For six months, the most prominent college football game of the year — and therefore the most hysterically overhyped — was a Megalopolis-level letdown. Alabama, ranked fourth in the country by people who are allowed to guess and have their votes counted, crushed Georgia, which was ranked second by those same people. Watched personally by High Lord Emeritus Saban and his consort Terry, plus the entire ESPN arsenal of hyperkinetic parrots called College GameDay, the Crimson Tide scored four touchdowns in 17 and a half minutes, along with forcing a safety and two turnovers, for a 30 -7 lead at halftime, which also included this play by Ryan Williams, which essentially caused a massive national television audience of megaty-billions to exclaim at once, “What else is going on?”

But then things happened because the only thing that hasn’t completely ruined college football is football. Fueled by shame and the fear of what would be said about them for the rest of the weekend by their most devoted fans (plus Paul Finebaum), the Bulldogs rallied in the most pyro-spectacular way, which is not sufficiently summarized here:

Yes, Georgia went from 23 down to 1, because that’s how it works sometimes, and then they lost everything on a play by Ryan Williams, who is 17 years old. In fact, let’s look at that last part again, just because:

We’d even recommend watching the entire game for yourself if you missed it the first time, as it illustrates the reason why the adults go to so much trouble to screw it up – all under the guise of ultimately paying the players , although it’s clear no one actually wants to do that. From realignment to NIL to NIL pushback to schools billing fans directly through ticket prices to pay the players instead of the colleges doing it themselves with their media billions, to Congressional intervention to avoid player compensation as a whole to… well , to do everything possible to make college football the NFL for people who don’t live close enough to an NFL team, or who live too close to the Jacksonville Jaguars.

And the cap hasn’t even been reached yet. ESPN, which along with its fellow networks and streaming services helped create this mess, is rolling the dice this coming week by putting GameDay in the one place in the United States that no one ever thought it would go, all in an attempt to revive the West. Coastal market ravaged by the dissolution of the Pac-12. Yes, Berkeley, that most delightfully Trotskyist environment, the gargantuan university least connected to the siren song of sports, the one city where the only member of the GameDay crew who would draw a crowd is Kirk Herbstreit’s dog.

Yes, it’s a pretty bold marketing tool, and one suspects it will be a one-off, as the sport is more centered in the Southeast and Midwest than ever before, and will increasingly be so with each new realignment story. In short, we’re not far away from colleges moving to other states, because why not. But why not Cal for a week? You guess we’ll see.

However, this much is almost certain: the best game of the year has already been played and Ryan Williams has become a business just five months shy of his 18th birthday.