Daily Sports: Saturday Showdown In College Station

The game most college football fans see as the Game of the Year goes today in College Station. ESPN’s Gameday is on the scene for Alabama-Texas A&M, and CBS has the telecast itself at 3:30 PM ET. I’m not sold at all on the Aggies, so I don’t buy the whole Game of the Year thing. But I’ve been known to wrong—quite often in fact, and there’s no denying that if A&M wins, I think they deserve to be ranked #1 in the country.

TheSportsNotebook’s college football coverage featured the Tide-Aggies game as part of what amounts to a “TV Triple Crown”, to use the phrase I used to spin where I was writing B.S. marketing copy for professional touts. The two other big games bracket the SEC showdown in the TV listings, with UCLA-Nebraska going at noon ET on ABC and then Wisconsin-Arizona State at 10:30 PM ET on ESPN.

Both games are potential Rose Bowl preview. Although I guess that’s true of any Big Ten-Pac 12 matchup, and the Ohio State/Michigan and Oregon/Stanford combos will have something to say about it.

The best game on the undercard is South Carolina-Vanderbilt, a key SEC East battle at 7 PM ET. It’s on ESPN, and part of an SEC combo in that time slot. Mississippi State-Auburn is a significant game in the SEC West and kicks at the same time on ESPN2. TheSportsNotebook previewed several games beyond the marquee battles, including these two.

Baseball is thundering forward to the playoffs, with two weeks and two days remaining in the regular season. Fox’s national coverage today starts at 1 PM ET. The biggest game of the day is Oakland-Texas, but that will only be shown in a few select parts of the country. Instead, NY Yanks-Boston from Fenway goes to most of the country.

Now Yanks-Red Sox is an important game, with New York pushing hard for a wild-card spot. But the Red Sox are home free in the AL East, and this game going national at the expense of bigger games is one of the things I talked about yesterday in how the media helped to ruin this rivalry for me, speaking as a partisan Boston fan.

Still, on balance a day marked by UCLA-Nebraska and Yanks-Red Sox early, followed by Alabama-Texas A&M and capped off with Wisconsin-Arizona State, with some options for an audible to the SEC games at 7 PM ET—that’s a good menu in daily sports.