College football is BACK.
It was a wild week 1 of the 2026 college football season, with the controversial ending to the Michigan game, basement-dweller UMass upsetting Rutgers out of the Big Ten, and Boise State giving national title contender Oregon all they could handle.
The best game of the week, though, came last night in Nashville when Ole Miss and Louisville faced off to start their seasons.
The Music City Kickoff, which was held at Nissan Stadium, turned into a shootout between #9 ranked Ole Miss and #24 Louisville. The Rebels took a 38-24 lead with just under 7 minutes left in the game thanks to a rushing TD from their star QB Trinidad Chambliss, but Cardinals QB Lincoln Kienholz put on a show and scored one TD through the air and one on the ground in the final 6 minutes of the game to tie things up with 1:28 left on the clock.
Unfortunately, that was too much time for the Ole Miss offense, who managed to make it into field goal range and kick a 48-yard field goal to win the game, 41-38, as time expired.
But that’s not what anybody is talking about from the game.
As often happens during college football games, the cameras happened to catch a shot of an attractive Ole Miss fan in the crowd, and the internet immediately exploded.
The blonde Rebels fan looked anxious as she watched, I’m sure not even realizing that the cameraman had zoomed in on her. But the internet immediately fell in love with her:
There were also plenty of jokes about former Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin, who was well known for doing yoga with college girls during his time in Oxford – and even walked in to his first game as LSU head coach with Livvy Dunne and Brooks Nader. Gotta wonder if this girl could have kept him at Ole Miss.
(There were also quite a few very NSFW posts about her…I’m not going to post those here but some of y’all are sick).
Well the internet did what the internet does, and the young lady was reportedly identified as Ole Miss alum Sara Smith, though her Instagram is private so we don’t know much about her.
We’ve seen this same thing happen quite a bit in the past, with attractive fans quickly setting the internet on fire, from the Tulane Peach Bowl girl a few years ago to this Georgia Bulldogs fan who went viral during a game against Texas last year.
Smith has yet to respond to her viral fame from last night (probably had a long night on Broadway celebrating the win) but there’s no doubt she’s heard about it by now after absolutely taking over the internet.
Good to have college football back again.
Big Ten Offers Explanation On Controversial Michigan Ending
Elsewhere in college football, the worst ending of the season came thanks to…a group of Big Ten officials in the game between Michigan and Western Michigan.
The Western Michigan Broncos were giving the No. 16 ranked Michigan Wolverines all they could handle at The Big House. In fact, the Broncos had the Wolverines on the ropes, and even delivered a knockout blow.
Until the referees got involved.
The Broncos kicked their final field goal with just 1:15 left on the clock to make the score 12 to 7, meaning Michigan needed to drive down the field to score in just over a minute if they wanted to avoid what would have been considered one of the biggest upsets in the history of college football.
With no timeouts left and only 9 seconds on the clock, Michigan was forced to throw a hail mary, which star quarterback Bryce Underwood actually overthrew, and ball fell to the ground outside the back of the end zone as the clock hit triple zeros. That’s at least how us casual college football fans saw it play out.
Here’s how it looked in real time:
As Western Michigan began celebrating what would have been the MAC program’s signature upset for the ages (Michigan was predicted to be a Big Ten powerhouse this season) the refs suddenly announced that the previous play was under review. When the broadcast took another look at it, they confirmed that there shouldn’t be any time left on the clock, and that Western Michigan had won the game.
But the Big Ten referees evidently saw something else (more on that shortly), and said that they were putting one second back on the clock, which gave Underwood and Michigan one more shot at an unlikely hail mary. Sure enough, here’s what happened with the Wolverines and their second chance:
Admittedly, it was an impressive throw and catch… but Michigan shouldn’t have ever gotten that second chance.
College football fans were almost certain that what they saw play out on the field was rigged in favor of Michigan. And everyone was waiting for some sort of official review from the Big Ten and its referees. Late into the night, the conference did finally provide a statement and what they call “video evidence” of the one second being added back onto the clock:
“Following video review, it was determined Western Michigan’s #18 started his jump from an established out-of-bounds position (left foot) and made contact with the ball with one second remaining on the clock. As shown in the provided video of what was viewed during the replay process, a side-by-side view of the play and the game clock, using a direct shot of the game clock in the stadium, was used to determine the final ruling.
Eighty-five minutes prior to the game, all broadcast cameras used for the replay system, including the camera on the game clock, are synced using a strobe system to ensure all cameras are aligned.
Per NCAA Football rule 4-2-3-a, ‘A ball not in player control, other than a kick that scores a field goal, is out of bounds when it touches the ground, a player, a game official or anything else that is out-of-bound [sic], or that is on or outside a boundary line,’ and thus the clock is stopped.”
Yeah… no one is buying that.
If all the clocks are synced prior to the game, why was the official clock the broadcast was referencing different from the one Big Ten refs used? In the broadcast replay, the football is still in the air as the triple zeros appear.
Conveniently, the clock the Big Ten provided in that video above has “0:01” on the clock when a player touches the football.
College football fans still think it was fixed:
Prior to this game, 110,352 teams, dating back to 1869, that were leading at the end of regulation won. #60:01
— Unsportsmanlike_Conduct (@personal_f0ul) September 6, 2026
— Ivetta (@IvettaAbramyan) September 6, 2026
Who synced up these videos, Connor Stalions?
Why does it not match either the TV game feed, or what is supposed to be the literal stadium game clock here? pic.twitter.com/noaxehK7yK
— Lance ‘Doc’ Pearson 🅙 (@DocLanceP) September 6, 2026
“We keep the real clock somewhere else where only we can see but nobody at the stadium can see” is the most unserious, “we don’t respect your intelligence” explanation possible
— Primetime Carolina (@primetimecar) September 6, 2026
A complete utter joke. We have eyes. We saw what happened. You guys are justifying this horrible call or trying to get away with rigging it. A complete joke to the sport
— Preston (@49ersPreston) September 6, 2026
