College Football Viewing Guide: Week 2

How do you follow up an opening weekend with 5 consecutive days of college football? How do you possibly do that? You don’t. So I suppose it’s to be expected that college football didn’t even try.

Coming off that smorgasbord of games in week one, week two of the college football season doesn’t include a single FBS matchup on Thursday night (granted, there’s an NFL game tonight and who wants to compete with that? - also, you can catch Kennesaw State at Tenessee Tech on ESPNU at 6pm if you’re really starved for the college game). If that wasn’t bad enough, after being treated to a slew of Friday games last week, we have only one this week. And Saturday’s slate doesn’t exactly make up the difference, though there is plenty of quantity.

So, without further adieu, let’s take a look at the weekend’s full slate of games.

Note: All times are as the good Lord intended, in the central time zone. For that is where the college football Mecca known as Kinnick Stadium lies.

Friday Game

As noted above, there’s only one game to catch on Friday evening. I’d like to tell you it’s going to be great, but Courtland Sutton is no longer catching everything within 20 miles of the Dallas metro so I have little faith in SMU to hang with #16 TCU tomorrow night. But alas, it’s college football and it’s on TV. You can catch this one at 7pm CT on ESPN2.

Saturday Games

Saturday is full of games given the lack of mid-week games in week 2. Unfortunately, there’s more quantity than quality on Saturday.

Things get kicked off in the 11am time slot with #5 Wisconsin hosting New Mexico on BTN. As I suspect you won’t need to tune into that one for long, best to check out ESPN. There you’ll find #18 Mississippi State at Kansas State. FS1 has #21 Michigan hosting Western Michigan. Duke is at Northwestern on ESPNU. And ABC and ESPN2 are mirroring Arizona at Houston and Georgia Tech at South Florida. Yeah.

FOX is doing it’s part to keep things moving with their staggered start times. They have UCLA at #6 Oklahoma at noon central.

The 2:30 pm CT time slot has a bunch of highly rated teams paying money to destroy miserable opponents. ESPN2 has #1 Alabama hosting Arkansas State. Rutgers is at #4 Ohio State on BTN. And NBC has Ball State at #8 Notre Dame.

As for potentially good matchups at 2:30, check out CBS for #3 Georgia at #24 South Carolina. You can also watch what would have been a tremendous game about 25 years ago on ABC as Nebraska hosts Colorado.

Of course, the game of the week is at 4pm on FOX.

The evening slate isn’t much better than the early games. The SEC has a pair of games on their network at 6:30 with #7 Auburn hosting Alabama..... State, and Kentucky (Ahmad Wagner watch) at #25 Florida. The Big Ten also has a pair of games at 6:30. Illinois is hosting Western Illinois and Virginia is at Indiana.

Arkansas at Colorado State could be interesting. That’s also at 6:30 on CBSSN. Iowa’s week one opponent, Northern Illinois, will also get another test as they host Utah this week. That one’s on ESPN News. And Fresno State is at Minnesota on FS1.

At 7pm CT, #12 Penn State is at Pitt on ABC. I’ll be interested to see how Penn State responds to the close call with App State a week ago. I’ve long been beating the “James Franklin isn’t actually good” drum. Let’s see how game two post-Saquon Barkley and Joe Moorhead treats him.

FOX keeps up their solid slate with their 7:30 matchup. #17 USC is at #10 Stanford in what is probably the best matchup of the week (outside of ¡El Assico!, of course).

With the minimal early week schedule, we get a chance to bring back the #Pac12AfterDark this week. At 9:15 pm CT you can catch Cal at BYU on ESPN2. At 9:45, #15 Michigan State is on the road at Arizona State to take on the fightin’ Eno Benjamins. That’s worth a watch.

And finally, it’s a damn shame that you have to stream it on WatchStadium.com, but America’s team, Hawai’i, is hosting Rice 10:59 pm CT. Not 11, not 10:55, but 10:59.

Here’s the full schedule for Saturday.

So that’s that for week 2 of the college football season.

As for the beverage this week, I think the choice is obvious. It’s Iowa State weekend. A time where brothers and friends become enemies. And at a time like this I think it’s important to remember at the end of the day, we’re all Iowans (transitive property?). We may like different teams, but we’re all good people (all is a stretch, most some of us are good people). And any game featuring two teams from the state of Iowa is deserving of the most Iowa beer in the land.

Image via foodandwine.com

It’s very representative of the game itself. Is it particularly good? No. Do you really want it to exist? Probably not. But it’s here and it’s all Iowa, baby!

Long live ¡El Assico! Go Hawks!