A full college football weekend — with full stadiums, a full slate of Saturday games up and down the dial, and a full season unlikely to be derailed by a pandemic before us — is something none of us had experienced for almost two years entering this past weekend.
Last year, we had abbreviated schedules pockmarked by cancellations, and few of the bizarre outcomes — did y’all see that Montana beat Washington? — that come from adding more opportunities for variance to the best variance generator in sports.
And last year, we had a lot more concern for people — for the sick and the potentially so, mostly, but also the people running the show despite a lot of fears about a novel virus causing hundreds of thousands of deaths — to make rooting for a season to go on far more fraught.