I never thought we’d see a year crazier than 2007. Ever.

Any college football fan born pre-2000 probably remembers that roller coaster like it was yesterday. Twelve top-5 teams lost to unranked teams.

Remember the curse of No. 2? Of course you do. After the first BCS rankings came out on Oct. 14, the No. 2 team lost 5 times, and 4 of those losses were against unranked teams. The most notable was when Rich Rodriguez’s West Virginia squad entered the final weekend of the regular season as a 28-point favorite … and then laid the egg of all eggs and lost to 4-7 Pitt (people forget that Pat McAfee missing 2 chip-shot field goals was the difference in that game).

I mean, Kansas and Illinois played in BCS bowls. If that’s not a wild season, I don’t know what is.

It was fitting that 2-loss LSU, which entered conference championship weekend ranked No. 7 in the BCS standings following what appeared to be a season-ending triple-overtime loss to Arkansas, played for and won a national title. That hadn’t happened to a 2-loss team before, and it hasn’t happened to a 2-loss team since.

Well, I hate to break it you, 2007, but your place in history as “the craziest college football season ever” is officially on the hot seat. If this unprecedented offseason is any indication, 2020 will own that title by season’s end.

Because college football season is, in many ways, a celebration, let’s think of this comparison in terms of a night of partying (while also understanding that there’s a pandemic going on and there are things more important than football and this isn’t a literal comparison).

The 2007 season was like a bar crawl. It got drunker and more out of hand at every stop until the night finally came to a close at 4 a.m. There was karaoke, far too much dancing in public, a run-in with a movie star who was in town for a film and an on-foot escape from the law. I mean, we should have known. The 2007 season essentially chugged a bottle of Jack Daniel’s upon arrival at the bar:

The 2007 season was an unforgettable night that we still replay more than a decade later.

The 2020 season, on the other hand, is already off the rails before people have even left the house for the bar. We’ve got Power 5 conferences making separate announcements that they’re only playing each other because of COVID-19 protocols, we’ve got entire programs like Michigan State and Rutgers in quarantine because of outbreaks and we’ve got players like Virginia Tech’s Caleb Farley and Illinois’ Ra’Von Bonner opting out of playing football during a pandemic.

I mean, a group of Pac-12 players already threatened an opt out over concerns of safety and injustice.

Again, nobody has even left the house yet and this season is already a different kind of drunk. What’s gonna happen if and when they do leave the house? That’s not the type of start to the night that sets up for quietly sitting at a table sipping on a Bud Light. The Power 5 commissioners are like bar owners trying to make sure their buildings don’t go up in flames by night’s end.

They don’t know what lies ahead. We don’t either. Will we have games canceled because of outbreaks? If the MLB is any indication, that seems inevitable. Will we have 8-0 teams that suddenly can’t play a monumental late-season game because of an outbreak? Nothing seems out of question. Well, besides a ho-hum regular season.

The unpredictability from week-to-week is going to be unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The fact that all of these Power 5 conferences won’t be facing each other during the regular season is going to spark more debate and hypotheticals than ever. Instead, they’ll be tested on a weekly basis. How are we not going to have something like a 2007 Pitt-West Virginia upset in a year like this?

If a starting quarterback is in quarantine or if a contender loses its starting middle linebacker, who knows how the Playoff selection committee will treat that. Shoot, who knows how Las Vegas will treat that. For all we know, the oddsmakers will be forced to hold off on lines for certain games until they see who’s on the field and who isn’t.

This is setting up to be a year in which a team could get lucky by virtue of catching a contender at the right time. By the way, dibs on Louisville, UNC and Iowa State to be the random team that we look at and say, “wait a minute. How in the world did they make the Playoff?!?”

And on the flip side, you know that the SEC winner this year is going to try to claim multiple national titles. After all, the league is scheduling to play 10 games against one another. Ten! Instead of Samford cashing a 7-figure check to give us a 3.5-hour snooze fest in late November, we’re about to see Auburn taking on an actual Power 5 team. Instead of there being a .000001% chance of competitiveness, we’ll see Auburn face a team like Kentucky, which is more than capable of pulling off an upset.

If we’re being honest, college football was due for a year of madness. The sport that has 4 teams (Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Oklahoma) represent 71% of the Playoff bids could use a little shakeup. Even if that’s the exact Playoff that we get, it doesn’t feel like any of those teams would be taking the same path to get there. Well, they aren’t because they’re only playing conference games and all of them will get the “wait until they play conference X” treatment.

I’m here for it. I’m here for actually embracing this season, no matter how weird it looks.

It won’t be anything like we’re used to. We won’t know if a star quarterback is playing until he’s on the field. We might not even know if a head coach is a go until he takes the field. Shoot, we won’t know an entire team is playing until it takes the field. Maybe it won’t have quite as many late-season, national championship-changing upsets as 2007, but it’ll be more unpredictable than any season we’ve ever had.

If there was ever a year that could make 2007 look mundane, well, 2020 is it.