[NU Sports] Extended football season

[SjT (Stephen J. Truog)]

> 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.

Chuck's right on the money here - there's no way they
get this past Michigan, OSU and PSU -- where those
extra home games mean 100,000+ tickets sold and
countless dollars into the local economy. It may not
be a huge deal in Evanston or Bloomington, but in
Madison or Happy Valley, that extra game is HUGE.

Chuck's other points are spot-on as well. It hurts our
chances of getting extra bowl teams and extra BCS
cash. Never gonna happen.

The lack of big NC games is a key, too. Sure, the
present system does little to encourage or reward
scheduling those mega-games in September like the
OSU-Texas series, but this would lessen those chances
even more.

There's a lot the Big Ten can do while they wait for
that 12th team, conference title game and big bucks
that comes with that (and the title game hasn't hurt
the SEC much in getting 2 teams in the BCS - unlike a
true round-robin schedule).

The easiest and most sensible thing is to stretch out
the weeks a bit as the Pac 10 has done, so that we
don't cram 12 games into 12 weeks and wind up done
with the season a month before some other teams. It
doesn't mean every game has to be the first Saturday
in December, but you can move OSU-Michigan and MSU-PSU
there and spread out others. More weeks of big-time
conference clashes for national TV in October and
November ... more bye weeks for teams to take a breath
-- that's a change that is feasible and doable. The
10-game schedule will never see the light of day.

Also, we do a better job than any other league at
getting our games televised - even more with the
upcoming Big Ten network - but spreading out the
season would aid in that even more with one less game
every couple weeks or so.

And we know Notre Dame likes playing a wannabe Big Ten
schedule, so opening up our league slate allows for
some flexibility to not just cram the ND games in
September, but maybe break up their rut of dull
service academy games in between the Big Ten September
and USC with a couple more Big Ten clashes. PSU-ND in
November was much more fun than PSU-ND in September!

GO CATS!!!
-SjT

* * * * * * * * *
STEPHEN J. TRUOG
sjtruog at yahoo.com
GO CATS!!!


 
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