As Thursday nights go, this is a most excellent pre-Thanksgiving feast. Maybe the best ever for college football.

ESPN has No. 3 Oregon traveling to No. 5 Stanford tonight. Meanwhile, Fox Sports 1 will show No. 6 Baylor hosting No. 10 Oklahoma.

Two games with four top 10 teams and plenty of BCS implications on a Thursday night. I mean, who needs Washington at Minnesota on NFL Network? That’s Mediocre vs. Terrible.

How did this bounty happen? According to ESPN, Stanford was slated to host a Thursday night game this year, and the network requested the one against Oregon. Voila, ESPN now gets one of the best match-ups of the year on any day.

Fox Sports 1 also has a strong game. The staggered starting times will allow college football fans to watch the end of both games: Baylor-Oklahoma starts at 7:30 ET and Oregon-Stanford is at 9 p.m. ET.

How unusual are these Thursday night powerhouse games? Bill Connelly of SB Nation writes that since 2009, there only have been two match-ups on Thursday nights featuring ranked teams: Sept. 15, 2011: No. 3 LSU 19, No. 25 Mississippi State 6; Nov. 10, 2011: No. 10 Virginia Tech 37, No. 21 Georgia Tech 26.

Connelly:

We rarely expect to see elite teams playing on Thursday nights. These games are usually reserved for programs that are happy to risk iffy weeknight attendance for a spot on national television. We’ve seen a lot of Georgia Tech on Thursday nights over the years, for instance. But the big teams and huge games are typically saved for Saturdays.

Alabama-LSU is slated for Saturday night on CBS. That should be more than enough to fill your plate. ABC is showing Notre Dame at Pittsburgh in primetime. When in doubt, always go with the Irish, right ABC?

However, for quality and quantity, it will be hard to top Thursday night. Both ESPN and Fox Sports 1 should do strong ratings. Whether they beat the NFL monster remains to be seen, but the pros will lose many viewers to the college games.

Enjoy the feast, college football fans.