College football today - Week 1 takeaways and insights

Week 1 occasionally delivers truly great football, an epic battle of two teams destined for a playoff run.

It also delivers some awful football, as two teams still shaking off the rust of a long offseason wage a battle of attrition.

But Saturday's noon slate gave us something else entirely. It was a Schrödinger's cat of college football — both great and awful, beautiful and horrifying, live and dead, all at once.

On the wide open plains of Iowa, the Hawkeyes delivered a win so gloriously ugly, the only true complaint is that the 7-3 final score was marred by a late safety that left even Iowa fans, now secure in victory, dejected. It was a game that deserved a 5-3 final. To have anything else would be like Charles Dickens writing «A Tale of Two Cities» then naming it «A Book About France.»

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Upon the rolling hills of western North Carolina, the Tar Heels and Appalachian State packed nearly nine full Iowa games into the fourth quarter alone. App State jumped out to a 21-7 lead; UNC roared back and led 41-21 entering the fourth quarter, and then things got fun.

The Mountaineers scored on back-to-back drives. UNC answered. Two more App State touchdowns followed before the Tar Heels scored on a 42-yard pass from Drake Maye to take a 56-49 lead with just 2:50 to play.

Then four more touchdowns happened. Seriously — four more TDs than in the entirety of the Iowa-South Dakota State game happened in less than 3 minutes of action at App State. It's possible space-time ceased to exist for a while.

The Tar Heels appeared to have escaped when Chase Brice overthrew his receiver on a 2-point try with 31 seconds to play, but North Carolina went and did the dumbest thing it could possibly do in the aftermath. It