Week 3 is already here, and the schedule has enough juice to keep college football fans bouncing between screens all weekend. Ole Miss gets LSU, Florida meets Auburn, and LaNorris Sellers and Kamario Taylor square off in a matchup between two of the SEC’s hottest quarterbacks. There’s plenty to watch, even if one part of the calendar makes life annoying for anyone trying to follow it all.
The first headache is simple: Florida-Auburn and LSU-Ole Miss are basically stacked on top of each other. Florida vs.
Auburn kicks at 7 p.m. ET on ESPN, while LSU vs.
Ole Miss follows at 7:30 p.m. ET on ABC.
In a world with quad boxes and multiple TVs, that’s manageable. Still, it’s hard not to wish those two games had their own spotlight instead of forcing fans to choose.
Georgia at Arkansas, by comparison, probably didn’t need the noon ET ABC slot. And based on all the whining he did about it in the offseason, Arkansas AD Hunter Yurachek would probably happily move to a later kickoff.
Jon Sumrall and Alex Golesh are both launching their SEC tenures in the matchup at Jordan-Hare Stadium, and both teams are 2-0. The winner gets real momentum; the loser has some scrambling to do.
Even so, the atmosphere in Oxford is the one nobody wants to miss.
The SEC quarterback pool is another reason this weekend feels loaded. It’s deep, and it keeps getting deeper.
Tennessee’s Faizon Brandon and Vanderbilt’s Jared Curtis both carry 5-star pedigrees, though neither is draft-eligible until the 2029 NFL Draft. Mississippi State’s Kamario Taylor, this season’s early darling, won’t be eligible until 2028 either.
Alabama’s Keelon Russell is another name to file away for that same draft class. That’s already four possible first-round quarterbacks before even getting to the current crop.
Among the eligible guys, Arch Manning is the easy lock. He may not be the conference’s best quarterback right now, but the name alone is going to pull someone in.
Ole Miss quarterback Trinidad Chambliss is forcing his way into the Round 1 conversation and the Heisman picture. Georgia’s Gunner Stockton has been excellent, even if he hasn’t faced much real competition yet.
South Carolina’s LaNorris Sellers looks like a likely first-round pick if he keeps this up. LSU’s Sam Leavitt had first-round buzz before the season, and while that has cooled, the door is still open if he cleans up the interceptions.
Then there are the dark horses: Austin Simmons of Mizzou, Aaron Philo of Florida and Marcel Reed of Texas A&M. Any of them could rocket up draft boards.
The point is, nobody saw Kyler Murray, Baker Mayfield, Joe Burrow, Fernando Mendoza or Cam Ward coming when their rises started either.
Taylor, though, is the name that keeps jumping off the page. He has been electric through two games and looked like one of the best players in college football.
Against Minnesota in Week 2, he threw for 227 yards and 3 touchdowns and added 86 rushing yards. For the season, he has 7 passing touchdowns, 1 rushing touchdown, 581 passing yards, 145 rushing yards, 0 interceptions, 1 lost fumble and only 1 sack taken.
Those are outrageous numbers.
The Heisman, however, is a different story. Almost certainly not, because the Bulldogs probably aren’t getting to 9 wins, and that’s basically the floor for a player to win the sport’s biggest individual prize.
Since 2000, only five Heisman winners have come from teams that finished with fewer than 10 regular-season wins: Tim Tebow in 2007, Robert Griffin III in 2011, Lamar Jackson in 2016, Jayden Daniels in 2023 and Travis Hunter in 2024. Every one of those teams went 9-3 in the regular season.
Taylor needs that kind of finish, too.
That means the next two games are critical. South Carolina this weekend and Mizzou next weekend are must-wins.
Then comes a brutal October: Oct. 3 vs. Alabama, Oct. 10 off, Oct. 17 at LSU, Oct. 24 vs.
Oklahoma and Oct. 31 at Texas. The path from there is narrow but clear - beat the next two, knock off Oklahoma at home on Oct. 24 and then run the table in November with Vanderbilt, Auburn, Tennessee Tech and the Egg Bowl at Ole Miss.
It’s a long shot, but Taylor has been playing well enough that nobody should dismiss it outright.
And then there’s the Big Ten, which somehow managed to draw plenty of heat without even doing much on the field. Big Ten coaches and fans love pointing fingers at the SEC whenever an SEC team lines up against a lower-level FBS or FCS opponent, but this Week 3 slate is not exactly a masterpiece.
It’s the kind of schedule that makes a college football junkie shrug. Purdue-UCLA is probably the one game worth sampling, and even that has more to do with the time slot than the matchup itself.
For anyone handing out schedule lectures, this is not the week to talk.
One last oddity from Week 2: Northwestern burned its only bye week of 2026 right away. Florida State, Stanford and Northwestern were the three Power 4 teams off last week, but Florida State and Stanford had already played in Week 0, so they still have more byes coming.
Northwestern does not. The Wildcats used theirs in Week 2, and that means they now have to go 11 straight weeks without a break.
With a new stadium opening later this year, maybe they wanted one more game in the new place. Either way, it’s going to be a grind from here on out.
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