Watch Grid: Very busy evening

Small writeup this week due to work travel. Now I'm the first person to ever post about college football while at Comic Con, probably. Eli Manning is here, however.

Look at this Saturday night log jam of decent-to-good activity:

• Hello! I have a novel coming out asap!

• People you respect have said it’s good, the cover art fucking rocks, it’s by far the best thing I’ve ever made, and I’ll share the evidence of all these things with you once it’s time. If it were not so, I would not have told you.

• Join the 7,000+ who’ll be notified as soon as preorders are available at Shutdown Fullbooks and elsewhere.

Quite possibly the four best mid-major teams (on this website, nobody can make me say “Group of 5”) meet on Friday night and Saturday evening, giving us two clear favorites for the New Year’s Six spot. (Next year, games like these will have playoff stakes. Keep that in mind whenever anyone argues a bigger tournament will diminish the regular season. Not that it’s any of my business either way, because the playoff shouldn’t exist in the first place.)

The biggest game of the week will also somehow gain you a few hipster credentials. The Pac-12 is old and has long had power status, sure, yet it’s limited edition, it’s soon to be small-batch, and it regularly broadcasts games on a channel you’ve likely never seen. More importantly, the Oregon-Washington rivalry winner will have a strong case for #1 votes, considering this season’s wide range of potential top teams and the fact that Georgia’s only played one truly impressive game so far.

End your evening with the Shutdown Fullcast After Dark (airing around 11 ET on LinkedIn and elsewhere — Get it? LinkedIn? That’s the joke) and the finest conference of all: the Big Sky Conference.

And now, it’s time to imagine opening your front door and yelling this dog’s name as your neighbors attempt to go about their business: