Unfair fights that should never be played
The South Dakota Coyotes play in Norman on Saturday. The McNeese State Cowboys play in Stillwater on Saturday. Welcome to college football's answer to the NFL exhibition season.
The Cowboys and Coyotes are members of the NCAA's Football Championship Subdivision, which many call FCS. I don't, because the world is overrun with indistinguishable acronyms. I stick with the old verbiage; Division I-AA.
I-AA schools give out a maximum of 63 scholarships, 22 fewer than Division I-A, and much of their funding comes from these unfair fights.
“Sometimes people forget that if the bigger schools don't play some of the smaller schools, it's hard for them to budget and make ends meet,” Mike Gundy said.
Maybe that's how coaches in the Power 5 conferences sleep at night. Knowing their humanitarian efforts help Arkansas-Pine Bluff and Stephen F. Austin stay afloat
in football.
By 10 p.m. Saturday, Big 12 teams will have played 18 games. Exactly half of them against I-AA opponents. Every Big 12 team except Texas has a I-AA foe on its schedule. OU tries to avoid the lowerclassifications choo ls but occasionally relents. OSU plays a I-AA foe virtually every year, and most Big 12 teams do the same.
Gundy says OSU's current scheduling model is just right – a Power 5 foe, a mid-major like Tulsa, then a “smaller school,” as Gundy puts it. Lincoln Riley didn't really endorse playing I-AA opponents but does support uniformity in scheduling among the Power 5 schools.
“Whatever we did, I wish it was more uniform,” Riley said. “You would love to see, at some point, college football get closer to the NFL in that respect, where leagues were a little bit more even as far as numbers of teams and then the nonconference schedules were a little bit more uniform.”
Good luck with that. The conferences can't even ride herd on their own schools. The Big Ten tried to ban its schools from playing I-AA foes; the Big Ten schools rebelled. The Big 12 has mandated that its members play at least one Power 5 opponent each year, but this season, Baylor's nonconference trio is Stephen F. Austin, Texas-San Antonio and Rice.
And the Big 12 now has in its rank a champion of Division I-AA. New Kansas State coach Chris Kleiman has spent 20 seasons coaching on the I-AA level, including the last five as head coach at North Dakota State.
Klieman said games like OSU-McNeese and OU-South Dakota are “a great thing for football. Great thing for being on the FCS side, the money that those guys are able to get to help fund their programs is tremendous. So I'm a big advocate of it.
“Second thing is, I really believe the level of play at the FCS level is exceptional. It's not a layover game. You can ask all the teams that had tough games … there's really good football played in the FCS.”
In this decade alone, 201019, Power 5 teams have lost 23 games against Division I-AA opponents, including at least one every year except not yet in 2019. Not for lack of trying. Iowa State against Northern Iowa, West Virginia against James Madison and Kansas against Indiana State all were taken to the wire last Saturday.
North Dakota State alone has beaten five Power 5 foes this decade – Iowa, Iowa State, Kansas State, Minnesota and Kansas. Eastern Washington, Sacramento State, Northern Iowa and South Dakota State have beaten two each.
The moral of that story is, if you're going to schedule a I-AA foe, schedule a bad one. Don't make the mistake Michigan made in 2007, losing 34-32 to Appalachian State, a rattlesnake of a team when it was in the lower division.
Of course, the public doesn't care. Only hard-core fans know the difference between Portland State and San Jose State, South Dakota State and New Mexico State, Eastern Kentucky and Western Kentucky. The kickoff time has a bigger influence on game attractiveness than does which sub-level an opponent inhabits.
So our state takes its hit all at once. On the same day, South Dakota and McNeese State come for a paycheck and leave with memories, while the Sooners and Cowboys get a victory and film on a game that should never be played.
Berry Tramel: Berry can be reached at 405-760-8080 or at btramel@oklahoman.com. He can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including FM-98.1. You can also view his personality page at newsok.com/berrytramel.