If you’re a neutral fan, you might not pay much attention until bowl season. But I’d argue watching college football during Week 1 gives a neutral viewer the most distilled version of the sport, thanks to the amount of things that come together during the sport’s opening weekend marathon.
If you’re just now getting into college football, here’s how the very weird Week 1 works
You picked a really strange time to hop on board, but then again, it’s always strange.
Jason Getz-USA TODAY Sports
First, the whole thing starts even a week earlier than it seems. But don’t worry if you missed that part.
College football’s Week 1 officially starts on the Thursday before Labor Day. But the NCAA allows games to be played four days earlier too. Think of it as preseason, if that helps, but it counts.
We call it Week 0, and since it almost exclusively involves middling or lesser teams, it has an especially high number of silly games. Tune in if you want to see stuff like this:
The games on the Thursday before Labor Day are perfect for overreaction, which is fun even if you know it’s coming.
Only having one or two noteworthy games going on during what most of country perceives as opening night leads to, for example, everyone assuming Texas A&M’s new quarterback is a Heisman front-runner or that Ohio State’s season is in deep trouble because it only beat Indiana by, um, 28 points.
You usually shouldn’t watch Friday games and should just go to a high school game or something.
But in Week 1, watch everything. Colorado and Colorado State play their rivalry game here, rather than during Rivalry Weekend three months later. Why? Because college football.
The Saturday noon ET slot is boring 99 percent of the time, but here’s the fun part: somebody’s gonna lose a huge upset.
Pro sports fans like to use cupcake games as an argument against watching college sports, but here’s the secret: we don’t watch them either, unless they go totally off the rails. There’s always a better option on TV elsewhere.
Pretty much any week has FBS tune-up games against FCS teams, but the volume of them in Week 1 is often staggering. Nearly one-third of FBS teams play an FCS game in Week 1, and half of Saturday’s earliest games in 2018’s Week 1 feature FBS vs. FCS matchups.
Luckily, your remote control is capable of switching from a boring blowout as soon as it’s clear a titanic upset is on another channel.
The mega neutral-site games, a shameless money grab by all involved, are still worth your full attention, unless they involve Alabama.
Multiple kickoff showcases in sterile NFL environments have popped up on the calendar, and they aren’t going anywhere. They’re like a bowl game without any of the charm, but at least they get big-name teams in the same stadium. One of those teams will lose to Bama by double digits.
There might be a huge on-campus game too! It was probably announced a decade ago, meaning everyone forgot about it until like three weeks prior to kickoff.
There will be other exciting games that won’t mean shit in two months.
Fueled by offseason hype, preseason rankings, or just general epicness, some Week 1 games can get gassed up without the rest of the season for perspective.
Notre Dame vs. Texas, 2016; Alabama vs. Florida State, 2017; and so on: they go in the annals of games people thought were huge. All of them were not, upon review.
A slight derivative of this is the inverse: The Week 1 game that we look back on on Nov. 1 and say “wow, you probably shoulda won that.”
Whatever happens, Saturday usually doesn’t end until Hawaii’s done.
The team that’s indirectly responsible for Week 0 is also directly responsible for keeping college football fans across the country on their couches for about 15 straight hours.
Thank you, Rainbow Warriors.
NFL fans, this part will be familiar, at least: in Week 1, we also have Sunday and Monday games.
ESPN usually saves a couple pretty good games for Sunday and Labor Day, also including an FCS game or two on Sunday. The Labor Day night game ends up being one of the most-watched of the entire year, both as a celebratory capper for CFB fans who’ve been tuned in for five straight days and for casual fans who just turned on sports on a holiday.
And in recent years, these games have gone especially sideways. In 2017’s two games, UCLA pulled off one of the biggest comebacks in football history the night before Tennessee and its trash can beat Georgia Tech in OT.
And then three days later, we start all over again.
We have fewer Thursday and Friday games going forward, but the sport rarely catches its breath until mid-January.
If you’re trying out college football, you should watch at least part of all five days.
You might see at least five different flavors of crazy, the perfect microcosm for the season as a whole.
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