The date of college football’s opening day is something that varies every offseason, as the first weekend keeps creeping further back into summer. Depending on when your team plays in Week 1, the number of days to the true opening week of college football could vary.
College football’s 2017 opening weekend might be sooner than you realize
The opening weekend isn’t Labor Day weekend. It’s earlier.
Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports
But here at SB Nation, we’re here to get the exact date of opening weekend right. And that, my friends is Saturday, Aug. 26th. Now, you’re probably thinking “Wait, this isn’t when my team plays on Week 1.”
But folks, on this day, we have just about a full Saturday of televised college football. All times ET:
- Texas Southern at Florida A&M: noon, ESPNU
- Oregon State at Colorado State: 2:30 p.m., CBS Sports Network
- Portland State at BYU: 3 p.m., ESPN
- Hawaii at UMass: 6 p.m.
- Chattanooga at Jacksonville State: 6:30 p.m., ESPNU
- Colgate at Cal Poly: 7 p.m., ESPNU
- South Florida at San Jose State: 7:30 p.m., CBS Sports Network
- Stanford vs Rice: 10:30 p.m., ESPN
And a game on Sunday, August 27:
- Richmond at Sam Houston State: 7 p.m. ESPNU
These games aren’t huge, but there’s still fun stuff happening.
Colorado State welcomes Oregon State to CSU’s brand new stadium, named after the school itself.
The new CSU Stadium seats 41,200, compared to 32,500 at the old place. That’s about 30,000 seats for general admission and 10,000 for students, plus a thousand or so more in suites, clubs, and loge boxes. The school tripled the size of its video board. What it’ll lack in history, it’ll make up for by being a beautiful place to watch a game. It’s got mountains in the background.
The stadium cost about $240 million to build, and my personal favorite amenity is a craft beer porch, which is incredibly cool. And the television viewers will have a pretty sweet scene, as the crowd is striping out the stadium for the game.
Hawaii is traveling a heck of a long way to play UMass, but that’ll be a respectable matchup, and the Rainbow Warriors will look to have another encore to their first bowl-winning season in a decade.
The Stanford-Rice matchup is unique, given that it will be played in Sydney, Australia, like last year’s Cal-Hawaii. That explains the late kickoff, which will be 12:30 in Australia on Sunday afternoon.
1. To re-introduce the sport to the country
Bringing the sport to Australia was a labor of love for Colin Scotts. Scotts was the first Australian football player to earn a scholarship in the States when he turned his rugby union skill into a full ride at Hawaii in 1983. Now, he’s the game’s ambassador. The former defensive lineman is hoping this weekend’s game can add a new level of exposure beyond what expanded cable packages have added in the past two decades.
There has been an eruption in the last five to ten years — Nintendo, watching Fox Sports, and social media have absolutely captivated the imagination of Australians. We’re absolutely eating and breathing NBA, NFL, you name it. We’ve just fallen in love with American culture and American sports. And the world has shrunk. We really believe with the wave of interest in Gridiron, we can put on a great show. Starting with a college game and hopefully make it into an annual event, or at least bring the NFL down. It’s exciting.
Not all of these matchups are exactly as exciting as the Florida State-Alabama or BYU at LSU games that fall on the following Saturday, but it’s still the opening weekend of college football.
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