Week 0 always sneaks up on me. I\u2019ve been trained to not expect college football until Labor Day weekend so the handful of early games comes as a very pleasant surprise each year. Sort of like getting to open one of your presents on Christmas Eve. Sure, they\u2019re not always match ups that will grab headlines or be the talk of every podcast, but we\u2019ve waited long enough for the return of football and<\/p>\n
#22 Iowa State @ #17 Kansas State (11:00 AM, ESPN) is the headliner this week. The annual Aer Lingus College Football Classic is now in its fourth consecutive year and will host two nationally ranked teams for the first time. Last year featured a Georgia Tech upset of Florida State – well, it was considered an upset at the time before we found out how much the bottom had fallen out of the Seminoles – and with two teams aiming for a Big XII championship and playoff berths this year it should be a very entertaining start to the season.<\/p>\n
The rest of the slate is your typical week 0 fare. If you\u2019re in the FOX5 market in Las Vegas you could check out Idaho State @ UNLV (3:00 PM, Silver State Sports and Entertainment) on a sports network I\u2019ve never heard of before but who am I to judge. Fresno State @ Kansas (5:30 PM, FOX) is probably the biggest game outside of the game in Dublin. The Jayhawks return quarterback Jalon Daniels who\u2019s been a serious playmaker but have to replenish most everyone else on the offense. The first Saturday of football closes with Sam Houston @ Western Kentucky (6:00 PM, CBS Sports Network) and Stanford @ Hawai\u2019i (6:30 PM, CBS) and both should offer some under the radar fun with mostly even teams.<\/p>\n
Enjoy this early Christmas present, football fans. College football is back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Week 0 always sneaks up on me. I\u2019ve been trained to not expect college football until Labor Day…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2026],"tags":[7,4525,58466],"class_list":{"0":"post-311230","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-iowa-hawkeyes-football","10":"tag-iowa-hawkeyes-game-threads"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/115078214114866033","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}