College football Week 13: Rivalry Week, Ohio State-Michigan, playoff spots, bowl eligibility and best bets - ESPN

Rivalry Week is an endurance test. You start out on Thanksgiving, full of food and spirits, watching something chaotic and messy happen in the Egg Bowl. Then, rendered logy from leftovers, you get two mostly full days of plot lines and constant plot twists to track.

There are so many games over this long weekend that are important for different reasons — College Football Playoff stakes, New Year's Six bowl stakes, conference races, bowl eligibility, just plain old hateful rivalry stuff — and it's almost impossible to keep up. Allow me to help. Rivalry Week is a smorgasbord, and you've got to have a plan to get through it all. So here are all the different categories of stakes, and the games that matter most in each category.

From the College Football Playoff quest to Group of 5 title races to small-school playoffs, here's what you need to know about 55 different Rivalry Week games. We'll get through all this together. (The food and drink will help.)

Jump to a section:
An epic in Michigan | CFP plot twists
Conference races | New Year's Six races | Bowl eligibility games
For funsies | Best bets | Small school playoffs

No. 2 Ohio State Buckeyes at No. 3 Michigan Wolverines (Saturday, noon ET, Fox).

The Game is on quite a roll. This will be the 14th time Ohio State and Michigan have met as top-five teams, but four of those have come in the past eight seasons, including the past three in a row. After losing 15 of 16 to the Buckeyes, the Wolverines completely flipped the rivalry on its head with back-to-back dominant wins (and ensuing Big Ten titles) in 2021 and 2022; Ohio State has spent the past 52 weeks waiting to find out if its remodeled — and, to date, incredibly effective defense — is up for the test it failed so