|
The college football season has plenty of epic heavyweight clashes on the horizon, games that will decide conference titles and playoff spots (or seeds): Georgia at Alabama in Week 5, Ohio State at Oregon and Texas vs. Oklahoma in Week 7, Georgia at Texas and Alabama at Tennessee in Week 8, just to name a few. The big ones are coming, and they're usually worth the hype. But as we learned last week, a nice, decentralized, keep-the-remote-in-your-hands-at-all-times week can be an absolute delight. Week 3 is as decentralized and democratic as you'll ever see. It gives us only two ranked-vs.-ranked matchups, but instead of focusing on headliners, we get to watch Alabama playing in the land of "Jump Around." We get Boston College playing its biggest game since, what, 2018? 2008? We get Oregon State fans creating the most hostile environment imaginable for a wobbly Oregon team. We get the Backyard Brawl and the Apple Cup. We get a couple of potentially outstanding Friday night games in Kansas. We get a rematch of last year's ridiculous Colorado-Colorado State game. We get a night game between two of the Big 12's most chaotic programs (TCU and UCF). We get to see East Carolina's Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium at its absolute best for an in-state rivalry game. We get the biggest Indiana-UCLA game ever (technically true). We're going to have an absolute blast, in other words. Here's everything you need to follow in Week 3. (All times are Eastern.) Jump to a topic:
BC-Missouri | Alabama-Wisconsin
Early Rivalry Week | Big 12 status check
SEC tripleheader | Chaos superfecta
Week 3 playlist  'May the best man win'  No. 24 Boston College at No. 6 Missouri (Saturday, 12:45 p.m., SECN)
"There's a lot of people talking about Group of 5, Power 4, the money and the resources and NIL. It's about the players and it's about lining up and banging heads and [may] the best man win. You saw that [Saturday]." Northern Illinois coach Thomas Hammock's quote after the Huskies' win over Notre Dame was a life-giver. We spend the entire offseason basically boiling everything down to spreadsheets and power. We watch the two most powerful conferences arrange to vacuum up an even higher percentage of the money than before. We create in our heads a universe in which only the richest programs matter and money eliminates all uncertainty in this game. And then 22 guys line up on the field and the 11 from DeKalb beat the 11 from South Bend. And the guys from Berkeley fly across the country and win on The Plains. And guys from Georgia Tech and Boston College beat guys from the school that spent all offseason telling anyone who would listen that it's too good for its own conference. And then those guys from Boston get a shot at an SEC team.
|
