College Football Returns With Week Zero

It turns out you can replicate that wonderful feeling of excitement from your childhood that is Christmas morning.

College football has returned. 

Week zero of the college football season kicks off today, with five games on the slate. Illinois vs Nebraska kicks off the fun at 1:20 p.m. ET as Scott Frost enters his fourth season in Lincoln, attempting to get his Huskers off of the mat after three difficult seasons. Frost is just 12-20 as the man in charge, and the shine of the “golden boy” returning home is beginning to dim. Frost led the Huskers to a National Championship in 1997 as a player, and after leading UCF to an undefeated season in his second season as head coach, he returned to his alma mater. But things have not gone as planned. 

The Huskers have yet to finish a season over .500 with Frost as head coach, and no matter what he did for his home state as a player, Nebraska fans are not known for their patience. 

“There are some challenges to playing a team that has a new staff,” he said. “We did not play very well against them last year. We made some mistakes. We need to play better this year. I think the guys are locked in on that.”

Bret Bielema makes his return to the Big 10 — Bielema coached for seven years at Wisconsin — replacing former coach Lovie Smith. 

“Well, I would like for the things that we’ve seen during practice to be the same things we see on the field Saturday, right?” Bielema said. “So we talk a lot about a tough, smart, dependable team — teams don’t beat themselves, right? We want to be able to play ahead of the chains offensively, be physical on defense and capitalize on big moments. So, hopefully, the things we’ve been preaching to our guys are the things that show up on Saturday.”

At 3:30 p.m. ET, Hawai’i and UCLA are set to kick off their season. It’s UCLA’s earliest opener ever, and head coach Chip Kelly is another coach under pressure to win. 

Kelly signed a five-year, $23.3 million contract in 2017 and his time at UCLA so far has been a disappointment. The Bruins are 10-21 in Kelly’s three seasons as head coach, and the pressure is on to produce results in year four. 

“We’ll take care of business on the field, and the rest of it will take care of itself,” Kelly said.

They return 20 starters and a quarterback on the rise in Dorian Thompson-Robinson. 

“This is what we’ve been building toward,” Thompson-Robinson said. “We’ve been talking about rebuilding the program. We’ve gotten through that rebuilding process, and we’ve built up something special here.”

It may not be the full college football slate we’ve been waiting for — that occurs next Saturday, September 4 — but it’s football. All we’ve had over the past several months are the exhausting conversations around college football realignment as Texas and OU announced their departure for the SEC and the Pac-12, ACC, and Big 10 announced their “alliance.” 

Today, we can simply focus on the sport we all love. Enjoy.

Joe Morgan is the Sports Reporter for The Daily Wire. Most recently, Morgan covered the Clippers, Lakers, and the NBA for Sporting News. Send your sports questions to [email protected].

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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