Drew K had something come up so for now I'm posting this week's Saturday gameday open thread. Drew will hopefully be able to update this throughout the day, but I'm keeping things fairly simple for now. I follow college football but not nearly at the level of Drew's commitment to the game.
After having a couple intriguing top 25 matchups last week, things start to get serious this week. It's a long season ahead of us, but losses today would be huge setbacks for national title contenders. Your two big ESPN games feature #18 Penn State traveling to #1 Alabama and #12 Miami traveling to #2 Ohio State. While Alabama and Ohio State are expected to walk away as victors, crazier things have happened. I'm not holding my breath for upsets, but a loss by Alabama and/or Ohio State would certainly shake things up early in the season.
Some other nationally televised games include Florida State traveling to Oklahoma and Michigan traveling to South Bend to face Notre Dame on NBC. That latter matchup is one I'll probably skip. Tate Forcier is an intriguing talent, but I can't stand RichRod, and I really can't stand Notre Dame. I'd rather watch Miami-Ohio State. Of course, LeBron supposedly might be at the game which would lead to plenty of annoying coverage of that. I'll roll the dice and hope for the best.
For local action, Cal hosts Colorado in what could be a fun week 2 matchup. California Golden Blogs will have plenty of coverage of that game. Stanford heads down to SoCal to battle UCLA in an early conference battle. The Cardinal are hoping to take the next step and challenge for the Pac-10 title. We'll see how that plays out.
After the jump I've posted today's schedule of games, similar to what Drew posted last week.
