CLEMSON, S.C. -- It hit Dabo Swinney when the Clemson coach woke up this past Sunday morning: Game week. The season opener, the end of eight months of talking and preparing and practicing, and now a real football game that counts.
"Then you look up and go, oh man, we're playing LSU on national TV, at home," Swinney said. "It's awesome. It's a lot of juice, man. You can just feel it."
They probably felt it also at LSU, and at Ohio State, and Texas, and Notre Dame and Miami. Maybe even at South Carolina, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, Colorado ...
All over college football, there's a lot of juice this Week 1, which by a few metrics might be the biggest Week 1 ever.
It features three matchups between teams ranked in the top 10 of the AP preseason poll:
There have never been this many games between top-10 teams on any opening weekend. In fact, this is only the fourth regular season week of any kind since 1978 to feature three in one weekend (Nov. 11, 2017; Sept. 30/Oct. 1 in 2016; and Oct. 12, 2002).
This week also has three more ranked teams who are playing power-conference opponents, plus a fourth ranked team playing on the road:
And there are five more power-conference matchups, including Bill Belichick's debut as North Carolina coach:
That's a total of 11 games between power-conference teams. Is it the best Week 1 ever? Well, it's hard to be definitive, especially since the concept of Week 1 gets trickier the farther back you trace it. The college football season had more staggered starts prior to the 1990s. For instance, a matchup between No. 1 Notre Dame and No. 2 Michigan in 1989 was the Wolverines' opener, but the Fighting Irish had opened 17 days earlier.
The most recent competition is the 2016 season opener, which had 10 power-conference matchups and four games between Top 25 teams, though none of them were top-10 matchups. It did end up memorable: Texas upset Notre Dame on Sunday to ignite years of "Texas is back" memes. Wisconsin upset No. 5 LSU in Lambeau Stadium, one of five matchups featuring ranked teams that weekend in neutral sites or NFL stadiums.
This year, however, all three top-10 matchups are at campus sites, as are seven of the power-conference matchups. That could add to the mystique.
"It's going to be a great opening weekend, which is really what the leagues want -- and what our TV partners certainly want," Miami athletic director Dan Radakovich said. "In some years, it works out that way. There have been other years where it really hasn't, yeah, so I think it's you got to take advantage of it, and enjoy it really, when you have these kind of matchups."
Indeed, the chaotic nature of college football scheduling -- every conference makes its own schedule, every team arranges its own nonconference games -- makes it hard to plan a weekend like this. It's college football, nobody is in charge.
Maybe the closest to "in charge," at least when it comes to nonconference scheduling, is Dave Brown, a former ESPN executive who runs Gridiron Schedule, a consulting firm that connects programs looking for games. As he looked at his spreadsheet on Wednesday, Brown had bad news for anyone thinking this week was the start of a grand new trend: 2026 and 2027 look much thinner.
"You're not getting anything near this. Not even close," Brown said.
But a lot of that is due to the fact that games are spread out over the first two weeks. The opening week in 2026 has six power-conference games, with Clemson's return date at LSU, Boise State at Oregon and Miami at South Carolina the only ones between teams that are ranked right now. But the second week of next year has Ohio State going back to Texas, Oklahoma at Michigan, and three other power-conference games.
So why did the 2025 season end up so front-loaded? Mostly, luck.
Ohio State-Texas, last played as a regular season game in 2006, seems perfectly timed: nine months after they met in the CFP semifinals, and ahead of a possible rematch in this year's Playoff. But this game, part of a home-and-home, was originally scheduled back in 2012, when Urban Meyer was in his first year in Columbus and Mack Brown was the Longhorns' coach. It was originally scheduled for 2022-23 but was pushed back to 2025 in January 2020. At that point, of course, no one could have known it would end up being a matchup of top-three teams.
LSU and Clemson, which met in the national championship game to cap the 2019 season, arranged this game -- their first ever in the regular season -- the year before that, when Radakovich was Clemson's athletic director. Radakovich had worked at LSU, so he called up an old friend in the LSU athletic department, and it came together quickly.
"That's how a lot of football scheduling comes into play," Radakovich said. "You have relationships and friendships with people and say, hey, does this fit your schedule? Does this fit your home-and-away needs during the course of a year? And sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't, but that's how an awful lot of these have come in."
Notre Dame is playing Miami as part of the ACC's five-games-a-year scheduling agreement with the Fighting Irish. It was originally supposed to happen a couple of years ago, but it was moved at Miami's request, because then-new coach Mario Cristobal wanted some time to get his roster in place. Now he's coming off a 9-3 season. When the conference office asked both schools if they would be willing to play on Week 1 and on Sunday night, knowing it would mean more attention, both agreed.
Miami and Notre Dame are much more acquainted with each other than Week 1's other marquee opponents, most famously for the two decades of near-annual play between 1970 and 1990 that included the "Catholics vs. Convicts" game. They've also played four times since 2010, this being the third one as part of the Notre Dame-ACC scheduling agreement.
"It's going to be a great spectacle," Radakovich said.
Georgia Tech and Colorado, which shared the 1990 season's national championship, have never played. It took 35 years, but maybe some will consider this the playoff.
Georgia Tech has had power conference openers every year Brent Key has been the head coach -- Louisville, Florida State in Ireland -- and Key remembers being at Alabama when it had openers against USC and Florida State.
"I love it. I love opening up with an opponent like this," Key said. "The opportunity to go on the road, it really dials you and it locks you in. And we know the sense of urgency as coaches, but it also takes now that sense of urgency with the kids and the players, and really puts it in a premium."
The question is what will happen in future Week 1s. There are mixed signals: Alabama and West Virginia canceled a home-and-home series for 2026-27, citing the SEC's move to a nine-game schedule. But Alabama (for now) is keeping a home-and-home with Ohio State, as is Georgia.
The SEC -- and perhaps the ACC -- going to nine games will decrease the slots available for marquee games. And most programs still want to ensure seven home games per year, or failing that, six plus a high-revenue neutral site game.
"The cookbook, the recipe is 10 power (conference) games, an FCS, a Group of 5 game for us at Clemson, and now we've carried that here to Miami," Radakovich said.
Playoff expansion could help, giving teams more wiggle room to afford early-season losses. But expansion also doesn't deserve much credit for this week's big set of games: Almost all were scheduled before it was known the CFP would be expanding to 12 teams.
Still, as fluky as this "Best Week 1 Ever" may have been, one could see it driving more down the road. On Tuesday afternoon, Clemson was already preparing for Saturday's big game, a staffer setting up parking spots across from the stadium. Hotels were getting ready for an influx of LSU fans. And Swinney was girding for whatever result comes: Last year, he pointed out, Clemson opened with a 34-3 loss to Georgia in Atlanta.
And both teams still ended up making the Playoff.
"You play games like this, you get beat. But we don't shy away from that," Swinney said. "We don't ever fear losing a ballgame. Don't fear that. Go play the game. I'm more excited about the chance to win."