Stay in? On a Friday? And watch a college football game featuring two teams you (probably) don't care about? Absolutely. Here's why:

Vegas doesn't know quite what to do with it.
For all their recent BCS glory, Boise State isn't getting a whole lot of respect from the experts this week. A game between two teams with a documentable history of Boise dominance (including a 61-10 Bronco victory last November) thanks to sharing a conference, an undefeated, top-10 outfit against a 1-1 squad with meh expectations that lost to the middling Big Ten the week prior ... and there's only a 7-point line?

Another gate for Boise State.
The Broncos cleared the tallest hurdle between them and the BCS -- perhaps smashed the hurdle is more appropriate -- by running Oregon out of the stadium two weeks ago. From then on, given Boise's extreme dominance of the WAC, a date in one of the big-money games is almost a foregone conclusion; over the years, the Broncos have consistently proven they just don't lose games they're clearly supposed to win. The rest of the schedule consists entirely of those kinds of games, including tonight, but if any of them is likely to present a serious threat to the Broncos ascension, at Fresno is it. The Bulldogs took Wisconsin to double overtime in Camp-Randall last week and should be more than game for their biggest conference showdown.

We may get to hear some actual football facts.
We have no quarrel with Boise State. Really, we don't. As BCS bustin' teams go, they're actually quite likable and have managed to withstand an onslaught of media coverage designed to darling them up without becoming unbearable. We even like their most readily recognizable and best-known feature, that bright blue field that gives us the spins every time it's shown in HD. But every time it is shown, it seems to take over the game broadcast to a truly unreasonable extent. Say, did you know that field was blue, viewers? Or did you tune into this game to stare at the wall and knit? Talking heads, from all of us, We Get It. It is a color that other fields are not. There is football being played upon it that we would love to hear about.

There are no such distractions in Fresno. I lived in Los Angeles for the past three years, and spent a fair amount of time watching West Coast football. Unless you like featureless, vaguely menacing landscapes perfectly suited for a Stephen King novella, your average broadcaster is not going to find much scenery to waste valuable airtime bloviating over. For this, and for the fact that there is football on at all on a Friday night, we give thanks.