[NU Sports] 2009 schedule

[Joe Thiegs]

Right.  It seems to be a byproduct of the two-year rotation and happens
every once in a while.  For example, Minnesota played at Michigan in both
2004 and 2005, and I remember the question coming up then.  Like Dennis, I
favor playing 10 conference games against everyone in the Big Ten and then
cutting the nonconference games to two.  I heard once, though, that--besides
some resistance to playing what would then be a tougher schedule than teams
in other conferences play--another issue is that with an odd number of Big
Ten teams, the conference couldn't schedule an equal number of home and away
Big Ten games for everyone.  Intuitively, you'd think with ten conference
games you could do five home and five away, but I haven't done the math and
whoever raised that concern may very well be correct.  Perhaps that was just
the problem with playing a round-robin schedule before Penn State joined.
-Joe


-----Original Message-----
From: nwu-sports-bounces at tssi.com [mailto:nwu-sports-bounces at tssi.com] On
Behalf Of Michael Vance
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 9:20 PM
To: nwu-sports at tssi.com
Subject: Re: [NU Sports] 2009 schedule

I've never thought it through completely, but it would make sense to me 
that you probably can't always alternate home/away for every common 
opponent when the schedule rotates.  If you look at the last 20 years:

1988-89: Michigan State (Away)
1990-91: Purdue (Home)
1992-93: Indiana (Home), Ohio State (Away), Illinois (Away)
1994-95: Wisconsin (Home), Minnesota (Away)
1996-97: None
1998-99: None
2000-01: None
2002-03: None
2004-05: None
2006-07: None

It looks like before Penn State started in football in 1993, it happened 
quite a bit, and continued into the first rotation after they started.  
Since then, they've managed to work the rotation without any 
year-to-year repeats (for us). But I still think that with an odd number 
of teams and the three groupings of "protected rivals" that it has to 
happen every once in a while.

-Michael

Jim Bendat wrote:
> Agree that it seems weird. It's a new two-year cycle of scheduling, where
we drop Ohio State and Michigan, and we add Penn State and Wisconsin.
Because our home schedule in 2009 has both the Nittany Lions and Badgers on
it, the schedule makers sent us packing to Iowa City again so that we would
still have four home conference games and four away games.
>
> -----Original Message-----
>   
>> From: WildElk2 at aol.com
>> Sent: Oct 1, 2008 5:01 PM
>> To: nwu-sports at tssi.com
>> Subject: [NU Sports] 2009 schedule
>>
>> OK schedulholics, why are we playing at Iowa again next  year?   (good
bye 
>> week fodder)   
>>
>>     GO CATS!!    Eric
>>
>>
>>
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