 to Ipswich on Sunday, the alarm bells once again started to ring all across Manchester. Old Trafford was completely silent — with the exception of the Ipswich supporters, of course — as the fans came to grips with the possibility that this all might be happening all over again.
In the end, it didn’t.
Fernandes went supernova, scoring three goals in a torrential downpour to lead the Red Devils to their first victory of 2026-27. It was exactly the sort of performance United needed after everything that happened against Hull, not necessarily because beating Ipswich at home should be treated like some monumental accomplishment, but because another poor showing would have turned one bad result into the beginnings of an actual crisis. Instead, United responded by scoring five goals and looking much more like the version of itself supporters spent the summer hoping would finally emerge.
Does that mean Manchester United is back?
No. We’re not doing this again. Talk to me in two months and we’ll see where United stands. Until then, the stink of the loss to Hull hasn’t fully worn off.
Perhaps that’s me failing to see the grand plan. I did just finish apologizing to Newcastle supporters, after all.
Jalon Daniels Has an NFL Home
Anybody who watched the Kansas Jayhawks play football over the last half-decade knows just how special Jalon Daniels was. Kansas was one of the laughingstocks of major college football when he arrived in Lawrence, and while he obviously wasn’t solely responsible for turning everything around, he became the player most associated with the program’s resurgence. Injuries unfortunately kept him off the field for large stretches of his career, but when Daniels was healthy, Kansas football was genuinely fun in a way it hadn’t been for a very long time.
His career will now continue in the NFL, something that wasn’t guaranteed when he went undrafted and signed with Tampa Bay earlier this year. Daniels impressed enough throughout the preseason to earn a spot on the Buccaneers’ roster and will enter the season as Baker Mayfield’s backup, which is a pretty remarkable outcome for a player who entered the summer simply trying to prove he belonged at this level.
I have no idea what Daniels’ NFL career will ultimately look like, nor do I really care at this point. One of my favorite college football players of the last several years made an NFL roster and will get an opportunity to keep playing. I love it.
The combined record of the football teams we follow (TCU, Tottenham, Sunderland and Wrexham) is 1- 5 - 2 (I converted to the american format of Wins-Losses-Ties). Uggggg