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The 9 Top Games Of College Football Week 1 Saturday

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College football Saturdays are back, and without further adieu, here’s the Notebook Nine, the nine best games of the day for the Saturday of college football Week 1. Games are listed in order of kickoff time so you can plan your Saturday accordingly…

Penn State-Central Florida (8:30 AM, ESPN2): A top ‘o the morning to ya, from Ireland, as the Nittany Lions and Knights meet in Dublin. This game is big for UCF—a major bowl bid is guaranteed to one team out of the “Little Five” conferences. Central Florida is the highest ranked in the AP poll of any team out of that group. Penn State begins the James Franklin era with depth a concern, as NCAA sanctions have taken their toll.
Ohio State-Navy (Noon, CBS Sports Network): This game will be in Baltimore, not more than a half-hour from the Naval Academy, although the guess here is that Ohio State fans will be the more dominating presence at M&T Bank Stadium. I’m curious, along with the rest of the country, to see how the Buckeyes adjust to life without Braxton Miller. I think they’re going to be okay, but the Middies won’t be an easy out—they have experience on both sides of the ball and a great triple-option quarterback in Keenan Robinson.
UCLA-Virginia (Noon, ESPN): It would be a pretty big shock if UCLA lost, but this will be a bellwether game for both programs. Are the Bruins ready to stand up, win the Pac-12 and maybe make the College Football Playoff? Then they’ll blow the Cavaliers out. Conversely, can UVA head coach Mike London, on the hot seat, rally his players and at least play competitively? The 21-point line that UCLA is favored by makes a good benchmark either way.
UCLA-Virginia.

Rice-Notre Dame (3:30 PM ET, NBC): Before you sleep on the Owls, this is a program that won Conference USA last year and while quarterback Taylor McHargue is gone, Rice has an experienced line on both sides of the ball. Notre Dame’s doing some rebuilding of their own this year. It’s a game the Irish must win if they’re serious about a spot in the playoff or even one of the major bowls. But it’s not a gimme. The Rice of 2014 is as good as the South Florida of 2011…the latter of which came into South Bend and won a season opener.
Arkansas-Auburn (4 PM ET, SEC Network): Now Auburn has to show they can handle being the hunted rather than the hunter, coming into this game spotting nearly three touchdowns to Arkansas against the spread. This probably isn’t a make-or-break year for second-year Hogs coach Bret Bielama, but we’ll have a good sense after the season is over if he’s going to make it in Fayetteville. That means somewhere along the line, he has to play competitively with SEC West powers.
Clemson-Georgia (5:30 PM ET, ESPN): It’s the biggest game of the day. If Clemson wins on the road they could possibly make the playoff as a one-loss team—meaning the Tigers might be able to afford a competitive loss to Florida State. For their part, Georgia has to see this as their year to be the SEC frontrunner, with all that entails on the national scene. The Dawgs have ten starters back on defense and a Heisman candidate in the backfield in Todd Gurley.

Fresno State-USC (7:30 PM ET, Fox): There’s a lot of rebuilding to do in Fresno after their big year in 2013 with Derek Carr at quarterback. It’s tough to see them winning in USC, which makes this game a good early read on the Trojans. If they’re going to compete for the Pac-12 title, they should be good enough to blow out Fresno at home. If USC wins a competitive game, it means either that Fresno rebuilt fast, or that the Trojans are still a few steps behind the pace being set by Oregon, Stanford, UCLA and Arizona State in their league.
College Football BowlsFlorida State-Oklahoma State (8 PM ET, ESPN): We have the defending national champions and the defending Heisman Trophy winner playing on national television in Dallas, which is the same site this year’s national championship game will be at. For all those reasons, this game has to make the list of nine. But frankly, Okie State is rebuilding and I’d be shocked if this is still a game in the second quarter.
Wisconsin-LSU (9 PM ET, ESPN): Keep an eye on the running backs. Melvin Gordon from Wisconsin is in the Heisman Trophy conversation, the best back Madison has seen since Ron Dayne, who won the award in 1999. LSU has freshman sensation Leonard Fournier, considered the top frosh in the country and possibility a contender to continue the pattern of freshmen winning college football’s top individual prize. Gordon and Fournier have veteran offensive lines and inexperienced quarterbacks, so each should see plenty of the football in Houston.
I didn’t include Alabama’s home game with West Virginia on the list, since the Mountaineers have to show they’re back as a legitimate contender before a road date with Alabama can be among the nine most watchable games. The fare we have instead is pretty good, as college football begins its first year where the phrase “The Road To The Final Four” applies on the gridiron along with the hardwood.

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Daily Sports: An SEC East Saturday

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College football Saturday focuses in on the SEC East, and the MLB playoff races lock in on two hot races, with great all-day agenda of daily sports TV action.

ESPN will be the place to be for college football, and it starts at noon ET. Florida is on the road at Miami. The Hurricanes are hoping to do what their ACC brethren, Clemson, did last week, and its beat a high-profile SEC team at home.


In this same early afternoon time slot is Fox’s usual Saturday baseball coverage. Unsurprisingly, the network has opted for Red Sox-Yankees in the Bronx (1 PM ET). The teams aren’t in a race with each other, but both are in hot separate races, Boston for the division title and New York for a wild-card.

While Florida is one contender in the SEC East, the other two are South Carolina and Georgia, and those two powers go head-to-head at 4:30 PM ET on ESPN. This is the biggest game of the young college season, and likely to still rank pretty high on that list in November. The winner gets a significant leg up in the push for Atlanta, the SEC Championship Game, and a likely crack at Alabama on December 7.

There are two other games in the mid-afternoon spot, although neither comparable to Gamecocks-Bulldogs. ABC & ESPN2 combine to televise Oregon-Virginia and San Diego State-Ohio State.

Then in prime-time we head to Ann Arbor, the site of ESPN’s College Game Day. It’s Notre Dame-Michigan in an 8 PM ET kickoff. If you share the curious view of Irish coach Brian Kelly that this is just a regional rivalry, you’ve still got two good options. Texas-BYU starts an hour earlier on ESPN2 and is the best of the undercard games on Saturday’s schedule. And on the baseball front, MLB Network tunes into the tight NL Central race with a 7 PM ET telecast of Pirates-Cardinals.

If you’re wondering why ABC doesn’t have its usual Saturday night college football, it’s because they have the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series regular season finale, from Richmond, at 6:30 PM ET.

TheSportsNotebook has preview coverage of the ESPN tripleheader, along with ten notable games on the undercard.  

Big Ten Legends Division Race Heats Up Saturday

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The Big Ten Legends Division will see its race kick off in earnest on Saturday. Contenders like Nebraska and Northwestern have played significant conference games, but none within the division. Michigan’s only important tests have come outside the league entirely. Iowa won an opening salvo over Michigan State in overtime last week. But on Saturday there are two head-to-head battles and tough cross-divisional game that will help give early shape to the Legends race.

Nebraska visits Northwestern, hoping to get some revenge for a Wildcats upset in Lincoln a year ago. Each team has lost on the road in Big Ten play, to Ohio State and Penn State respectively. Nebraska also has a win over Wisconsin.

One thing we don’t know if Nebraska has is a defense. After a shutdown effort in a second-half rally over the Badgers, the Huskers were positively torched two weeks ago by Ohio State. There will be a difference in that Wildcat quarterback Kain Colter won’t test the defense to the degree Braxton Miller did in Columbus. But Colter is versatile and can create problems. Just not as many as Taylor Martinez creates for opposing defenses, and I believe he’s enough to get Nebraska a win.

Michigan has revenge on its mind, as well as homefield when they host Michigan State. The Wolverines have torn apart Illinois and Purdue in league play, but I consider this misleading. When Michigan can spread a slow, bad defense out, Denard Robinson runs and throws at will. Michigan State has its problems, but the defense is good and Robinson won’t be able to do what he wants. Nor will Michigan run the ball in the conventional way.

The problem is that so long as Robinson doesn’t make mistakes, he’s still enough to put 21-24 points on the board, and I don’t see any reason to believe Michigan State is ready to match that. They can run the ball with Le’Veon Bell, but the passing game hasn’t improved enough to merit confidence, especially on the road in a rivalry game where revenge is working against you.

Iowa doesn’t play a divisional game, but the Hawkeyes do follow up their win over the Spartans by traveling to Penn State. The Lions are a better team—quite a bit better—and are coming off a bye week.

They also have the motivation of playing for a PSU season-ticket holding friend of mine who got married last week (a stunning coincidence his wedding fell on a bye week) and had a reception marked by a cake shaped like Beaver Stadium. If that’s not enough to stir Bill O’Brien’s troops to get a road win in a place that’s caused Penn state problems over the years I don’t know what is.

The team in the Legends Division that really needs to win is Nebraska. They’re the ones who already have a conference loss, and the schedule-makers did them no favors. The Cornhuskers also have to play Penn State, meaning they’ll play the three best teams on the other side of the conference, while Michigan only plays one.

We’ll take a look at Saturday’s biggest games in our regular Friday college football feature here at TheSportsNotebook. For now, here’s a look at the landscape in the other major conferences…

SEC: LSU can’t get too busy celebrating its win over South Carolina. The Tigers travel to Texas A&M for an early kick at noon EST, and the Aggies can put up points in a hurry. The rapid-paced offenses like the one run by new A&M coach Kevin Sumlin often struggle against real defenses, but that assumes said real defenses are ready to play. LSU needs to be fully engaged, because they’re a still a game back of Alabama.

The Tide travels to Tennessee, a team that has enough explosiveness to tease, but not enough in the way of fundamentals and toughness to compete in a game like this. And this conference’s big game—indeed the nation’s big game—is South Carolina-Florida, one that gets our attention tomorrow.

Pac-12: Oregon and Arizona State are the early leaders in each division, one of them being a surprise and the other less so (I’m going to assume if you’ve visiting a site like this you know which is which). The Ducks and Sun Devils meet on Thursday night in Tempe.

ASU coach Todd Graham and his staff have to find a way to slow Oregon down—dramatically so, because it’s asking too much of sophomore quarterback Taylor Kelly to put 35-40 points on the board against an opponent with this kind of team speed. I have no sense of an upset in the making and Arizona State’s biggest games against divisional foes USC & UCLA are still ahead.

Oregon State came out 8th in the BCS rankings and is in position to make a major bowl game, even if they don’t beat Oregon in the season finale. What the Beavers can’t do is lose games like the one they have coming up at home with Utah. Another North Division rival, Stanford, plays archrival Cal in a must-win game, given the Cardinal already dropped a game to Washington.

The biggest question I have regarding this week’s Pac-12 card is this—why did Stanford and Cal move up their usual Rivalry Saturday game in late November to mid-October?

Big 12: Texas Tech quarterback Seth Doege outgunned Heisman frontrunner Geno Smith last week as the Red Raiders blasted West Virginia. Now Doege takes the show on the road to TCU, a team not nearly as defensive as they’ve been in recent seasons. The winner keeps their conference losses to one and their title hopes alive.

Baylor travels to Texas in a game where the Over/Under is posted at 80.5, and given the way both teams play defense (or don’t play it, as the case may be) I might take one team to cover that number themselves. And the league’s biggest game is Kansas State-West Virginia, which gets covered tomorrow.

ACC: There aren’t any big divisional rivalries on tap, but two games that cross Coastal-Atlantic lines loom very large. Florida State gave away its margin for error in the Atlantic when they lost at N.C. State two weeks ago. Now the Seminoles visit Miami in a prime-time affair, where the Hurricanes are off a loss to North Carolina that’s put them under the gun.

Virginia Tech saved its season with a rally from 20-0 down to beat Duke and now goes to Clemson, who is tied with Florida State.

The Atlantic Division times—FSU & Clemson—are the ones under the most pressure. They are the better teams, meaning neither can count on its rivals to lose again. My guess is the Miami-Virginia Tech race might be a backpedal to the finish line, with Duke possibly still getting back into the picture (North Carolian is on probation), so if either the Hurricanes or Hokies slip a game back it’s not the end of the world.

Big East: It’s a light schedule, as is often the case for a league with only eight teams where the seven conference games are spread out from September to December. The big one of this week is Louisville hosting South Florida. The Cardinals are still undefeated, but the Bulls and B.J. Daniels have been a big disappointment thus far. The USF we’ve seen the last few weeks isn’t ready to win this game on the road.

Rutgers takes its show on the road to Temple, but while the Owls are rebuilding nicely in the wake of large graduation losses and an upgrade from the MAC to the Big East, they are a long way from being in the class of the Scarlet Knights and their swarming defense.

The Best Of The Rest: We’re actually going to wait for the Friday marquee feature to shower some love on the Sun Belt, with its big UL-Monroe-Western Kentucky showdown. The rest of the card in the midmajors is pretty bland, with Western Michigan’s visit to Kent State noteworthy, as the Broncos are good enough to hand the Golden Flashes their first league loss.

And the Notre Dame-BYU game, which had such promise when the schedule came out, doesn’t look so hot anymore. BYU is 4-3, with quarterback Riley Nelson and the defense seeming to regress a little each week.

We can’t rule out a letdown from the Irish after the dramatic goal-line stand in overtime against Stanford. Nor can we ignore the fact that Notre Dame’s lower-scoring physical style is something BYU will be comfortable matching up with.

But I consider that analgous to the Thursday night NFL game between the Seahawks and 49ers—if a team is going to pull a road upset they need to take the home team out of their comfort zone, not play into it. I don’t know how good Notre Dame will look on Saturday, but I’d expect a win.