College Football Season Preview 3 BC-Missouri Alabama-Wisconsin Oregon-Oregon State

College football season is full of epic heavyweight matchups, games that decide conference titles and playoff spots (or seeds): Georgia vs. Alabama in Week 5, Ohio State vs. Oregon and Texas vs. Oklahoma in Week 7, Georgia vs. Texas and Alabama vs. Tennessee in Week 8, to name a few. The big games are coming up, and they're usually worth the hype. But as we learned last week, a nice, remote week where you always have the remote in your hand can be an absolute delight.

Week 3 is as decentralized and democratic as ever. We get just two ranked-versus-ranked matchups, but instead of focusing on the headliners, we get to see Alabama play in the land of the “Jump Around.” We get Boston College’s biggest game since, what, 2018? 2008? We get Oregon State fans creating the most hostile atmosphere imaginable for a shaky 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 greatest Indiana-UCLA game of all time (technically true).

In other words, we're going to have a blast. Here's everything you need to know about Week 3. (All times are Eastern time.)

Jump to a topic:
BC-Missouri | Alabama-Wisconsin
Early Rivalry Week | Big 12 Status Check
SEC tripleheader | Chaos superfecta
Playlist for week 3

“May the best win”

No. 24 Boston College at No. 6 Missouri (Saturday, 12:45 p.m., SECN)

“A lot of people talk about the Group of 5, Power 4, the money and the resources and NIL. It’s about the players and lining up and banging heads and [may] the best wins. You saw that [Saturday].”

The quote from Northern Illinois coach Thomas Hammock after the Huskies' win over Notre Dame was life-giving. We spend the entire offseason basically reducing everything to spreadsheets and power. We watch as the two most powerful conferences prepare to siphon off an even higher percentage of the money than before. We create a universe in our minds where only the richest programs matter and money removes all uncertainty in the game.

And then 22 guys take 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 the entire offseason telling anyone who would listen that it was too good for its own league.

And then the guys from Boston get a chance to get on an SEC team.