Look, I am excited about college football. Never doubt this. So when I say this weekend's slate of games may be the worst I've ever sought to endure, take it for what it's worth: Even an awful weekend of football is preferable to pretty much any weekend, ever, that doesn't involve a honeymoon, a child being born or being voluntarily shot into outer space.

But this weekend's slate of games may be the worst I've ever sought to endure. Prepare for tedious manufactured storylines a-plenty. Probable themes include:

• Revenge! Notre Dame plays Navy, USC visits Stanford and Ohio State goes to Illinois in search of a pound of flesh each for 2007's most sobering/embarrassing/ambition-destroying losses. Meanwhile, UCLA heads on up to Washington for one of the most futile "vengeance" games in history, though Rick Neuheisel's return is probably a better draw for completely disinterested Husky fans than the prospect of actually winning a game against the 3-6 Bruins.

• Standings Scrabble. Virginia Tech at Miami, North Carolina at Maryland and California at Oregon State all have major conference championship -- and therefore BCS -- implications, of some kind, if you're willing to sort them out, only to be proven wrong when all of your assumptions are blown up a week later. Virginia Tech, Maryland and Oregon State all control their own destinies, for the record, and no one is banking on any of them.

• Maybe they'll pull it together? If Auburn's offense and Kansas defense engineer some kind of massive, one-week turnaround, their once-interesting home games against Georgia and Texas, respectively, might be worthwhile. It might also be worthwhile to stop living in late September -- dude, Obama's the president! Woo!

• Nostalgia of great games past. South Carolina at Florida is the weekend's only matchup of ranked teams, and a rematch at the site of one of the defining wins of Urban Meyer's tenure at Florida, when Jarvis Moss demonstrated just how thin is the thread on which championships hang:

This time around, the Gators are only 21-point favorites. Sounds fun!

But seriously, folks: Oklahoma is off this weekend. Texas Tech is off this weekend. There are other solid games to hold our attention next week, when the pivotal Tech-OU shootout will suck all media that ventures across its path into Norman, Oklahoma, anyway. Can we not just move the new Game of the Decade of the Year up a week and get our 100-point, 1,000-yard fix now? Do we really have to wait? Because the Paul Bunyon Axe is interesting and potentially lethal and all, but unless Alabama gets Croom'd for the third year in a row, this is going to be one sad day on the couch.