Look alive, it’s the second-last weekend of the college football regular season! This is unlikely to be the season’s most cataclysmic weekend, though we do have 10 ranked teams favored by only single digits. And I think this schedule is pretty sneaky-loaded.

First, we must salute the weekly parade of MAC teams that have already taken care of wins. This time, those are CMU, EMU, Miami (Ohio), NIU, and Toledo.

As always, the Watch Grid sorts your Saturday 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.

Thursday, Nov. 18 and Friday, Nov. 19 college football schedule

Pretty good Friday night, though I’d like to speak with whoever decided we needed to make the CFB completionist stay awake until 3 a.m. ET Saturday morning.

Saturday, Nov. 20 college football schedule

Whether you like decent games or terrible games, that’s a really crowded middle slate, huh?

SICKOS GAME OF THE WEEK

Last week, many noted the Texas Longhorns found themselves amid a five-game losing streak for the first time since 1956. Well, the worst thing about a five-game losing streak is that it can become a six-game losing streak. This could be the first time Texas has suffered such a thing since … 1956! The Horns went 1-9 that year, only beating a 6-4 Tulane by one point. Things could always be worse!

And they might be! West Virginia’s a three-point favorite in Morgantown!

But here’s what makes this situation truly sicko: WVU fans are likewise already disgruntled. Their team is 2-5 in Big 12 play, and Neal Brown’s tenure is 15-17 overall. This could be forgiven if the team won or lost via explosions, as is proper, but it mostly just sputters and/or makes opponents sputter. This means no matter what happens in Texas-WVU, somebody’s mad about sputterin’.

Let’s also remember how much WVU people would enjoy one last (maybe) win over the SEC-bound Longhorns. It was the rivalry-deprived Eers, after all, who made Horns Down a truly national thing.

The actual most important game of the week

We still have roughly 11 College Football Playoff contenders, a bit higher than the eight-ish we usually have at this point in the season, so we should either expect a bloody weekend or a real log jam of a finish.

Spartans-Buckeyes is an obvious playoff eliminator, but almost every other one-loss team is also in for a tussle. No. 3 Oregon, No. 6 Michigan, No. 9 Oklahoma State, No. 10 Wake Forest, or No. 13 Oklahoma could lose, and I’ve just jinxed No. 2 Alabama and No. 8 Notre Dame.

Undefeated Cincinnati also faces a scrap, with a chance to look like a CFP team for the first time in a month. I say this not to argue non-power teams deserve exclusion, but to argue it’s fair to expect great teams to dominate weak teams and beat good teams. Absolutely, this expectation should also apply to a team like Oregon, which has mostly been Green Cincinnati With A Loss To A Terrible Stanford this season.

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