Looking Ahead To College Football

Due to an impending hiatus from writing/”researching”, I realized that I was getting behind the eight ball with regard to the upcoming college football season. So I started earlier this week to gather some basic information that might be useful in a variety of ways once that season gets underway. The place I always start is with the schedules – and for college football finding the schedules for a number of teams in a variety of conferences is a whole lot more of a pain in the butt than finding the schedules for – say – the NFL.

However, once I had some of the schedules in front of me and had a chance to look at how they differed from one another, I see that there are still schools that are committed to padding their records by scheduling mouthbreathers as their out-of-conference games. Let me give you eleven examples; I am sure that if I spent a lot more time looking at more of the 128 Division 1-A schools I could find more:

Auburn: Home games against Louisville, Jacksonville State, San Jose St. and Idaho. Auburn does not have a single road game in their out of conference schedule.

Baylor: Road game at SMU and home games against Lamar and Rice. This is a team that aspires to be in the College Football Playoff this year.

Florida State: Home games against Texas State, USF and Tennessee-Chattanooga and a neutral site game against Florida.

Kansas State: Home games against South Dakota and La Tech and a road game at UT-San Antonio.

Kentucky: Home games against La-Lafayette, Eastern Kentucky and UNC-Charlotte and a road game at Louisville.

LSU: Home games against McNeese State, Eastern Michigan and Western Kentucky and a road game at Syracuse.

North Carolina State: Home games against Troy and Eastern Kentucky and road games at Old Dominiion and South Alabama.

Mississippi: Home games against Tennessee-Martin, Fresno State and New Mexico State and a road game at Memphis.

Rutgers: Home games against Norfolk State, Washington State and Kansas and a road game at Army.

Ohio State: Road game at Va Tech and home games against Hawaii, Northern Illinois and Western Michigan. The best you can say here is that Va Tech would be a 2 TD favorite over the Alaska Asthmatic College team…

Penn State: Road game at Temple and home games against Buffalo, San Diego State and Army.

I am sure someone will notice that I did not put Alabama on that list teams with embarrassing out of conference schedules; and indeed, I was going to do that until I noticed the totality of the Alabama schedule which made me sympathetic to their scheduling of a couple of patsies (Middle Tennessee, La-Monroe and Charleston Southern). Alabama opens against Wisconsin on a neutral field; this year it plays all of the teams in the SEC West and from the SEC East they draw Georgia (on the road) and Tennessee. Besides, Alabama is going to win a minimum of 10 games this year unless they schedule NFL teams.

BYU is an independent and so all of its games are “out-of-conference” because they do not have a conference. The Athletic Director at BYU has lined up a serious set of challenges for the team this year:

Just in the month of September, BYU plays road games at Nebraska, UCLA and Michigan with a visit from Boise State mixed into that lineup.

The rest of the schedule is not as daunting but they do have games against Cincy and Missouri thrown in there.

Changing the subject here, I have often tried to advocate the position that public money ought not to be sued in great quantity to build stadiums/arenas for pro sports teams. I have long believed that few if any of these stadiums ever generate sufficient NEW tax revenue for a city/state to cover the costs of building a new playpen for wealthy owners. At the very least, a new stadium or arena project should be a cost-sharing endeavor with the majority of the costs coming from the team and/or the league.

Since my powers of persuasion are obviously limited in that dimension, let me ask you to watch this commentary from John Oliver on the subject of using public money for such endeavors. In addition to being humorous, his argumentation here is eloquent. When cities borrow hundreds of millions of dollars in order to build a stadium for a team, that lowers that city’s ability to borrow money for schools and public safety and public transit. In science class we learned about the Law of Conservation of Matter; well in government terms the Law of Conservation of Matter means that you cannot borrow the same dollars twice nor can you spend already borrowed money on two things at once.

I recommend you take a few moments to watch John Oliver here…

Finally, Brad Dickson addressed the continued expansion of the number of college football bowl games in the Omaha World-Herald:

“The NCAA approved several new college football bowl games. We’re running out of decent host cities. Take one of the new games: the Bozeman Pecan Bowl. Then there’s the Dubuque Doughnut Hole Bowl. We need more college football bowl games like television needs more television dance competition shows.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………