Hello and welcome to 2021’s first edition of the College Football Watch Grid, a weekly attempt to categorize your college football schedule by watchability. I’ve done my best with it each week since the mid-2010s or whatever, and this year, it’s here at For The Win.

As always, watchability is not strictly about game quality, team quality or the honest prestige of your alma mater, which I think boasts the most underrated academics, athletic department, fanbase, traditions, ethics, party scene and campus greenery in all of college sports. These things matter, but we’ll discuss what else watchability is about.

Each week, the Watch Grid will sort your Saturday into three columns. We’ll begin with Week 0, the opening-act trial run that we trot out to make sure everyone can remember how to find CBSSN in their channel guides, and to make sure people have excuses to stop going outside, except for the football players, who have to go outside, in my opinion.

Let’s get right to it.

Each week, we’ll break down a couple special categories. The first one takes longer to explain.

SICKOS GAME OF THE WEEK

There are three levels of college football fan.

1. Person who only cares about one team, only watches one team and reroutes every CFB convo back to one team. This can be an enjoyable and relatively healthy way to consume the sport, as long as this person accepts most people don’t care about this one team, which usually goes 7-5.
2. Person who samples the varied bounties of this coast-to-coast patchwork, straining to watch only the most evenly matched, mistake-free competition between competent teams, enduring statesmanlike Big Ten West chess matches with scores like 13-10, but always ending up drawn toward an 11-interception catastrophe probably involving Ole Miss, West Virginia or some damn foolish thing in the Pac-12. Each week, this person joins the stampede of viewers toward the bad game, beholds things never before imagined, needs a moment to recover from such awful wonders, atones for indulging such guilty pleasures, swears off future lapses in judgment and then lies all week about looking forward to a game that will be coached by Jimbo Fisher.
3. Person who admits right up front that we love college football for one reason: We enjoy bad things. So we might as well plan our Saturdays around the South Carolinas of the world, rather than fall into the weekly trap of trying to appreciate Georgia leading whoever by exactly 16 points for four hours.

So yes, we want our college football schedules to spotlight not just the great games, but also the horrible games. Evaluating a game’s SICKOness is a complex process, however.

Will the game be poorly played? This is the quickest path to SICKO consideration, though it’s not a requirement.

Are both teams reliable chaos generators? If so, fun is guaranteed, but SICKO fun?

How’s the weather forecast? Sunny, 72-degree weather is pleasant, and pleasant is not SICKO. The people prefer mudstorm, but cannot demand it, unless they do sacrifices.

Are one team’s fans already enraged? Now we’re really talking. Quintuple SICKO points if the team drawing all the anger is a once-proud power. If fans of both important teams have lost all emotional control even before kickoff, we’ve got a SICKO GAME OF THE YEAR contender.

The biggest SICKO factor for me is this: What is the maximum possible rage this game is somewhat likely to generate? Because everyone likes it when other people feel bad about something that doesn’t matter.

Let’s use Week 0 of 2021 as our example. The SICKO novice might sprint toward the games involving UConn or New Mexico State.

After all, UConn will likely get blown out on the far side of the world by a Fresno State that was, until a few years ago, the Huskies’ alleged conference inferior. Now, that’s fairly SICKO, but UConn fans have long accepted this as standard UConn behavior.

And UTEP, possibly the FBS’ worst team, faces New Mexico State, possibly the FBS’ worst team. That sounds bad, but come on. Does it feel good to revel in the hardships of NCAA Football 14 starter dynasties? Do we really want to mock cash-strapped, recruiting-deprived universities as they try their best? What did NMSU ever do to you? Does the idea of UTEP having a bad day really give you the following vibes?

No. We’d rather not think about these things at all, because they make us sad.

The Watch Grid’s inaugural SICKOS Game of the Week thus calls upon an old friend: the Nebraska Cornhuskers, who make every looming Saturday feel like the end of the world, like Runza Ragnarok. In this regard, they rank among fancrusher-plus powerhouses like Texas, Tennessee, Michigan, Georgia, Auburn, and whoever is playing Pitt.

Embracing SICKO mindset is about letting the past flow into the future, like if Dr. Strange focused on determining which fumbles would hurt the most feelings.

The Huskers, the greatest college football program of the America Online era, hired Scott Frost in 2018. A can’t-miss sure thing and local legend, Frost has since presided over a 12-20 record and a new NCAA investigation, the kind of thing that’s much cuter when you aren’t 12-20.

Now take that past and spin it into this scenario: Nebraska loses to lowly Illinois for the second time in a row. And not just Illinois. An Illinois coached by Bret Bielema, a snickering loudmouth of Iowa and Wisconsin stock, two more programs long ago regarded as inferior to Nebraska. Imagine bringing home your program’s championship-winning golden son, then watching him lose to this barbarian:

Do you see? Now do you see? And Nebraska still has to play Oklahoma, Michigan, and Ohio State, plus all these Big Ten West teams who were not as good as Nebraska during the No Limit Records administration. This means the future of Nebraska’s schedule also informs the SICKOness of its present.

Are we picking on Nebraska? Is this unfair treatment? No! This will happen to somebody else in next week’s Watch Grid. Maybe Penn State, LSU, UCLA, Virginia Tech, or even Nebraska.

But what if Nebraska wins by 42? Then what? SICKOism was a lie all along? No. In that case, we sought the spirit, but found only the wind, then had to turn elsewhere. Something else surely went wrong in a different game, and this will be the key: We were prepared to abandon the boring Nebraska game and pounce on the debacle, because we spent all week seeking to attune with SICKO energies.

The actual most important game of the week

In this portion each week, I’ll write some notes about the playoff race and stuff. Some people don’t like the playoff being a year-long topic, and that’s fine! Other people say they don’t like it, but click without ceasing on articles about it, leading one to wonder.

I’ll just admit I love the playoff race. I like parsing the rankings, which are bad, made by a committee inventing its own criteria on the fly. I like projecting bowl matchups, which are rigged according to antiquated systems. The whole playoff system is unfair, we should scrap the playoff for a plus-one championship after bowl season and I love the playoff race.

This Week 0 is likely irrelevant to the playoff race, unless we wanna talk FCS playoffs, and even then, might not matter in any way. The only Week 0 teams with even a theoretical chance of making the four-team FBS playoff are Illinois, Nebraska, and UCLA, for no other reason than they each joined the right kinds of conferences like 100 years ago.

For that reason, I think the most important game of Week 0 is also the SICKOS game. Things involving Nebraska’s rises and falls are important. The reason is that many people care about whether Nebraska rises or falls. Whether Nebraska launches a stunning 10-2 bounceback or a 2-10 meltdown or anything in between, it will be important to many people.

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