COLLEGE FOOTBALL WATCH GRID, Week 3: No such thing as a boring Saturday

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

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

This part of the college football season demands frequent use of this mantra: There is no such thing as a boring college football Saturday, no matter what the schedule looks like. Did you expect last Saturday to cram in so much weird, mean joy? No, nobody did, but that’s what happens every time we underestimate a Saturday. This schedule might look light now, but we’ve seen enough over the years to predict we’ll all be delirious by Sunday morning.

This mantra will now be repeated every week for the next month or so.

Thursday, Sept. 16 and Friday, Sept. 17 college football schedule

UCF-Louisville was nearly a 2005 Conference USA rivalry, was the game that prevented anyone from arguing the 2013 Cardinals deserved any BCS consideration, is currently a meeting between a non-power and a power, and would be a meeting between two powers, if we were in the mid-2020s right now. But that’s nothing. Did you know Illinois is considered a power?

Saturday, Sept. 18 college football schedule

Stream live college football games every week this season from conferences across the country on ESPN+.

SICKOS GAME OF THE WEEK

Two weeks in a row, Nebraska has handled business like a competent team should. And the Huskers’ Week 0 loss to Illinois has only looked more and more fluky (though no less entertaining) as September has unfolded.

Yet Week 2’s SICKOS GAME was ordained before the season began.

Any time you try to make it so people don’t watch your game against your historic archrival, a game in which you’re a three-score underdog, rest assured people will show more interest in this game’s outcome.

And guess what? If the Huskers win, this is an even bigger SICKO outcome! You, the viewer at home, can’t lose — unless one of your teams is in this game. In that case, you can lose.

The actual most important game of the week

Sure, fine, whatever. It’s technically Bama-Florida. But there’s a high likelihood we already know exactly how this will go, especially if Nick Saban is this mad about giving up 14 points to Mercer.

I considered putting this game in the Maybe column. Whatever.

Let’s not lose sight of Auburn-Penn State, which could end up having more ramifications, is likely to be more competitive, and involves two talented teams prone to playing football as savants who’ve never played football before.

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