College Football

NCAA football news: Cody Kessler starting at USC, UCLA uniforms, and more

A lot of things happened yesterday. Here’s a quick rundown of what you may have missed in the world of college football.

by Peter Berkes

Sep 4, 2013, 2:00 PM UTC

Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

Here is all the news you may have missed from Tuesday, all wrapped up in one neat little package.

USC

Cody Kessler will reportedly start at quarterback for the Trojans when they host Washington State on Saturday. Both Kessler and Max Wittek saw time against Hawaii in week one, but neither of them looked particularly great. Kessler went 10 of 19 for 95 yards, a touchdown and an interception while Wittek went 5-10 for 77 yards. That's not going to cut it, and there needs to be marked improvement at the position if USC wants to be a real contender in the Pac-12 South.

Alabama

Wide receiver Kenny Bell retired from football on Tuesday. For a little while, anyway. Bell was reportedly frustrated over playing time, but Nick Saban said that Bell is welcome back to the team after basically taking a personal day. Bell caught 17 passes for 431 yards and three scores last year, but didn’t catch a pass in the Tide’s season opening win over Virginia Tech.

UCLA

The Bruins unveiled a new set of black uniforms, which will be worn on Nov. 15 against Washington. A school with uniforms as beautiful as UCLA wearing black alternates doesn’t make a ton of sense to me, but boy those uniforms sure are black!

Clemson

The Tigers got their season off to a great start by beating Georgia on Saturday, and the offense looked as good as advertised. They reeled off 76 plays against the Georgia defense, which is normally a pretty high number ... but offensive coordinator Chad Morris doesn’t seem all that impressed:

[...] “We can play faster. Tajh slowed us down a whole bunch. That was some of our biggest downfalls,” Morris said. “He played well, he played like a veteran, like he’s supposed to play. But as far as the tempo, especially in the third and fourth quarter, he was the one slowing us down because he wasn’t getting his eyes to the sidelines quick enough.”

California

The Bears will be without starting safety Avery Sebastian for the rest of the season after he tore his ACL against Northwestern. He has a good shot at getting a medical redshirt waiver for this season, but that doesn't do much to help Cal's already-thin depth at safety for this year.

Targeting ejections

Six players were tossed from games over the weekend due to the new targeting rule, and after review, four of them were upheld and two were overturned. Texas A&M defensive back Deshazor Everett was among those that did not have their ejections overturned, and probably has the best case that he was hard done by the officials. The validity of his gripe is obviously up for debate, but see for yourself:

Polls

The AP and USA Today released their first polls of the season that are actually based on this year’s games. Polls this early in the season are still silly, but this week was good for Clemson and bad for Oregon State and Boise State. Predictably, I suppose.