COLLEGE FOOTBALL WATCH GRID: How to not worry about Bama (unless you’re UGA)

It’s college football season. We can pretend we only wanna watch good games, or we can face facts.

Here we have the final weekend of the regular season, which is also the first weekend of the postseason. Also, there’s one more regular-season game after this weekend, and all the lower levels of football are already well into their postseasons. Make sense? College football.

Every Championship Weekend, it’s easy to lose yourself in College Football Playoff jockeying and miss out on actual game stuff. The end of this very blog post focuses on playoff business, because all have fallen short.

As always, the Watch Grid sorts your weekend into three watchability columns. And as always, watchability is not strictly about game quality, team quality or quality of any kind. These things matter, though, I guess.

Friday, Dec. 3 college football schedule

Since Oregon-Utah is a rematch of a blowout and is a Pac-12 game, keep at least one eye on the FCS game, a seminal-worthy matchup in round two. Snow approaches greater metropolitan Hell Gate, Montana, but looks like it’ll just miss this game. Still, let’s get a load of what college football playoffs should look like, with top teams rewarded by getting to host games.

Saturday, Dec. 4 college football schedule

SICKOS GAME OF THE WEEK

Kinda has to be interim-coached USC meeting Cal in a game that could’ve just been canceled, since both teams are 4-7 anyway. Nevertheless, since the Mountain West continues to baffle by burying its title game among the early headliners, we are thankful to USC-Cal for giving us one last late-night event before bowl season.

The actual most important game of the week

All the others, by definition. And in FBS, all playoff talk revolves around one.

If Georgia beats Alabama, ignore those who’ll spend all of Saturday pre-angry about a two-loss Bama making it into the field anyway. They know you’re tired of the Tide acquiring bids even in subpar seasons, and they like to watch you fret yourself silly over the possibility of it happening again.

It won’t, unless cataclysms hammer the rest of the scoreboard.

  • Iowa beating No. 2 Michigan would be one such cataclysm. If nothing else, you have to assume the Hawkeyes will have a better time against Michigan’s offense than Ohio State did, since Iowa’s whole worldview is based around playing in games with modest box scores.
  • Houston beating No. 4 Cincinnati would be another. That’s where we are as a species: Alabama’s playoff fate might depend on an AAC team losing. (At this point, I think the only scenario in which a 13-0 Cincy doesn’t make the playoff could be: Alabama beats Georgia, and Oklahoma State annihilates Baylor.)
  • Baylor beating No. 5 Oklahoma State would also weirden (trying out a word) things.
  • And No. 6 Notre Dame exists! The Irish are moving quickly, reportedly replacing Brian Kelly with defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman, which makes it seem much less likely that the the playoff committee will punish Notre Dame players for a midseason coaching change.

So if this stuff is happening, does anyone really have the energy to present a grand case against a playoff field of Georgia, Notre Dame, maybe two-loss Michigan, and whoever’s available? I don’t even know which teams we’d furiously advocate. Would we all work up the bile to ride for a Baylor that’s lost to TCU’s interim coach? An Oregon that’s lost to Stanford, one of the country’s worst teams? At some point, there are only a few truly good options.

So there you go. No reason to worry about grand conspiracies favoring Bama. If the Tide reach the playoff, it’s because either they beat Georgia, or everything else fell apart to such a degree, somebody just had to be put in there. Don’t fall for the takesmiths who’ll try to stir you up otherwise.