WATCH GRID: Normal seasons should have Surprise Scheduling too

The WATCH GRID is your weekly guide to which college football games are most likely to be watchable, for people who are choosing to watch college football.

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2020 has exposed lots of long-held assumptions as being based on lies all along. Many of these new realizations/confirmations have made life harder, at least for the foreseeable future.

At the same time, a few of these exposés basically have meant discarding bullshit.

It’s all kinds of little and big things, all over the place and all at once.

It turns out being able to order take-out beer and wine did not cause the end of the world. With kids going to school at home, it turns out data-streaming caps are — whoops! — a fake thing companies conjured to squeeze money out of consumers.

It turns out the government can give money to people without the country instantly turning into Soviet Russia, and that it can help immensely at little relative cost.

College football is full of lies like this, and even in a normal year is largely itself a weird mistruth.

One longtime lie that’s been cast aside this season: All schedules must be set in stone 30,000 years in advance, meaning there’s simply no room for up-and-comers to get shots at big teams, broken rivalries just cannot find a time to reconnect, and schools have to make large guesses about which teams will be good decades from now.

Welp:

One of Saturday’s two highest-profile games, BIG NUDE SATURDAY itself, wasn’t on the books until 160 hours before kickoff. Now that’s an EXTREME example, a bad one for people who have to slap together logistics on short notice. So let’s not do exactly this again.

But there are plenty of ways we could hang on to flexibility in 2021 and beyond.

Bill Connelly’s BRACKET BUSTER SATURDAY, when every team would draw an opponent of comparable quality from anywhere in the country, is one great example. Every team’s schedule would leave one non-conference spot available, maybe the first week of November. Then we’d use power ratings to fill out that vacant weekend.

Playoff contenders would get chances to prove it or lose it, the best non-powers would get top-20 opponents, teams that have never met would finally do so, and the worst teams would have chances to win a game. Plus, a couple weeks before kickoffs, the drawing could be a whole ESPN event.

Now that we’ve confirmed schedules do not need to be locked in right now for 3079, there are zero things preventing a BRACKET BUSTER SATURDAY in a normal year.

Here is the “Week 3” Watch Grid:

As discussed on this week’s Shutdown Fullcast, the wildest unique part of Houston-Baylor is: The lowest-salaried graduate assistants have to rapidly assemble opponent film for a game they possibly didn’t even know was coming. Surely they had some sort of notice/hunch, but still. And planning for Houston’s first game is an even sillier task, since UH attempted to tank 2019 via mass-redshirting. So yes, in the future, Surprise Scheduling should give these folks a bit more heads up than this.

UCF-GT should be somewhat important and dramatic, but let’s not overlook Appalachian State-Marshall getting the SEC on CBS slot. It’s fair to consider them both SEC, I think, since each of these relative FBS newcomers has more bowl wins than Vanderbilt, which has played top-level football since 1902.

Miami-Louisville counts as, like, the biggest game of the year so far, I guess. Wild!

And if you thought concluding your Saturday by watching Coastal Carolina-Kansas was weird, well! We’re now headed to El Paso, home of the weirdest bowl game of them all. Watching Abilene Christian-UTEP is what tens of thousands of people will be doing at 1 a.m. ET.

This is another terrible idea we will retain.

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