COLLEGE FOOTBALL WATCH GRID, Week 4: It’d be fun if Notre Dame lost

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 continue to be repeated every week for the next month or so.

Thursday, Sept. 23 and Friday, Sept. 24 college football schedule

If Liberty’s playing Syracuse, it’s time to commemorate college football’s greatest hospital-bed mythmaking since “The Gipper.”

Saturday, Sept. 25 college football schedule

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

SICKOS GAME OF THE WEEK

If you’re just here for bad football, it might be hard to top Hawaii-New Mexico State and New Mexico-UTEP, the kinds of games that only make the Watch Grid because there’s little else going on late at night (otherwise, I usually exclude games that don’t involve any top-100 Division I teams).

But if you’re here for at least half-bad football involving the emotions of hundreds of thousands of people, you’re gonna wanna pay attention to Louisville-Florida State, where the Cardinals are favored in Tallahassee. A loss would give FSU its first 0-4 start since before Bobby Bowden showed up and would mean Mike Norvell must go 6-2 down the stretch in order to equal the record that got Willie Taggart fired. The Noles might be underdogs in six or seven of those games.

We’ll be certain to check back in with these folks either way.

The actual most important game of the week

Two ancient programs, neither of whom has won any sort of championship in quite a while, meet in a 100,000-seat stadium to play a few hours of gruesome gruntball. The winner will be 4-0 and in position to dethrone the division’s longtime bully. I’m speaking of Rutgers-Michigan, of course.

Ok fine, I’m speaking of Texas A&M-Arkansas in JerryWorld, where the Aggies annually pull out a 17-overtime thriller at the Hogs’ expense.

Actually, no. It’s Notre Dame-Wisconsin, because the Irish are three-for-three at doing the Notre Dame thing: Looking unimpressive against non-good teams (FSU, Toledo, and Purdue). Somebody’s gotta do something about it at some point, unless we want this to be yet another of those years when the Irish show up in January with a pretty record and then get flattened. Those are also pretty good too, though.

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