Thursday-night fun

Is it me, or has the appeal of ESPN's Thursday-night football programming decreased significantly this season?

Seems that in previous years there were compelling matchups on a regular basis, a reason to get jacked up about getting a head start on the college football weekend.

This year ... not so much.

We got the season off to a rousing start with Wisconsin's curb-stomping of UNLV.

Oklahoma State and Arizona in Week 2 ... meh.

LSU and Mississippi State in Week 3 was something to get excited about.

N.C. State at Cincy? Not bad ... until the game began.

And then came these:

South Florida-Pitt

Cal-Oregon

SoCal-Cal

UCLA-Arizona

Maybe it's just provincialism that keeps us from being entertained by stuff going on in other locales. But it really seems there have been fewer ACC/SEC games this year than in recent years, and that takes away some of the appeal.

That's in the midst of changing, though. Last week we got Virginia-Miami. Tonight we get Florida State-Boston College.

Next week is Virginia Tech-Georgia Tech.

A week later is North Carolina-Virginia Tech.

So there's that.

But I'm guessing one of the problems with staging attractive Thursday-night matchups is convincing certain schools it's worth it to shut everything down during the week instead of doing the normal Saturday thing.

Clemson hasn't played host to a Thursday-night game since 2002, and I've said before that Clemson needs to rethink its position on this issue because Thursday-night games have become much more of a spectacle than they were a decade ago.

College football is bigger than it was then. It's an opportunity to showcase yourself to a captive audience when there are very few (if any) other games available on television.

And there's this: The home team seems to have an overwhelming advantage in Thursday-night games.

If Virginia Tech can pull it off with regularity, then there's no reason Clemson can't. Not saying it has to happen every year, but ironclad opposition to the idea doesn't seem like the best approach.

Bottom line, it'd be pretty cool every once in a while. And if Clemson is going to regularly put itself at a disadvantage by going on the road for Thursday-night games, then it only makes sense for the Tigers to cash in on that advantage every two or three years.

Then again, Clemson isn't playing a Thursday-night road game this year and didn't last year. The last one was at Georgia Tech in the second week of the 2009 season.

Maybe Clemson has told the ACC it doesn't want to play any Thursday games, period. It's something worth asking about.

Either way, there's no reason for Thursday-night football not to be a showcase the college football world looks forward to every week.

There just shouldn't be a lot of "blah" games, and there have been quite a bit of them this year.

LW