Beneath His Station

The Oldest House. — the words of House Cardinals

Jacoby Brissett is the man a house sends for when the plan has already failed. His whole career is other men’s seats, kept warm and handed back without complaint.

Arizona did not send for him as a substitute. Arizona gave him the house.

In the spring this house released the lord it had built around for a decade — at the first minute of the first day it was legally allowed to — and it will be paying him not to be here for two more winters. Brissett is what they did next. Nobody read it as a plan. Arizona won three games all last season, and the realm looked at that, agreed, and thought about something else.

Which left Los Angeles, at home, with the realm’s money on them: the safest wager of the weekend.

Arizona won it by two scores and never once looked hurried.

---

Nobody tells you how ordinary an upset looks while it is happening.

Brissett was not brilliant. He was unbothered. Nine separate times he threw to Trey McBride, a knight of his, and never far — a man paying off a debt in instalments. A squire scored on his first day in the sport. Arizona’s Reckoner, Chad Ryland, went out four times and came back with points every time, cold as arithmetic, one of them from short range after somebody grabbed a face mask and handed Arizona free ground.

Across the field, Jim Harbaugh, who runs Los Angeles, watched his house hold the ball barely a third of the afternoon. Nothing is winnable from there.

---

Two minutes before the interval, Los Angeles came within three strides of scoring and stopped there.

Harbaugh had the safe thing in his hand: send his Reckoner out and take the certain points. The other choice was one more attempt at those three strides, and failing meant the whole long march counted for nothing.

He sent his lord.

Justin Herbert never got the throw away. Arizona came through his own shieldwall and put him on the grass, and the safest wager in the realm walked off its own field with nothing at all.

Late in the third quarter Los Angeles lost Ladd McConkey, the one knight who had looked capable of rescuing something, to a hurt chest. Then it came apart in the ordinary ways. Arizona smothered a kick before it left the ground, and took one of Herbert’s throws clean out of the air.

Afterward Harbaugh had nothing to tell anybody about McConkey and not much about the rest of it. He called his own house sloppy, and unlike itself. Asked what had gone wrong, he said there were quite a few things.

The other steward had never run a house in his life before Sunday. Mike LaFleur is the first man to win his first afternoon in charge of Arizona in more than fifty years — for the house that threw its lord away in the spring and was pitied all summer for it.

Ships of the week: Brissett and McBride, nine times, nothing fancy, all afternoon. Villain of the week: whoever made Los Angeles the favourite. Next week: Los Angeles explains itself. Arizona, for now, has not lost.