A Grip on Sports: While much is changing, this week in the Northwest, there will be some normality with college football

A GRIP ON SPORTS • The college football season is underway. Just barely, sure, but it was possible to waste a whole bunch of time in front of the TV last weekend watching games. And the next will be even more crowded. It is, in a word, glorious.

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• Not all of it, sure. We still can’t figure out how all the off-field stuff is going to work. The proliferation of transfers. Name, image and likeness money. Conference realignment. All that is mystifying.

But the on-field action never changes. Not really. Watching O.J. Simpson run isn’t all that different than watching Caleb Williams sling the ball around the field a million times, even if USC is bound for the Big Ten.

The players may be bigger, faster, better. The coaches smarter, older, richer. The broadcasts clearer, sharper, constant. The game itself, though, is the same. Deep down.

It is still about land acquisition. About dominating the person in front of you. About leveraging the outcome whatever way possible. And it, unlike its professional counterpart, features people who actually make mistakes and do the unexpected.

Football is a uniquely American game. College football is even more so, as it plays well in big cities and small towns. It’s rich in tradition – for now – yet always willing to change. It’s highly accessible.

It’s fall’s game. And it never fails to entertain us.

• Washington State and Idaho meet Saturday in a season opener that could have been scheduled for 1948. Middle of the day. Hot. Dry. The Palouse in all its glory, the wheat harvest finished or soon to be. Holiday weekend. Perfect.

Eastern Washington also begins Saturday, though its game with Tennessee State is more of a modern creation. Such inter-regional battles used to be reserved for the big schools with big budgets and big dreams. Now anyone can hop on a plane and fly across the country, play on a bright red field in front of a national audience accessing the game through a streaming service. Nothing is more anti-traditional than that.

Washington starts the Kalen DeBoer Era by playing the school that gave the Huskies their greatest coach. Don James is no longer with us, but his legacy is everywhere at, and everything to, UW, a school he joined nearly 50 years ago from Kent State. Now the Golden Flashes visit for a night game in Husky Stadium that should feature some incredible shots of Lake Washington. Such images are a tradition.

Is it the most challenging or dynamic opening weekend ever? No. Who cares. There are great games available if needed, even with Pac-12 schools. Oregon plays Georgia, Utah travels to Florida and Stanford hosts Colgate. OK, we threw the last on in there just to see if you were paying attention, but the point is it doesn’t matter.

Whether the game features traditional rivals or new foes, is played on green grass or red turf, brought to us on a legacy network or via our smartphone, it’s there. It’s accessible. And it’s football season.

• It’s also baseball season. Not to be confused with what’s usually going on in Seattle in late August. For the better part of the past couple decades, we’ve know the period as play-out-the-string season. Not this year. Not with the starting pitching staff Jerry Dipoto has built.

Say what you will about the lineup – and most of you use cuss words while doing it – the Mariners’ starting staff is nails.

The five guys the M’s run out there hammer the strike zone. They either throw extremely hard or have great command or change speeds relentlessly. Heck, a couple of them have all of those attributes.

How good has the staff become? We won’t quote numbers and new stats with multi-letter acronyms. We’ll just point out this fact: Last season Marco Gonzales was either the M’s No. 1 or No. 2 starter, depending on how Chris Flexen was doing that week. Now Flexen, who is still throwing well, languishes in the bullpen. And Gonzales, who looked like last year’s Marco in his latest start, is the fifth starter.

Cleveland is a good team. A playoff team with a talented lineup. Yet the M’s starters dominated over the weekend and Seattle probably should have swept the four-game series.

As it is, the M’s won three of four and are about to end the regular season’s penultimate month with a playoff berth seemingly in hand.

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WSU: Will Calvin Jackson Jr. make the New York Jets’ roster? Only if the Jets want to win. He caught another game winning pass yesterday, his second of the preseason. He also leads off the S-R’s weekly look at local players in the NFL. … Yesterday we linked the longer version of this Jon Wilner media-valuation piece. Today, it ran in the S-R. We link it again.  … Elsewhere in the Pac-12 and college football, we’ve always hated USC. For going on 60 years. We’re glad to see everyone is catching up. … Not everything you think you know about Washington this season is true. … Oregon State opens its season with a battle against Mountain West power Boise State. … Oregon has the showdown in Georgia to worry about. … Can Stanford turn its recent struggles into success this season? … Colorado’s strength is in its tight end corps. … As Utah prepares for a game in the Swamp, the Utes know they have a freaky good athlete on their side. … A UCLA player got in better shape and it’s showed in preseason. … Though Arizona State is an underdog this year, there are a few things the Sun Devils can do to be successful. … Arizona hasn’t been successful on the field in a while. The Wildcats have more talent and should be better this season.

Indians: The postseason will more than likely be determined this week after Spokane dropped Sunday’s game at Everett 5-3. The Indians trail Vancouver by 1.5 games for the final spot heading into a seven-game homestand that begins Tuesday. Dave Nichols has more on all that in this game story.

Preps: Dave also has another beat. Local high school sports. Today he begins the long march by starting with an in-depth interview with Paul Kautzman, the former Mt. Spokane athletic director who is taking over as the director of the Greater Spokane League.

Golf: It is still true professional golfers putt for dough – and for victory. Jillian Hollis showed that Sunday as a couple of late, long birdie putts lifted her to victory in the Epson Tour’s Circling Raven Championship. Jim Meehan has the coverage.

Seahawks: The way they played in the preseason, the Hawks’ backup running backs showed the team has more depth than previously thought. … Training camp allowed a quartet of players to make a mark and possibly earn spots on the roster.

Mariners: It was Robbie Ray’s turn to dominate the Guardians yesterday. The M’s got just enough offense and won 4-0. One thing for sure. It was a historic homestand and not just for what happened on the field. … J.P. Crawford is having an issue with a pectoral muscle and had to sit Sunday. His replacement, Dylan Moore, hit the big three-run home run.

Storm: We were in and out of the Storm playoff game at Las Vegas yesterday. And, while we were watching, Seattle was having its way with the top-seeded Aces. But the opener of the five-game semifinal tightened up before Jewell Loyd came through to lift Seattle to a 76-73 victory.

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• A baseball card sold for $12.6 million? Are you kidding? We knew inflation was out of control, but this is ridiculous. Even if it was a Mickey Mantle card. … One more thing. It looks as if the U.S. is back to dominating the Little League World Series. Hawaii was the best team in the tournament and cruised in the title game, winning 13-3. Until later …