It is the end.
College football stands at a dividing line between something old and something new, and while most of us have had the acute feeling that things are going to be a lot different going forward for a while now, the past week has repeatedly underlined that one era is ending and another is beginning.
Not because Michigan won their first outright national championship since before the Korean War; no one cares about that anymore, because in the past (holy shit) four days the landscape of college football has shifted yet again due to the retirement of one old dude from West Virginia.