This is an opinion column.

And now they play football.

Perhaps the longest offseason in the collegiate game’s recent history ends Saturday with what we still call Week 0. For the next 17 Saturdays, the most overshadowed season in memory will try to win back the viewership overlooked in the nonsense of the past few months.

In some ways, this is the Christmas Eve of college football seasons.

In others, it’s a four-month comma connecting the proud past with a complex future.

A new 12-team playoff awaits in 2024 just as Texas and Oklahoma deepen an already stacked SEC lineup.

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Zoom out and the uncertainty surrounding the structure of the sport as we know it looks less enticing. Realignment found a tipping point where the entire Pac-12 conference appears headed for the most pathetic and awkward curtain call ever.

The TV cartels are busy hijacking the soul of the sport as administrators rail on NIL being an existential threat. All this while the inevitable scandals associated with widespread legalized gambling wash ashore in Iowa.

But hey, Notre Dame and Navy kick off at 1:30 p.m. CT Saturday in Ireland. Let’s hope attendees at least get free beer like last year’s opener in Dublin.

To say the season’s beginning with an Irish wake is an exaggeration and a weak joke but there’s an eerie feel to this fall.

As Ralph Russo of the Associated Press wrote earlier this week, “Welcome to the final season of college football as we know it.”

And not everyone feels fine.

We’ll be losing stitches in the fabric of the sport like Bedlam in Oklahoma, the Apple Cup in Washington and Oregon’s Civil War.

Does that impact the casual viewer in SEC country?

Well, yes. They’re paper cuts around here but where does this end? When does the camera pull back the self-serving cosmetic surgery to reveal a product unrecognizable to the core audience?

Anyway, enjoy it while you have it.

But with all the looming changes, the summer of 2023 was all about the fall of 2024. Just after Memorial Day, the weekslong quibbling about next fall’s schedule dominated the conversation at an issue-heavy SEC Spring Meetings. Even then, a patchwork solution was reached because who really knows how the reality of 2024 will compare to the forecasts?

There was little talk of the football to come by Labor Day because the Texas and Oklahoma flags outside the meetings resort site figuratively blocked out the sun.

Former Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby made a good point in Russo’s Associated Press piece.

“It does seem like it will feel like a lame-duck year at some point in time,” he said.

The issues of tomorrow have clouded the view of today.

But there’s still real interest to be found on the field between Saturday and the Jan. 8 College Football Playoff title game in Houston.

Georgia’s going for the sport’s first three-peat since … Minnesota? That’s right, the last program to win three national titles was the pre-row-boat Golden Gophers from 1934-36.

Revenge Tour Redo is on the plate for an Alabama program that wants its throne back but still needs to find a quarterback.

Auburn’s up for another reinvention as Hugh Freeze becomes the fifth coach of the Tigers since Saban arrived in Tuscaloosa. He’s got momentum on the recruiting trail so he’s in that 2024 spirit already.

For now, bring on Week Nil where you can watch Hawaii play Vanderbilt in a construction site.

What’s more fitting than the first game involving the SEC being played in a stadium amid a renovation set for 2024 completion?

At least it’s football.

And we’ll take that over Capitol Hill lobbying, conference realigning and all the warts trying to suck the fun out of the falls to come after 2023.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.