This Week in Our Dumb Beautiful Sport: Alabama Crashes Out, Nico Iamaleava Might Have Regrets, and Northwestern Gets Trucked

By Ryan Ginn on September 2, 2025 at 9:10 am
Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer
Melina Myers-Imagn Images
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Welcome to This Week in Our Dumb Beautiful Sport, a weekly look at the chaos that reigns over the perfectly imperfect world of college football.

College football is back, and with it comes everything we missed: the inexplicable coaching decisions, the blown coverages, the 19-year-olds becoming instant legends, and the 19-year-olds becoming memes. It’s dumb, it’s beautiful, and it’s ours again for the next few glorious months.

Alabama Falls to Earth

“Welcome to the Hotel Hell. Check in time is now. Check out time is never.” – Dwight Schrute

It’s been more than a year and a half since Nick Saban retired, but Saturday might have been the first time it’s really sunk in for Alabama fans. It was easy enough for them to dismiss Kalen DeBoer’s first year struggles as the outcome of being hamstrung by a quarterback who didn’t fit his offensive style. And, to be fair, their unrelenting offseason cope did have some logic to it.

DeBoer has recruited and retained elite players at a level that has kept Alabama’s roster as one of the two or three most talented in the country. He also reunited with offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb, who many have thought might have been the actual brains behind DeBoer’s best teams of the past. But there’s no covering up the current reality after an embarrassing 31-17 loss to a Florida State team that was coming off a 2-10 season.

Alabama is ordinary.

Alabama now has losses to four unranked teams under DeBoer: Vanderbilt, Oklahoma, and Michigan last season and Florida State on Saturday. Could they turn it around? Of course! They have the best recruits, more money and resources than they know what to do with, and a conference front office willing to lie, cheat, and steal to favor them at the expense of its other teams. But the days of a guaranteed 11-1 and having the rest of the country pretend like any losses either didn’t happen or don’t count appear to be over.

Tommy Castellanos Calls His Shot

Adding to the humiliation was Alabama’s complete inability to do anything about Florida State’s quarterback spending the summer dogging them. Once upon a time, an opposing player delivering some form of “We Want Bama” led to 59-0 scores. But Noles quarterback Tommy Castellanos came at the Tide in June by saying “They don’t have Nick Saban to save them,” doubled down at media days in July, and then embarrassed the Alabama players who said “All disrespect will be addressed accordingly.”

Ohio State Stops Arch Madness

Is it possible that the guy who couldn't beat out Quinn Ewers last year won’t be the first player to get 100 percent of the first-place votes in Heisman voting? Shocking, I know. Instead, Ohio State’s defense saved the rest of the country from a four-month long discussion of where Arch Manning would be storing the Heisman Trophy once he wins it. It got a little nervy at the end for the Buckeyes after controlling the game for 56 minutes, but Ohio State sent a strong message to the rest of the country with a new starter of their own.

Brian Kelly Finally Wins a Season Opener

For the first time since Joe Burrow was on the roster, LSU started its season 1-0.

The Tigers had been practically inventing new ways to start 0-1: there was the COVID season weirdness of 2020 in Mike Leach’s Mississippi State debut, a game against UCLA in the Rose Bowl in 2021 played just days after Hurricane Ida leveled Louisiana, a missed PAT vs. Florida State with 0:00 left that would have sent the game to overtime in 2022, a steam rolling at the hands of Jordan Travis in 2023, and having to play a USC team that finally got to see what it was like to not have Alex Grinch as their defensive coordinator.

I would have bet my life on that streak continuing in 2025 once I saw the news that Dabo Swinney had finally decided to use the transfer portal just in time to host LSU in this year’s opener. Instead, LSU got decent enough play out of an offensive line with five new starters and suffocated Clemson with a defense that was overhauled in the portal thanks to NIL funds that suddenly became available last November.

I’m not convinced Clemson is as good as its preseason hype, and I do think LSU’s offensive line will eventually cause the Tigers problems, but those are later problems for a team starting 1-0 for the first time since 2019.

Nico Iamaleavingforaworsesituation

College football’s version of Wife Swap currently stands at Tennessee 1, UCLA 0.

Joey Aguilar: 16 of 28 for 247 yards, 3 touchdowns, 0 interceptions (45-26 win over Syracuse)
Nico Iamaleava: 11 of 22 for 136 yards, 1 touchdown, 1 interception (43-10 loss to Utah)

I think I speak for everyone outside of Knoxville in being hesitant to praise Tennessee football for anything given #VolTwitter’s role as college football’s prime chaos agent, but there’s something deeply satisfying watching this happen to someone who tried to hold a team hostage while making more than $2 million per year.

Hurricane Warning

Miami (Fla.) beat Notre Dame 27-24 in a game their own coach once again tried his hardest to lose. The Hurricanes entered the fourth quarter with a 21-7 lead and ended the game playing for a 50-yard field goal with a kicker who entered this season having made 4 of 11 field goals in his career. They’re on track to make the College Football Playoff after this win, but I can confidently say I’d rather light myself on fire than root for a team coached by Mario Cristobal because I simply would not be able to handle this mess on a week-to-week basis.

Northwestern Experiences a Hellava Hullabaloo

Tulane beat Northwestern 23-3 in a game more notable for what happened beforehand that came to light afterwards.

In his postgame press conference, Tulane coach Jon Sumrall lit up the Wildcats for refusing to let Tulane wear white jerseys at home one day after the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in a tribute to the 2005 Tulane team.

After Sumrall’s presser, Northwestern grad Adam Rittenberger was more than happy to carry water for the Wildcats by pointing out that it simply was not possible to change what color jerseys Northwestern brought to a game with a mere two weeks’ notice. On a non-bitter note, as a Louisiana native who moved back to New Orleans after my time on the Ohio State beat, I would encourage anyone to watch either one of the documentaries on Hurricane Katrina that recently came out on Netflix and Hulu.

The Oregon Duck Loses His Head

This is a pro’s pro right here, people. Never let the kids see you decapitated.

Welcome To CFB, Bill Belichick

When it comes to smug NFL coaches failing in college football, Charlie Weis crawled so Herm Edwards could walk so Bill Belichick could run.

First we had Weis and his “decided schematic advantage” at Notre Dame, then Herm Edwards and his New Leadership Model at Arizona State. Now Belichick, with a girlfriend the same age as his backup quarterback, opened his tenure at UNC with a 48-14 loss to an unranked TCU team. Yikes.

Play of the Week

What else can you say about this CJ Daniels catch that helped Miami to a 27-24 win over Notre
Dame? (Other than what I would say, which is where were these types of plays last year when he
was wearing purple and gold?) An absurd play that could end up being the best catch we see all
year.

Idiot of the Week

This one goes out to the entire Northwestern football program for reasons discussed above. But
since I already wrote about that, I’d also like to highlight Deion Sanders’ timeout usage (or lack
thereof) in a 27-20 loss to Georgia Tech on Thursday.

I’ve actually slightly warmed up to Sanders despite his extremely off-putting schtick, mostly because he at least seems self-aware about his whole deal and has generally shown he’s not a person who can dish it out but not take it. With that being said… you cannot be a Power 4 head coach and not know how to use timeouts.

If you didn’t catch it, Colorado had two timeouts remaining on its last drive of the game that began with 1:07 left and the Buffaloes down by 7. The first two plays used up almost 40 of those seconds while gaining 9 yards. No timeout called after either play. Either learn math or hire someone who has played Madden or NCAA football at least once in their life to tell you what to do.

Ref Jail Inmate of the Week

It’s my longstanding belief that most, if not all, referees and umpires should spend the night in jail after a particularly bad call. This week’s winner is the replay official who took the question of whether or not LSU wide receive Barion Brown made it to the end zone or stepped out at the 1-yard line and somehow came up with the answer that he didn’t catch it at all. It’s very rare to hear a tv network’s officiating expert so explicitly criticize a call given how tightly all adult hall monitors tend to stick together, but this was that bad. The only saving grace here is that the call – which loomed extremely large at the time – ultimately did not change the outcome of the game.

No Context Scores of the Week

Here are some scores that caught my eye for any number of reasons – randomness, outcome, unique matchup – that shall remain unknown:

Wake Forest 10, Kennesaw State 9
USC 73, Missouri State 13
Rice 14, ULL 12
Auburn 38, Baylor 24
Utah 43, UCLA 10
Kansas State 38, North Dakota 35
BYU 69, Portland State 0

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