It's college football season. We can pretend we only wanna watch good games, or we can face facts.

After a busy September and respectable October, we’ve made it to November, college football’s greatest month, full of the regular season’s highest stakes and meanest rivalries. History shows this is when the season’s most memorable chaos is likeliest to happen.

We’ll start off with a weekend full of middle-card drama, but no obvious main event. So this could go any number of ways! And congrats to Ball State, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Kent State, and Ohio for already taking care of business this week.

As always, the Watch Grid sorts your Saturday into three watchability columns. And as always, watchability is not strictly about game quality, team quality or quality of any kind. These things matter, though, I guess.

Thursday, Nov. 4 and Friday, Nov. 5 college football schedule

Consider making this the week you check in on FCS. On Friday, Princeton-Dartmouth could end up being the Ivy League championship. And on Saturday, we have North Dakota State-South Dakota State and Montana State-Eastern Washington, either of which could count as a national semifinal-worthy meeting.

Saturday, Nov. 6 college football schedule

SICKOS GAME OF THE WEEK

Here are three options this week, for three varieties of SICKO.

• If you’d like a pure endurance test, dare yourself to watch all of Missouri-Georgia, in which an alleged SEC team is a 39-point underdog. The Dawgs are usually content to park it around 30 points and call it a day, but it’s hard to picture how they’ll ever stop scoring against the country’s No. 126 run defense.
• If you’d like to watch two horrendous teams play for pride, there’s ODU-FIU and UNLV-New Mexico, along with the Watch UMass Try To Beat A Decent FCS Team variant.
• But if you’re just here for lols, it’s gonna be hard to top Texas-Iowa State. Not only are the Horns expected to lose their fourth game in a row, something they haven’t done within a single season since 2010, FS1’s announcers will surely have to find a way to discuss the monkey situation. Won’t that be exciting! It’s ok for all of us to be honest about which game we’ll be watching in prime time.

The actual most important game of the week

There could be a lot going on this week, even if the biggest bullies clock out early. Eleven ranked teams are in games with one-score point spreads, including No. 3 Michigan State, No. 4 Oregon, No. 9 Wake Forest, No. 11 Oklahoma State, and No. 12 Baylor.

And the next two teams on that list would be No. 13 Auburn and No. 14 Texas A&M, so sure, let’s go with that one. The winner will have a nice shot at a New Year’s Six bid, possibly even the Sugar Bowl.

Also, No. 6 Cincinnati could use a blowout victory after an ugly tussle with Navy and an ehh win over Tulane (which was still better than Oklahoma’s win over Tulane). At the moment, I think Cincy’s CFP ranking is reasonable, with most computer ratings also slotting them right outside the top four. And there might be some room to move up, with Michigan State and Ohio State still to meet, UGA potentially eliminating Bama, and Oregon looking likely to lose another game. It’s easy to picture something like Oklahoma leaping the Bearcats in a few weeks, especially after how poorly the committee has treated non-powers for seven years already, but I can’t declare 2021’s situation unfair just yet. So for now … Cincy could use a blowout victory.