Colleges should adopt flex scheduling
When college football looks back on the lessons learned from the improvisational nature of playing during a pandemic, it will be worth remembering that one of the season’s most interesting games was scheduled with three days notice.
For a sport where Oklahoma and Clemson have a home-and-home series scheduled for 2035 and 2036 while Virginia Tech has a trip to Mississippi on the books for 2037, it almost defied gravity for 9-0 Coastal Carolina and 9-0 BYU to figure out a way to play last Saturday when Liberty, the Chanticleers’ previously scheduled opponent, had to cancel due to COVID-19 issues.
“I think the factors aligned well for us,” Coastal Carolina athletic director Matt Hogue said by phone this week. “It wasn’t as hard as it could have been to put everything together.”
By the end of Coastal’s thrilling 22-17 win, which generated the highest rating on an ESPNU broadcast in five years, it had parlayed the willingness to take a risk into a moment that was genuinely good for the school and the sport. And it has sparked a conversation, particularly at the Group of Five level, about whether the post-pandemic future might need to include some in-season scheduling flexibility.
“I think this year has shown that at a high level, both from an institutional and conference standpoint, that games can be aligned in haste and can be aligned in a nature that presents really good games for the casual fan but also creates interesting matchups across college football,” Georgia Southern athletic director Jared Benko said. “It would behoove all of us to step back and say, ‘Is the current way we schedule games and look at games the best practice?’ This year has shown us with the right flexibility to make last-minute changes, it can be somewhat seamless.”
Nobody would argue that throwing together games on a Wednesday afternoon is practical or sustainable in a nor
mal environment. But why couldn’t college football build its own version of the old ESPN Bracket Busters event where mid-major teams from various conferences were matched up in made-for-tv games late in the regular season to help boost their schedule strength for the NCAA Tournament selection committee?
Here’s one version of how it could work: On some designated weekend in November, every Football Bowl Subdivision school must leave the same open date.
Before the season, schools know whether they would be the home or road team, which would alternate every year, so that they could sell it as part of their season ticket package.
Then on the Sunday before the games, you learn your opponent. If
you’re among the top four teams in one of the power conferences, you’d be matched up against a randomly selected top-four team in another power conference. The rest of the matchups would be completely randomized. You could do the same thing among the Group of Five or engineer it to produce the matchups you want among ranked teams.
This would produce a massive twopronged boost for the sport. First, there would be huge intrigue in how the games get selected. Imagine the ratings on an ESPN Sunday afternoon show where we’d learn who Alabama or Clemson was going to draw in one of their last big hurdles before the conference championship games. Then, of course, the games themselves would be more likely to draw in casual fans because they’d
generally be pretty competitive while giving us matchups we don’t see very often.
Now, would schools go for it? At the Power Five level, it’s unlikely unless the extra money involved was significant. In an informal survey sample of one athletic director in every power conference, only one of the five said they’d be personally interested in that kind of arrangement, and all agreed it would be a difficult sell for their leagues.
But the calculus at the Group of Five level is different.
It also proved that college football doesn’t have to be rigid in its concept of a schedule to produce great games and benefit the sport.
Even when the pandemic is over, it’s a lesson everyone should take with them.