The Best Week 1 College Football Games to Watch This Season

The 2022 college football season will soft-launch with “Week 0” on Saturday, Aug. 27. That day’s mini-schedule has a few college football games that might wind up being fun. Others might at least be instructive, like Nebraska playing Northwestern in Ireland, which could offer a hint at whether Scott Frost is finally going to turn a corner in his fifth season as the Huskers head coach.

But the real meat of the season’s opening starts the Thursday before Labor Day and continues through a long weekend that college football gets all to itself (the NFL will be a week from kicking off its regular season). A full Week 1 schedule is here, and below are eight college football games that I think will be particularly interesting to watch during that stretch. Don’t consider this a list of the juiciest matchups between the highest-ranked teams—those rankings will be useless a few weeks after the season starts anyway. Instead, think of it as a list of games that might teach us something about the teams involved.

Let’s start with the first one of the week.