College football is back, and if that doesn't get your blood moving a little in the middle of August, we probably can't be friends. Texas A&M held its first weekend practice of fall camp on August 8, and the early notes out of College Station tell you the Aggies are attacking this thing with some real edge.

Every year around this time I think back to two-a-days in the old Southwest Conference, when coaches ran kids until the Texas heat turned the practice field into a griddle. The modern game does things differently, and smarter, but that first weekend of camp still tells you something about a football team. The Aggies stood out. Not just because they were the only show in town that day, either.

What jumps out from the reports is the energy and how crisp the reps were. First practices can be sloppy, legs-heavy affairs where guys are just trying to remember the playbook. A&M apparently didn't get that memo. The intensity was high, and for a program that has spent the last couple years trying to figure out exactly what it wants to be, that matters.

I've said it before about fall camp and I'll keep saying it. Nobody wins a national championship the first week of August. But you sure can lose one. Teams that come out flat, that treat early camp like a formality, those are the ones that stumble in September and spend October trying to dig out. A&M looks like it understands that.

The positional battles will sort themselves out over the next few weeks. That's what camp is for. Grinding through the heat, finding out who can play when the lights come on for real. The foundation gets laid right now, in these early sessions, when nobody's watching except coaches and teammates. The Aggies apparently brought the right attitude to weekend one.

We'll see what they do with it. That's the beautiful and maddening thing about college football. A great first week of camp can turn into a September to remember, or it can evaporate the first time a road crowd gets loud. But you'd rather open sharp than open soft, and A&M opened sharp.