I hope you all canceled your plans for the next 20 or so Saturdays, because college football is back.
After a nice appetizer over the weekend courtesy of week zero, the action ramps up in earnest with a full slate of games going all the way through Labor Day.
There are quite a few high-profile match ups on the docket for week one, and with that comes the inevitability of upsets.
SEC LAWYERS, LANE KIFFIN AND DEATH VALLEY: COLLEGE FOOTBALL’S WEEK 1 IS SET FOR FIREWORKS
It is college football, after all, and no season opener would be complete without a few shockers (happy 19th anniversary to Appalachian State’s win at The Big House, by the way).
With that in mind, here are three teams favored to win this weekend that should be on upset alert.
Let me preface this pick by saying that I truly believe Auburn head coach Alex Golesh will do great things on The Plains, but this game reeks of upset potential.
The Tigers are breaking in a ton of new players as well as the aforementioned new coaching staff, and the fact that this is at a neutral site in Atlanta makes this game extra wonky.
The Baylor Bears weren’t exactly world beaters last year, and new quarterback DJ Lagway was a train wreck at Florida in 2025, but he was dealing with a litany of injuries all last season as well as having to perform in a Billy Napier offense, so I expect the junior signal caller to look more like a five-star than he did throughout much of his time in Gainesville.
Auburn won this game handily last year, too, but did so with an entirely different coaching staff and set of players, so that result is a largely irrelevant data point.
I wouldn’t put money on the Bears to win this game outright, but I wouldn’t be shocked if they did, and I almost expect them to get inside that 7.5 number as Golesh tries to work through some first-game jitters.
If you had asked me to pick this game seven days ago, I would have hammered UNLV, but with the benefit of seeing both teams perform during week zero, I might have to pivot to the Rainbow Warriors of Hawaii.
The Rebels struggled to stop Memphis’s offense in the 27-21 loss to the Tigers at home, and I have a feeling some of that defensive fog lingers for this game too.
Conversely, Hawaii might have actually gained some confidence in their week zero loss to Stanford, a game in which they were the underdogs and were leading midway through the fourth quarter.
The biggest factor here is that the game is in Honolulu, and that kind of trans-Pacific travel coupled with a season-opening loss could spell trouble for the Rebels.
If that does happen, and UNLV goes from G6 Playoff darlings to 0-2, some uncomfortable conversations will start to spring up about head coach Dan Mullen’s future in Vegas.
And no number of Elvis impersonators will be able to save him from that.
A good old-fashioned Tiger on Tiger match up, and this one has some layers to it, so bare with me.
When these two teams met last year in South Carolina, it was thought to be somewhat of a College Football Playoff preview, with both LSU and Clemson ranked in the top-ten to start the season.
As it turned out, both teams wound up winning only seven games apiece and LSU even sent head coach Brian Kelly packing.
Now, the Bayou Bengals have Lane Kiffin roaming their sidelines armed with a $40 million roster, but there have been several distractions to come out of Baton Rouge in recent weeks, most notably the staff being at the center of the controversy regarding NFL players going back to college.
That could prove to be enough of a headache for the coaches and players to make what should have been a fairly comfortable win into a dog fight, but that’s not to say Clemson can’t win this game even on their own merits.
The talent disparity between the two teams isn’t as wide as some say it is, and Clemson has some serious firepower at the wide receiver position as well as along its front seven.
I do worry about how Clemson starting quarterback Christopher Vizzina will handle the noise in Death Valley with this being only his second career start, but he has the talent profile as well as the aforementioned stable of receivers to get the job done.
LSU can ill afford to overlook this game, even as double-digit favorites, and no one should be shocked if Clemson comes in and plants their flag in Tiger Stadium.
