2020 Week 1 of the college football season is weird.
2020 Week 1 of the college football season is weird, but there are still dogs in sports, so that helps.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, about a third of the Division I football teams are not playing this year, which means that Dubs’ Washington Huskies, Jonathan’s UConn Huskies, Mission’s Northern Illinois Huskies, the Boise State Broncos’ tee-retrieval dog Kohl, the Fresno State Bulldogs, New Mexico Lobos and the Nevada Wolf Pack will be absent from the sidelines this season, as the Big Ten Conference, Mid-American Conference, Mountain West Conference and the Pac-12 Conference all canceled their seasons.
Nearly all other fall sports at both the NCAA and NAIA levels were either canceled or postponed.
In addition to that, many (though not all) nonconference games were either canceled or postponed, so the first action of 2020 Week 1 that we’ll cover here at Dog O’Day in our third annual canine college football roundup took place on Saturday, September 5.
The Southland Conference’s Houston Baptist Huskies traveled north to the DFW Metroplex in Denton to take on the American Athletic Conference’s North Texas Mean Green in a Labor Day contest on Saturday night.
Though a member of Division I, Houston Baptist plays football in the FCS (Football Championship Subdivison), which is a halfway tier between the FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) and Division II. They are coming off their best season ever after finishing 5-7 in 2019.
Unfortunately, Houston Baptist came up on the short end of a wild ballgame, which saw the Mean -Green escape with the victory as they won by a 57-31 final score.
The Sun Belt’s Arkansas State Red Wolves traveled east to take on the American’s Memphis Tigers at the Liberty Bowl in a nationally televised night matchup on ESPN.
This was closer, but the Red Wolves weren’t able to topple their feline opponents as Memphis used their home-field advantage for a 37-24 triumph.
That was all the canine college football content out there in 2020 Week 1, though the season cautiously gets more underway next week as the Big 12 and SEC get rolling.
For more college football content within the FanSided Network, be sure to check out our sister site Saturday Blitz, and for many schools there is a team-specific beat site featuring all the latest news, analysis and opinion.