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Ryan McGee, ESPN Senior Writer
Inspiring idea for this week:
There’s a house, dear, on the other side of town.
People come from miles around.
Wear your beautiful red dress
Let’s go see what this mess is.
That’s all baby, let’s go
and go far up the hill
We will have a lot of fun.
We will welcome the rising sun.
We’ll play ball all night long.
Until we hear your mother’s call
That’s all baby, let’s go
and go far up the hill
There’s excitement on the hill.
let’s go, let’s go, let’s go
— “Let’s Go” Hank Ballard & the Midnighters
Here at Bottom 10 headquarters, currently stored in a storage container aboard a cargo ship carrying Desmond Howard pocket squares to Ireland for “College Match Day,” we’re ready to spring back from our winter/spring/summer football slumber. Now let’s hope the teams on the roster that will receive them are about ready to do the same.
Same thing. That’s a word we won’t use much during the 2024-25 college football season (like, early 2025). The realignment has bankrupted Rand McNally. The transfer portal has been a merry-go-round connected to Max Verstappen’s RB20, a spring model. And come December, it will bring with it a 12-team College Football Playoff designed to please everyone, finally, and probably no one.
Which is why the arrival of the Top 10 feels like a warm hug from your grandmother. It’s still the same as it always was. It’s familiar. It’s soft. And it smells a little like eggs. But in a world that seems as turbulent as Tim Legler in the Los Angeles earthquake, it’s also the anchor we need… even if the teams that brought it to us always forget to pull that anchor from the bottom of the ocean before they try to sail. You better all get going. Dez needs his squares.
With apologies to Napoleon McCallum, John Paul Jones and Steve Harvey, here are the top ten players for the 2024 pre-season.
Ty Pennington’s alma mater has joined the FBS ranks and thus added its name to the prestigious Annowls, or Annals of Bottom 10 Owls, taking its impressive place on a rotting tree branch alongside Temple, Rice and F.A. (not I)U.
The Warhawks hired a new coach, Bryant Vincent, who immediately sensed a draft in his office. When he followed the air leak into the locker room, he discovered the transfer exit tunnel hidden behind a poster of the Louisiana-Monroe schedule, like a prison guard in The Shawshank Redemption.
The Golden Flashes, who have won one game in 2023, will spend three of their first four weekends traveling to Pittsburgh, Tennessee and Penn State. The good news is that the school will get big checks for those trips. The bad news is that it will end up spending most of that money on BenGay and Band-Aids.
I don’t want to bore you with this, but the Akron team will be traveling to Kent State on November 19th for what may be the 10 worst pillow fights of the century. So go ahead and circle them with your markers.
Apparently that wasn’t enough for the Wolverines to win a national title or even dominate the box office alongside “Deadpool.” Instead, Joe Blow’s team decided to go all out in their public disdain for the NCAA, whether it was head coach Jim Harbaugh walking out of his post at the Los Angeles press conference or the decision to invite him back to the season opener after Indianapolis made him an offer. I’m no expert on disdain, but I am somewhat of an expert on the Wolverines, and no one should show their disdain with adamantium claws.
The Minutemen will play their final season as an independent team before moving to #MACtion in 2025. But wait a minute here. If you’re a Minutemen, isn’t the fight for independence everything to you?
The second Owls in our rankings will play ROCK, a former bottom-10 UTSA player who has become a regular bowler in Week 13. Why does this matter? Because UTSA hosts Kennesaw State in Week 1… visits Rice in Week 7… and welcomes FAU in Week 8… meaning the Roadrunners will compete with all four FBS Owls in 2024. So, do they have to play all of those games at night?
New junior varsity coach Scotty Walden led a successful FCS program at Austin Peay, where the school’s true cheer was “Let’s go Peay!” Now he’ll be walking around the Sun Bowl shouting, “Let’s go UTE-Peay!” Which sounds like a case one might want to take to a urologist.
This spot is between the #MACtionites in Baller State and the Buffalo Bulls Not Bills. The Cards have been in the bottom 10 since 2015, the last of Pete Lembo’s five seasons in Muncie. He’s now the head coach at Buffalo. The two teams will play on Nov. 12. Until then, both will likely be in the bottom 10 of Lembo’s.
The Panthers are back. In 2014, they were the first team from a top-10 team selected by Ryan McGee. However, they eventually made the switch to an Atlanta street corner and became semi-annual tournament visitors under coach Sean Elliott, including last season’s 7-6 team that won the famed Idaho Potato Championship. But Elliott shockingly left the team after two days of spring practice and Georgia State jumped the gate like a waterslide at Six Flags Over Georgia. So who did Nott Southern State hire to take over? Dale McGee. Are we related? No. Are we family? Now we are, yes.
waiting list: Charlotte 3-9ers, EC-Yew, Buffalo Bulls not Bills, Sam Houston we have a problem, Fa-la-la-la-la Tech, New Mexico State and New Mexico State, U-Can, Maps… all of them.
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