Left Coast Crapstorm: Fallout from Week One Edition

Hello, my weary travelers, and welcome to the Left Coast Crapstorm, your weekly roundup of Pac-12 football that foregoes pleasantries and dives right into what we really want to hear - because this is the 21st century, dammit, and we deserve to communicate only with grunts, points, and four word sentences ending with excessive exclamation marks.

That being said, today’s edition will be astonishingly short due to the fact that your beloved author has had much of her time taken up from - get a load of this - moving to Canada.

So with that in mind, here’s a rundown of Pac-12 football from week one:

A Histrionic History of Saturday

If our overreactions to week one tell us anything, it should be that the Pac title race is.... open. And furthermore, the Pac South title race is... open-er.

Between UCLA and USC making the west look bad on a national stage, Colorado blowing out their rival (even one that is one step above shoot-yourself-in-the-face-awful), Arizona being all-around disappointing, and Utah and Arizona State coming away with not very impressive Big Sky victories, everyone here seemed, at first impression, pretty mediocre.

Meanwhile, I found myself overly passionate about wanting Oregon State to beat Minnesota, if only to have an excuse to tell my brother-in-law that his alma mater is verifiable garbage.

Then of course Oregon got off to an embarrassingly slow start against the Big Sky, while Washington State did what they do best - actually lose to the Big Sky and proceed to have the whole fan base lose their collective shit about it.

If there’s one thing we learned from week one of 2016, let us look to the Beehive and Evergreen States: Utah spent their Saturday yet again proving that offense is overrated, while Wazzu spent theirs proving that defense isn’t.

The fearsome Big Sky hath struck again.

But at least we can take solace in not being the conference where 9th ranked Tennessee needed overtime and a perfect fumble bounce to beat the pride of the Sunbelt, Appalachian State.

Play of the Week

Christian McCaffrey’s punt return for a touchdown, even if it didn’t count. Honorable mention goes to Cooper Kupp racking up - and this is an accurate measurement - 900 yards and 16 touchdowns against the poor Cougars, who just need to stop scheduling Big Sky opponents already. For a team that last year was a field goal away from taking down Stanford, they sure do have bad luck with the FCS.

Webb Watch

This is the part of the column where we check out what kooky things Goff 2.0 is getting up to, because why would we not obsess over someone whose ESPN headshot is this?

Unfortunately, we were not blessed with a Webb sighting this week, as the Golden Bears had a week of what I can only imagine was pure relaxation as they obviously wouldn’t be using a bye week to prepare for the grueling task of taking down the San Diego State Surfer Dudes, which is absolutely their mascot.

And that is as good a note as any to stop this train. Til next time, my weary travelers.