[NU Sports] 2009 schedule

[Mike Nolan]

> I thought the conference had this all figured out back in the late 1990s -- I thought some math whiz from Northwestern brought this to the conference.? Did they change the grouping method and go back to random scheduling voted on by the conference members?

The Big 8 and later the Big 12 have similar scheduling issues, the
balance they're trying for has to do both with trying to avoid playing
the same 'other' teams each year (when you can't do an all-plays-all
schedule) as well as having the same block of which teams are at home 
and which are on the road in those years.

In NU's case, for example, we probably would want to ALWAYS have to
play OSU and Michigan on the road in the same year.  

The only way to change that is to wind up playing two consecutive
games (not necessarily in consecutive years) at the same site.  

This happened several times during the heyday of the Nebraska-Oklahoma 
rivalry from the 70's through the mid 90's.  One year it even wound up 
in court because a couple's divorce settlement specified which years 
the husband got the tickets for the Oklahoma game and which years the 
wife got them, and then the Big 8 changed the rotation schedule.  

However, agreements as to how exactly to do this seldom last more than one 
or two cycles, and IMHO Jim Delany (Big 10 commissioner) tends to look no 
further than his media contracts when doing 'forward thinking'.  (The
Golden Rule applies here.)

I saw a post the other day speculating about the Big 10 moving towards 
adding a 9th in-conference game to the schedule now that the 12 game
schedule is permanent.  Maybe this is a step towards that?
--
Mike Nolan