Hard disagree. We aren’t a premier program. But we usually are a competitive one. In a time where we are about to be left behind, I’d rather play Pitt and Penn State and lose rather than Pitt and ECU, and lose to Pitt. Meaningful games draw the fans in, despite performance. He absolutely has a point with us opening 3 seasons on the road against P5; that’s a tough ask, and continually sets the tone for each season. Do things play out differently if we start with Duquesne and then play Penn State? Unlikely, but there is something to be said for almost no one on this team to ever be “undefeated”.
I’m ok with a g5 (g6? g8?) opener for us (TN) but what I’m not a fan of is Austin Pea here in week 2. The way I see it to be a serious p5 (p4? p2?) program is we need a good ooc slate. I say open with a g-whatever program to shake loose the rust if you need (bonus points if it’s ut-martin or ut-chattanooga) and then the rest of our ooc should be p5 programs, certainly not fcs.
Unfortunately that takes money out of Austin Pea’s (or insert fcs school here) pockets. And will lead to increased separation between the levels of the sport. But with fox and espn leading the way that’s already happening.
Agreed. It sucks that this is where the sport is going, but it’s untenable to keep subsidizing the costs of smaller programs to your own detriment. The games suck. They aren’t entertaining, they’re usually hot AF at noon, they’re usually (relatively) poorly attended. I’m not even going to finish watching us play Duquesne because I have another sports event to go to Saturday.
I love 11 P# games and 1 G# games. It feels right. Do whatever you need to with your conference scheduling, but get to 11. It helps preserve rivalries and just leads to better games. The goal is entertainment. Why not push for that?
That’s definitely my favorite way of scheduling games. Fortunately, Texas has been doing it for a while now. Sometimes it’s a decent 2nd G5 instead of another P5, but there’s always a marquee game. In the past that’s included ND, USC, LSU, Alabama and in the future it’s Michigan, OSU (plus Georgia and Florida when we expected those to be out-of-conference). In the future, we’ll play either UTSA or UTEP every year for a pay game and that money gets to stay in the system.
And we’ve never played an FCS game. I think (a small) part of why Texas is always “overrated” is they get so beat up in their week 2 marquee game and don’t have really easy cupcakes to sleepwalk through. And yeah, sometimes we lose to the “easy” P5 Cal/Maryland/BYU teams so we can’t sniff the playoff. But I’d still rather do it this way than pad stats/resumes with meaningless games.
This is the correct application of the phrase “meaningless game”
