Whoever Ran the Ball Won. Then There Was Dublin.

Two minutes before halftime in Dublin, North Carolina took the lead without touching the ball on offense. A safety. Two points, the kind of entry that looks like a typo on a box score, and it stood as the go-ahead score in the first game of the college football season.

North Carolina 15, TCU 10, from Aviva Stadium at noon Eastern in the Aer Lingus College Football Classic, and that line is the entire afternoon. Twenty-five points. Zero touchdown passes, by either team, in sixty minutes of football. Billy Edwards Jr. went 16 of 28 for 232 yards for the Tar Heels and Jaden Craig went 20 of 32 for 175 for the Horned Frogs, and neither quarterback threw a ball into an end zone. The second half produced three points in total, an Aeron Burrell field goal from 28 yards with 10:04 on the third-quarter clock, and then twenty-five minutes in which nothing at all happened.

TCU had the better afternoon on the ground and the worse afternoon everywhere a decision got made. Jeremy Payne carried 25 times for 142 yards with a 48-yarder inside it, and Jon Denman punched in the only touchdown the Horned Frogs would get. They held the ball 33:02 and converted seven of sixteen third downs. They also went 1 for 5 on fourth down and took eleven penalties for 89 yards, against three for 20 by North Carolina. There are many ways to lose a football game by five. Losing it four separate times on fourth down is the one that follows a team onto the plane home.

Carolina won this with its front. Xavier Lewis finished with seven tackles, two sacks and four and a half tackles for loss, a line that does not merely show up in a game, it bends the other team's plan; Melkart Abou Jaoude added a sack of his own. Jaylen McGill's 9-yard run late in the first quarter was the only touchdown North Carolina scored all day, and Jelani Thurman's four catches for 94 yards were the only sustained stretch where the passing game looked dangerous. A win on another continent, in a rugby ground, without a touchdown pass. Carolina will take the ugly one and say thank you.

Dublin was the exception. Everywhere else on this eight-game opener the sport handed back its oldest rule and then underlined it: seven of Saturday's eight winners out-rushed the team they beat, and the single game that broke the pattern is the one where neither offense could move the football at all.

The cleanest version came in Charlottesville, and it was the best performance of the day by a distance. Virginia beat NC State 34-8 in front of 62,779 at Scott Stadium behind a quarterback who barely had to throw. Beau Pribula completed nine of eleven passes for 155 yards and two touchdowns, then ran fifteen times for 110 more. The Cavaliers rushed for 258, gained 413, went 4 for 4 on fourth down, turned it over zero times and held the ball for 38:03. Read the possession number again. Virginia did not sneak up on anybody. It took thirty-eight minutes of a football game away from a conference opponent and never gave any of it back.

Both Virginia touchdown throws went deep and neither was especially contested, Xavier Brown for 45 and Da'Shawn Martin for 47, and Will Bettridge hit both his field goals including a 47 and all four extra points. NC State finished with 168 total yards. CJ Bailey went 12 of 23 for 84 with an interception to Brandyn Hillman, Will Wilson scored from a yard out in the third and Bailey found Deandre Desinor for the two-point try. That was the Wolfpack's evening. It is one Saturday in August against a defense that played its best game in a long time, and an ACC race does not get settled in week one, but Virginia looked like a team that has decided exactly what it is going to be.

USC was the only ranked team on the board, fourteenth in the AP poll and tied there with BYU, and for three quarters it was surgical. Jayden Maiava completed 25 of 29 passes for 286 yards and two touchdowns. Twenty-five of twenty-nine. The Trojans gained 505 yards, converted nine of thirteen third downs, and led San Jose State 35-3 midway through the third quarter at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where 51,144 turned out. King Miller and Trent Mosley did the rest of the damage, Mosley with seven catches for 118 and a score.

Then San Jose State scored 23 points in the last fifteen minutes and made it 42-26. Luke Weaver went 21 of 32 for 234 with two touchdown passes and a 7-yard scoring run, and he threw two successful two-point conversions in that quarter alone, the first of them immediately after Jerry McClure's 28-yard touchdown catch. The number that matters out of the Coliseum is 25 of 29. The number that gets repeated is 26. Both are true, and a team ranked fourteenth should want a tidier fourth quarter before its schedule stops being generous.

The best finish of the day was in Palo Alto. Stanford led Hawai'i 23-7 in the third quarter and then watched the Rainbow Warriors rip off twenty straight points: Sitani Mikaele from five with a two-point run by Tama Uiliata, an 11-yard touchdown catch by Uiliata, and DeVon Rice's 29-yard grab that put Hawai'i in front 27-23 with the game nearly gone. Micah Alejado threw it fifty times and completed thirty for 269 yards, which is its own kind of stubborn. Stanford answered with Micah Ford's third 2-yard touchdown run of the night and then Tevarua Tafiti scooped a fumble and took it 31 yards, and it finished 37-27.

Ford is the story there, and it is not the yardage. Twenty-five carries, 99 yards, three touchdowns, and not one of the three came from farther than two yards away. That is not a tailback having a monster night. That is an offensive line moving a football across a line three separate times when all 23,222 people in Stanford Stadium knew precisely what was coming. Davis Warren threw for 310 on 22 of 34 and JonAnthony Hall averaged 40.5 yards on his two catches, and Stanford still won this game because it could get two yards on demand.

The rest of the board said the same thing in different accents. Florida State ran for 217 and beat New Mexico State 34-17 in front of 65,915 at Doak Campbell Stadium, Ousmane Kromah going 14 for 115 with a 52-yard tear and Samuel Singleton Jr. scoring by ground and by air off Ashton Daniels. New Mexico State's Trey Hedden threw for 272 yards and converted ten of seventeen third downs and still lost by seventeen, because the Aggies rushed for 47. North Dakota State piled up 209 rushing yards in a 33-7 win over Jacksonville State inside the Fargodome. Eastern Michigan out-rushed Sacramento State 69 to 49, the thinnest margin the rule produced all day, and won 28-17 at Rynearson Stadium.

The day ended at ten Eastern in a domed stadium in the desert, Memphis over UNLV 27-21 at Allegiant Stadium. Marcus Stokes went 15 of 26 for 223 and two scores, one of them the only catch Stonka Burnside made all night, a 48-yard touchdown. Jaylin Carter carried fifteen times for 97 with a 36-yard run to the house. Jackson Arnold threw for 291 and ran it twenty-one times for the Rebels and lost anyway, because Memphis out-rushed them 195 to 169 and Philippe Laforge kicked field goals from 32 and 36 in the second half. Those two kicks were the last points of the opening weekend.

We wrote Wednesday that the sport does not start so much as boot up, one window at a time. Saturday was the power button, and it taught a narrower lesson than a full slate would have: eight games, and the football on the ground decided seven. The machine comes fully online Thursday through Monday, ninety-one games, with all twenty-five teams in the AP Top 25 on the field somewhere in that window and exactly one of those games pairing two of them. Whether the oldest rule in the sport survives contact with Ohio State and Georgia and Texas is the question worth carrying into it.