2024 College Football - Week 1 Weeknight Recaps

A look back at some of the top Thursday and Friday night games

Aug 31, 2024

Most of the biggest games are happening over the weekend, but that doesn’t mean that nothing of note happened in the weeknight games. Below the boys go over some of their key takeaways

Thursday:

Western Carolina 21, NC State 38

NC State needed a 21-0 4th quarter to pull this one out. Transfer quarterback Grayson McCall did not look sharp and will need to shake the rust off before Tennessee comes to town next week or that could get ugly

North Carolina 19, Minnesota 17

A missed 46 yard FG by Minnesota as time expired allowed UNC to escape with the win here, but the Tar Heels lost starting QB Max Johnson for the season to a broken leg.

North Dakota State 26, Colorado 31

This was our biggest position on Thursday night, so really glad they were able to get the cover. As expected, Shaduer Sanders and Travis Hunter are really good, but we’ll see if they can continue to do it all themselves when the competition steps up. Maybe the most interesting thing in this game was Coach Prime going for the cover at the end instead of running out the clock to guarantee the win. It didn’t bite him, but it did get a little closer than you probably liked if you're a Colorado fan.

Coastal Carolina 55, Jacksonville State 27

Didn’t watch any of this one, but CC won big after coming in as a dog, so maybe something to keep an eye on here

Eastern Illinois 0, Illinois 45

This one is probably only interesting to Andy and other Illini alum, but this was their biggest shutout win since 1973 and I think that deserves a shoutout.

Friday:

FAU 10, Michigan State 16

MSU struggled to put away FAU, but the more interesting storyline here is fans who lost money following MSU QB Aiden Chiles’ betting advice. He told fans to take the over and then never even got close. But what was he supposed to say? “We probably won’t score much”? If you lost money on the over, you deserve it.

Elon 3, Duke 26

Only interesting thing here is that Elon kicked a meaningless FG with 14 seconds left to get the cover

Western Michigan 14, Wisconsin 28

Having the under in a game like this is as good as it gets

TCU 34, Stanford 27

TCU quarterback Josh Hoover put up some numbers here, but the fact that he needed to do that to beat a bad Stanford team by 7 does not bode well for TCU when they get to conference play.