[NU Sports] Extended football season

Tue Feb 27 18:54:36 CST 2007

I can not see any program agreeing to this.  An 8 game schedule allows the big guys 7 or 8 home games.  A 10 game schedule would allow at most 7, and likely only 6 home games.  So, on average home games would drop from an average of 7.5 to 6.5 home games.  That one game loss would be millions of dollars for most teams.

Also, with the 8 game schedule, you can usually squeeze 7 (maybe 8) teams into bowls. With a 10 game schedule, it would be more like 6-7 bowl teams.  Again the loss of one bowl team would be painful to the conference.

Finally, the Big 10 almost always manages to get 2 teams into BCS bowls.  A 10 game schedule would have to impact this negatively.

Chuck Herron   Tech '85  

-----Original Message-----
From: jonathanwhodges at gmail.com
To: yevb0 at alumni.northwestern.edu
Cc: nwu-sports at tssi.com
Sent: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 6:16 PM
Subject: Re: [NU Sports] Extended football season

The article did mention extending the conference schedule beyond 
Thanksgiving (i.e. Pac 10 scheduling) - which must be considered if they add 
the games. This would mean NU would play games into reading week and maybe 
even finals week, but naysayers can look to basketball season where they 
have the possibility of playing over 2 sets of finals to get some 
justification for the "student" athlete side of things. 

In terms of fairness, it makes perfect sense to play everyone in the 
conference and I think I would be for it as it would eliminate some 
particularly meaningless games (i.e. any I-AA opponent) where the result can 
only hurt teams like NU. More conference games would yield more revenue for 
almost every team in the conference since every school plays at least one 
"cupcake" these days. 

The only disadvantage (for spectators) is that extending the games into 
December in the midwest will obviously provide some "interesting" weather 
which may help the team but be somewhat discomfortable to the fans in 
attendance. 

In any case, I have been waiting for the Big Ten to look into this ever 
since the Pac 10 went to the 9 game conference schedule, although I doubt it 
will come to fruition thanks to certain teams who seem to play 8 home games 
a year and don't want to give that up (OSU anyone?). 

Jonathan 

On 2/27/07, Evan Bradley <yevb0 at alumni.northwestern.edu> wrote: 
> 
> I like the idea of playing everyone in the conference, but one 
> potential downside I foresee for NU is that we'll have to play a home 
> conference game before class is in session, resulting in the stands 
> being even more overrun with opposing fans than is typical; usually 
> these are nonconference games, which I doubt attract as many fans 
> from, say, Duke or NH as from Michigan or Iowa (though I have no data 
> to back this up). For the most part, I suppose, it's good for revenue 
> if conference games are more highly attended (again, no data). I also 
> don't know how the Big Ten schedule is generated, so I don't know how 
> much (if any) control a school has over when its home/away/bye weeks 
> fall and if NU could (or would want to) manipulate this to its 
> advantage. 
> 
> Evan 
> 
> On 2/27/07, Roy Lamberton <rstetson at capps-assoc.com> wrote: 
> > Extending the season has been advanced as a good idea by Delaney but has 
> not 
> > moved past the talking stage... 
> > 
> > rsl 
> > 
> > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 
> > Roy S. Lamberton - Senior Associate 
> > Computer Applications & Support Associates 
> > and Publisher of Purple Reign, 
> > The Scout.com Northwestern University Site 
> > (http://www.purplewildcats.com) 
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> > 
> > > -----Original Message----- 
> > > From: nwu-sports-bounces at tssi.com 
> > > [mailto:nwu-sports-bounces at tssi.com] On Behalf Of HUDHAIFA3 at aol.com 
> > > Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 8:16 AM 
> > > To: tbng at comcast.net; nwu-sports at romaine.tssi.com 
> > > Subject: Re: [NU Sports] Extended football season 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Is this official? 
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-- Jonathan W. Hodges 
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