Your College Football Kickoff Primer

Jadeveon Clowney (leaping) and Aaron Murray (holding ball nervously) will each represent the SEC against stiff non-conference competition this weekend.

By Joe Parello  @HerewegoJoe

You know, people love to hate on ESPN.

Fans and bloggers just love to beat up on the worldwide leader for its programming (TIM TEBOW HOUR) and its ability to control the sports landscape by acquiring the television rights to pretty much everything.

Well, ESPN is proving to be a benevolent dictator for college football (At least for fans watching at home), as the network is delivering one heck of an opening weekend. While there are certainly a lot of things wrong with college football, ESPN setting up marquee matchups to kick the season off isn't one of them. The network's pairing of Alabama and Virginia Tech in the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Classic is just one example of an ESPN ratings move that is beneficial to everyone involved.

Oh, and that night's late game between LSU and TCU in Dallas… Also an ESPN creation.

Anyways, here is what else you should be watching for on college football's opening weekend which, like every good college weekend, begins Thursday night.

Long and Suite Preview: The American Athletic Conference

UCF's Blake Bortles should be the AAC's most important player not named Teddy Bridgewater.

By Joe Parello  @HerewegoJoe

The new American Athletic Conference was born out of the great schism between the Big East's "Catholic 7" and the conference's not-so-Catholic, football playing members.

Those seven schools chose to separate and form a league for "basketball-minded schools" (No, the ridiculousness of Catholic institutions calling themselves basketball-minded is not lost on me), and they took the Big East name with them.

Left in their wreckage is the AAC, a conference now comprised of teams on their way to the greener pastures of more powerful conferences (Louisville and Rutgers), teams desperately trying to follow those schools out the door (Cincinnati and UConn), a late Big East addition stuck in limbo (South Florida), a team the Big East once cast off (Temple), and a horde of former Conference USA squads (Central Florida, Houston, Memphis and SMU).