Friday night college games aren’t cool. College football is for Saturday, not Friday.

I get that it’s mainly a TV thing. I’m sure network executives think their games will get higher ratings on Fridays than they would on Saturdays because there are fewer games to compete against for viewership.

But Friday nights should be reserved for high school games. Part of the fun of a college-football Saturday is watching games unfold nationally and hypothesizing how those contests will affect your favorite teams and their games.

Watching for upsets, keeping track of the conference standings, and hearing about breakout performances all add to the college-football atmosphere on Saturday.

Iowa won’t be a part of that this week.

Instead, they’ll play Maryland at 7 p.m. on Friday. You will wake up on Saturday and say to yourself, “There’s an Iowa game today. Oh wait, no there isn’t.” And you’ll be sad.

Looking at the schedule from a player’s perspective, a Friday night affair throws off the practice schedule for the week. I think it’s fine for the NFL to give its guys a short week of rest ahead of a Thursday night game. NFL players are paid employees, college athletes are not.

If you ask any player, they’ll probably say they don’t care when they play, but I think they’re lying.

While some people might say they enjoy an occasional Friday night college contest, I — for one — am a traditionalist who likes his college football played on Saturdays.