Culture
Ranking Week 4’s top 10 college football games: From NC State-Clemson to Tennessee-Oklahoma
College football conference play is (mostly) underway and the stakes will be raised accordingly. The sport dips its toes this weekend with ranked matchups in the Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC featuring College Football Playoff favorites and some remaining question marks.
Let’s rank the top 10 games of Week 4, starting with a few honorable mentions and counting down.
Honorable Mention: JMU at North Carolina, Rutgers at Virginia Tech, Memphis at Navy, TCU at SMU, Iowa at Minnesota
(All point spreads come from BetMGM; click here for live odds. All kickoff times are Eastern and on Saturday unless otherwise noted.)
10. San Jose State (3-0) at Washington State (3-0), Friday, 10 p.m., The CW
What a win for Wazzu last week. It upset Washington in a new, strange rendition of the Apple Cup rivalry, secured by a dramatic goal-line stand by the Cougars. Quarterback John Mateer is a dual-threat firecracker, head coach Jake Dickert brought a celebratory cigar to the postgame news conference, and Washington State is one of the early feel-good teams. Now the Cougars have a different type of grudge match against San Jose State, which might feel scorned by WSU for helping lead the Pac-12’s poaching of the Mountain West. The Spartans haven’t faced anyone as good as Wazzu yet, but former Navy coach Ken Niumatalolo abandoned the triple option and has SJSU airing it out to an undefeated start, including a road win over Air Force.
Line: Washington State -11.5
Rough start for NC State. Following the 51-10 blowout loss to Tennessee, the Wolfpack lost starting quarterback Grayson McCall to injury in a 30-20 win over Louisiana Tech. True freshman backup CJ Bailey will start against Clemson and led the comeback over Lousiana Tech, but NC State hasn’t looked at all like a team deserving of its preseason Top 25 ranking. This will be an interesting test for Clemson, as well, coming off a bye following the blowout loss to Georgia and blowout win over App State. Are the Tigers still a legit threat in the ACC and Playoff race? The spread in this one suggests as much. Either way, Saturday’s result should get us a little closer to those answers.
Line: Clemson -20.5
Clemson QB Cade Klubnik threw for a career-high 378 yards on a 92.3 percent completion rate against App State. (Alex Hicks Jr. / USA Today Sports via Imagn Images)
8. Arkansas (2-1) at Auburn (2-1), 3:30 pm, ESPN
It’s tough to properly articulate in text, but this game just feels like leaf-changing college football in the fall. The game is on ESPN now instead of CBS, neither team is expected to be in the mix for the SEC title or CFP, Arkansas’ Sam Pittman is on the hot seat — but there’s an ineffable nostalgia hit with this matchup. It should be an interesting quarterback matchup between Arkansas’ dual-threat Taylen Green and Auburn redshirt freshman Hank Brown, who threw four touchdowns in his first start against New Mexico last week. Both teams have gantlet schedules ahead and could really use a win to keep fans from getting restless.
Line: Auburn -3
GO DEEPER
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How about Kenny Dillingham and the Sun Devils? The second-year head coach has ASU — picked dead last in the Big 12 preseason poll — off to an undefeated start with three solid wins, including a barnburner over Texas State last Thursday. Quarterback Sam Leavitt has been workmanlike, running back Cam Skattebo is a wrecking ball, and Dillingham’s commitment to recruiting Texas is already paying dividends. Whether ASU can make any noise in the Big 12 race remains to be seen, but it could start against a puzzling Texas Tech team that escaped in overtime against Abilene Christian, got smoked by Wazzu and then hung 66 on North Texas.
Line: Texas Tech -3
6. Georgia Tech (3-1) at No. 19 Louisville (2-0), 3:30 pm, ESPN2
Georgia Tech got right with a blowout over VMI following the close loss to Syracuse, and with a brief stay in the Top 25, it’s clear the Yellow Jackets are better than most anticipated this season. But Louisville is the team I’m more curious about. The Cardinals have climbed into the top 20 almost by default on the strength of easy wins over Austin Peay and Jacksonville State. Transfer quarterback Tyler Shough has impressed against inferior competition, but with a road trip to Notre Dame next week, this game should provide a much better sense of how viable an ACC and Playoff contender Louisville can be this season.
Line: Louisville -10.5
5. No. 8 Miami (3-0) at South Florida (2-1), 7 p.m., ESPN
Mario Cristobal’s year-three warpath makes an intriguing stop in Tampa. Quarterback Cam Ward has been spectacular for the Hurricanes, ranking second in FBS in passing yards, first in passing touchdowns, third in yards per attempt and fourth in QB rating, lifting Miami into the top 10. But now it has to face a USF squad that gave Alabama fits for 3 1/2 quarters. Bulls quarterback Byrum Brown has run the ball effectively but struggled through the air, and USF’s defense fissured late against the Tide, allowing 21 points over the final six minutes. A decisive road win, in prime time on ESPN, would shift the Miami hype train into high gear.
Line: Miami -16.5
Cam Ward transferred to Miami from Washington State in the offseason and is leading the Hurricanes toward their CFP hopes. (Sam Navarro / Imagn Images)
4. No. 24 Illinois (3-0) at No. 22 Nebraska (3-0), 8 p.m. Friday, Fox
The ranked Big Ten matchup you didn’t know you needed in your life. Nebraska quarterback Dylan Raiola and his Patrick Mahomes cosplay will get another turn in the spotlight Friday night against the undefeated Illini. Raiola has been impressive for a true freshman with heavy expectations and a fan base that is desperate to return to winning football. The Cornhuskers haven’t been to a bowl game in seven seasons, haven’t beaten a ranked team since 2016 and haven’t done so at home since 2011. Enter an Illinois team that is second in FBS with a plus-8 turnover margin. The Illini haven’t been elite in other areas thus far but are stout enough to keep the optimism in Lincoln on high alert.
Line: Nebraska -8.5
3. No. 11 USC (2-0) at No. 18 Michigan (2-1), 3:30 p.m., CBS
It’s Alex Orji time for Michigan. The speedy junior takes over at quarterback for Davis Warren, who threw six interceptions in three games at the helm of a dismal offense. Can Orji provide enough of a spark to turn things around? The Wolverines are a home underdog for the second time in three weeks. They got clobbered by Texas in Week 2 and now get USC coming off an idle week. The Trojans are surging in The Athletic’s Playoff projector after the opening-week win over LSU and with what looks to be a much improved defense under new coordinator D’Anton Lynn. A road victory over Michigan would further boost those CFP hopes, especially with a favorable schedule the rest of the way: no Ohio State, no Oregon, and Penn State, Nebraska and Notre Dame all at home.
Line: USC -6
GO DEEPER
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2. No. 12 Utah (3-0) at No. 14 Oklahoma State (3-0), 4 p.m., Fox
Utah quarterback Cam Rising is expected to play after suffering an injury to his throwing hand in the Week 2 win over Baylor. The Utes have been predictably strong on defense and remain the highest-ranked team in the Big 12 but are traveling into the thunderdome of Stillwater. The Pokes have been somewhat of an enigma. Doak Walker-winning running back Ollie Gordon II has been mostly held in check, averaging just 3.5 yards per carry, but seventh-year quarterback Alan Bowman has picked up the slack. Bowman is sixth in FBS in passing yards along with eight touchdowns and two interceptions. This is a crucial stretch for Oklahoma State, which travels to Kansas State next week and is still without star linebacker Collin Oliver. With Utah headed to Arizona next week, we should have a better handle on the top of the Big 12 by the end of the month.
Line: Utah -2.5
GO DEEPER
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1. No. 6 Tennessee (3-0) at No. 15 Oklahoma (3-0), 7:30 p.m., ABC
The big storyline is Tennessee head coach Josh Heupel returning to Oklahoma, where he quarterbacked the program to a national championship and was later fired as offensive coordinator. Joe Rexrode penned a great retrospective on how the reunion has unfolded for all involved (worked out for Tennessee!), as well as the stakes for a game Joe describes as an “early College Football Playoff clarifier.” The Vols look like a wagon, leading the FBS in points per game at 63.7. Quarterback Nico Iamaleava’s 10.4 yards per attempt ranks eighth among all quarterbacks and the offense is averaging 8.1 yards per play. The Sooners are on the other end of the spectrum, averaging just 4.9 yards per play under quarterback Jackson Arnold, who is averaging 5.6 yards per attempt and still trying to find his groove. (Potentially getting wide receivers Nic Anderson and Andrel Anthony back from injury could help on that front.) Brent Venables’ defense has been solid, but it’s Tennessee that is allowing 3.1 yards per play and 4.3 points per game, both in the top three in FBS. ESPN’s “College GameDay” heads to Norman to see if the Sooners can slow down Tennessee in the first SEC showdown for Oklahoma.
Line: Tennessee -7
(Top photo of Jackson Arnold: Aaron M. Sprecher / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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