Welcome to the era of Friday and Thursday college football.
On Friday, Stewart Mandel at The Athletic dropped the full 2026 Big 12 football weeknight schedule and it includes some pretty big matchups. It’s no surprise, considering Brett Yormark and the league have optioned Texas Tech, one of its biggest football kingpins, for two weeknight games this upcoming season.
Arizona State, Cincinnati, Kansas State and Oklahoma State all avoid weeknight games.
Off the top, the schedule includes two in-state home games for Texas Tech (Houston on Sept. 18, and TCU on Nov. 26), as well as the Kansas-Missouri Border War, moved from Saturday to Friday, Sept. 11.
After pinning Texas Tech to two weeknight contests, the Big 12 is now reeling easily one of the most-important rivalries of the league’s history to Friday night when the Tigers of the SEC travel to Lawrence, Kansas, for Part II of the teams’ active series.
Now, there are some positives here aside from television ratings, maximizing exposure and all that jazz.
For example, Iowa State’s Oct. 9 road trip to BYU means Jimmy Rogers and the Cyclones are getting an extra day of travel when returning from Provo, Utah, to Ames, Iowa, which are 16.5 hours apart via I-80 West. The same argument goes for Baylor at UCF (Friday, Oct. 30), TCU at Arizona (Friday, Nov. 6), and Houston at Colorado (Friday, Nov. 13), and West Virginia at Utah (Friday, Nov. 27).
Perhaps the most-interesting date is Thanksgiving, which typically seats the NFL but now introduces Texas Tech and TCU to our television sets. I’d imagine most fans could get behind that, although it makes for a shorter week coming off a Saturday road trip to Baylor just four days earlier.
The league is pursuing a new model of college football, and that’s obviously no longer restricted to Saturdays. There’ll be plenty of football to watch on the weekends, but perhaps just a bit less from your favorite team (sighs).
