10. The off season is over – We have football again and for that we can all celebrate.
9. Whoever has the ball last – East Carolina vs Tulsa was an entertaining display of whoever has the ball last – literally. Both teams scored touchdowns on every possession from the middle of the 3rd quarter and East Carolina won on a Hail mary on the final play. Sounds like a fun shootout to me to kick off play in the defenseless Conference USA.
8. Auburn, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina offenses against (semi)legitimate opponents – By legitimate I mean at least the school they player were FBS opponent and the offenses for these team did exactly what they were supposed to do against over matched opponents: Blow them up.
7. The Air Raid lives – All off season, pundits and Texas Tech bemoaned the demise of the Air Raid offense at Texas Tech. It's only one game, but “Not so fast my friends” as Lee Corso would say. Texas Tech threw more than any other other team in the country in week one and couldn't run the ball. The Air Raid may die in the future as Tommy Tuberville gets his own recruits into Lubbock, but credit Tuberville for playing to the strengths of his team and airing it out to get a win.
6. Big 12 running backs – All the dominant quarterbacks in this league are gone. So its back to the running game. Kendall Hunter at Oklahoma St., Daniel Thomas at UCLA and DeMarco Murray at Oklahoma all went over 200 yards in impressive opening week performances.
5. Fresno St. defense – Nine sacks of Zach Collaros in the late night take down of Cincinnati is pretty impressive. No points after the midway point of the 1st quarter is more impressive
4. Top of the Mountain West – BYU, Utah and TCU all took out BCS conference foes of varying hype to further their reputations. For BYU, new, inexperienced quarterbacks and a stout defense got the job done against Jake Locker's hyped Washington squad. Utah needed overtime but overcame Big East preseason favorite Pittsburgh by stonewalling conference player of the year Dion Lewis and TCU knocked off preseason top 25 and Pac-10 second choice Oregon St. in Dallas. For the Horned Frogs, the win moved them to 14-3 in their last 17 games against BCS leagues.
3. Oregon offense – The 72 points and 506 pushups were already covered in the New Mexico entry of the low lights section. The impressive thing is that starting running back LaMichael James was out suspended, projected starting quarterback Jeremiah Masoli was playing second fiddle to a huge upset at Ole Miss and it didn't matter. More impressive than the 72 points may have been the 720 yards with over 300 yards both running and passing.
2. Denard Robinson – Tate Forcier might as well save himself the trouble and transfer now. Denard Robinson is the starting quarterback at Michigan. Over 185 yards both rushing and passing against a UConn team thought to be pretty good before this game is hopefully a sign of things to come for Michigan fans.
1. Neutral-site openers – The schedule was admittedly pretty barren on the opening weekend except for the big neutral site openers. Though the LSU-North Carolina game was submarined by the suspension at North Carolina, it was still entertaining. The TCU-Oregon St. gave everyone a nice alternative if the UNC-LSU game turned out to be a blowout (and it certainly looked that way at halftime). Finally, tonight we have the big Virginia Tech-Boise St. game. Everyone is looking forward to this one.
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