SCHEDULES:
Teams have incentive to go big and bold
Florida State will meet Alabama on Sept. 2, helping to christen Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta in the grandest of grand style — with one of the most hotly anticipated season openers in recent memory, if not in the long history of college football.
The game was announced in July 2015 as part of the Seminoles’ quest to find the perfect scheduling balance in the young era of the College Football Playoff, which is entering its fourth season as the postseason format of the Football Bowl Subdivision.
Internally, it’s safe to say Florida State’s athletics department views its opener against the Crimson Tide as a win-win situation: “We’re having a hard time coming up with (a negative),” said Jim Curry, the university’s senior associate athletics director and the sport administrator for football, a role that includes managing football scheduling.
From FSU’s perspective, there are three primary positives. One is the platform and exposure a high-profile game provides. The second is the clear financial benefit; each school will receive roughly $5 million. The third is obvious: In this era of the Playoff, it’s vital — if not absolutely mandatory — that those programs with realistic title hopes augment their largely unchanging league slate with the strongest schedule they can during non-conference play.
“When you cut right down to it, the core of it is you’re looking for the best opportunity to position yourself for an invitation to the CFP,” Curry said. “You have to balance the strength of schedule. You want to look for opportunities to provide exposure for your program in a very positive way. From there, try to schedule quality non-conference opponents who can obviously help position you better for consideration.”
At face value, the concept of blue bloods matching wits outside of league play isn’t new — similar first- Saturday pairings have long been a part of the sport, if not a defining aspect of the regular season until the explosion of televised college football roughly three decades ago.
But it wasn’t until the start of the Playoff that these high-profile
games took center stage. More so than ever before, this format — and the factors weighed most heavily by the selection committee — has carved out one meaningful takeaway: overall quality of schedule matters.
“You want to be able to put the best strength of schedule possible,” Stanford athletics director Bernard Muir said.
Take the top 10 of the preseason Amway Coaches Poll, for example. Of this select group of title contenders, only one, No. 10
Wisconsin, fails to face off against a fellow Power Five opponent during non-league play in September. Besides Alabama playing Florida State, No. 2 Ohio State will host No. 8 Oklahoma, No. 4 Southern California will host Texas, No. 5 Clemson will face No. 13 Auburn and No. 9 Michigan will play No. 16 Florida.
This group — along with any Power Five program with goals of cracking the four-team field — is simply following the mandate
set forth by the committee, which throughout the brief history of the Playoff has given respect and credibility to those teams with more impressive overall résumés of competition.
An example from the 2016 season might be Penn State, which in the first week of the Playoff rankings was seeded 12th, 11 spots higher than its placement in that week’s Coaches Poll. Not that it eventually worked out for the Nittany Lions, who went on to win the Big Ten Confer- ence yet saw Ohio State — an opponent it defeated in regularseason play — make a return trip to a national semifinal.
That near-miss speaks to the delicate balancing act teams must take with scheduling in the Playoff era. Like Goldilocks, programs must find the right mix: not too strong nor too weak. Power Five teams must locate the right balance between impressing the committee while still maintaining their hopes of making the four-team field.
“You’ve got to find the right mix,” Curry said. “Scheduling is a complex puzzle where the pieces constantly change shape and size throughout the process. It’s a very fluid process. And I think if you talk to people across the country who are involved in scheduling, they’ll tell you the same thing. It’s a challenge, for sure.”
In one way, the discussion comes down to simple math. There are five major conferences in the Football Bowl Subdivision and four Playoff berths; one league will be left out in the cold. Since the committee eventually will place judgment on each contender’s overall schedule come early December, games in September take on an increased level of importance — a fact that might worry No. 7 Washington, for example, based on the Huskies’ non-conference slate of Rutgers, Montana and Fresno State.
That being said, scheduling remains a guessing game. With opponents often laid out years in advance — games between Notre Dame and the Atlantic Coast Conference are scheduled through 2025, for instance — it can be difficult, if not impossible, to gauge the quality of a future pairing. In the case of Washington, that matchup with Rutgers was announced in 2014, when the Scarlet Knights were in the midst of eight bowl trips in nine seasons.
All programs can do is aim high. Sometimes, as in the case of Alabama vs. Florida State, reality matches expectations. Yet the defining aspect of scheduling in the Playoff era is clear: Reaching a semifinal is about more than just winning your conference — it’s about putting your best foot forward from the season’s first weekend to its last.
“We want to put our studentathletes in a position where they can compete at the highest level,” Muir said. “And if things work out, hopefully down the road you’re in the position where you’ll have an attractive record and attractive strength of schedule that will catch the eyes of the committee.”