College football just gave us a nearly perfect Saturday. Each window of games gave us a dramatic center-of-gravity matchup with lots of rivalry games trying to distract us.
The early session gave us Michigan-Ohio State, with Kentucky-Louisville and Purdue-Indiana doing wild things in our peripheral vision. The afternoon window gave us another all-time Iron Bowl as the main course, with the Apple Cup, Oklahoma State-BYU and Northwestern-Illinois as incredible sides. The evening session was a bit tamer but still gave us huge and mostly close Georgia-Georgia Tech and Florida State-Florida games, mixed with the most aesthetically pleasing game of the entire day, a snowy and explosive Farmageddon battle between Iowa State and Kansas State.
Despite both Thursday's Egg Bowl and most of Friday being a dud, Saturday's perfection alone means that we just witnessed one of college football's best-ever Rivalry Weeks. (And I haven't even mentioned the incredible set of small-school playoff games we got!) Let's take stock of what we saw and what it means with the most enjoyable approach I know: ranking games!
Here are the 35 best games of Rivalry Week. (It took effort to stop at 35.)
Jump to a section:
Top 10 small-school games
What CFP should look like
Heisman of week
1. No. 8 Alabama 27, Auburn 24
The Iron Bowl is typically only good every other year -- average score of the past six games in Tuscaloosa: Bama 46, Auburn 20; average score in Auburn: 28-28 -- but when it's good, it remains the absolute best. And while 2013's Kick Six remains the greatest game the rivalry has produced, this game might have been the best since, or very close to it.