International openers are productive weirdness
Context
Ty understands that tourism boards and sponsorship money explain foreign-site openers, but he still likes that the first games of the year now arrive from places that do not feel like obvious college-football settings. North Carolina-TCU in Dublin and NC State-Virginia in Rio are odd in a way the sport can carry.
The take is not that globalization is strategically coherent. It is that college football often works because pieces of it do not make clean sense, and an overseas Week 0 kickoff announces that weirdness immediately.