2015 Schedule: The Western Front

BYU, Oregon State, and Utah have season results over the last 10 years quite similar to that of Michigan.  Oh, and Utah has gone undeated twice, 2004 and 2008.  So until Michigan can consistently win like a top tier team, maybe we should be keeping things real.

Michigan has had Notre Dame as a regular on the schedule since 1978 with a trio of two-year breaks   The Big Ten has a two-year experiment with a round robin schedule in 1983/4 and UM played Miami-FL, Washington State and Washington (twice) during those years.

The other breaks were in 1995/6 when Notre Dame wanted to play a home-and-home with Ohio State and in 2000/1 when ND played Nebraska in a home-and-home.  Michigan requested a break for the 2018/9 seasons to play Arkansas (Razorback AD Jeff Long has major ties with the UM program) during the BCS/12-team Big Ten era (short as it was), but was planning on keeping the Notre Dame series in place.  When the Irish joined the ACC as a semi-independent for football and  agreed to play five ACC teams per year, that pretty much maked the end of the annual Michigan-Notre Dame game.

It would have been very difficult for David Brandon to get a major program on the 2015 schedule given the timing of the ND cancellation announcement.  Brigham Young is the ND replacement and it's fortunate that BYU is an independent for football and is actively looking for higher end competition to round out their schedule.  The other two Pac 12 programs on the schedule (at Utah, Oregon State) are probably the result of when the Big Ten and the P12 was considering an annual scheduling agreement for non-conference football games (the same goes for the 2016 game with Colorado).

It does appear that Brandon is looking to schedule a game with what I'll call a high interest opponent to open the season more often than not.  As was mentioned above, the 2015 season opens against Utah in Salt Lake City on a Thursday night with the season opener against Oregon State nine days later (hopefullly no travel hangovers for that game).

2017 opens with the neutral site game against Florida.  While I'm not a big fan of neutral site games, UF is certainly a high profile opponent and I suspect would more than qualify as an excellent Notre Dame replacement (again, ND would have been a home game in Ann Arbor that season under the old scheduling sequence).

The 2018 and 2019 seasons open with Arkansas.  The first game is in Ann Arbor and the second in Fayetteville.  As one other poster pointed out, there's potential in those two season for a second home-and-home series with another Power Five program those two years.

The 2020 (at Washington), 2023 (at UCLA) and 2025 (at Oklahoma) games are all scheduled for the first Saturday of September as well.  The 2021 games at Virginia Tech and against Washington are in the second and third weeks of that month.  The 2022 and 2026 home games with UCLA and Oklahoma are on the second Saturday of September.

If Brandon does opt to have two home-and-home series with Power Five teams in the non-conference schedule, it's significant for a few reasons.  The first is that he essentially gives up one home date every two years and the ticket/concession revenue from it.  Secondly, it means he's committed to upgrading the non-conference schedule, even if it means alternating seasons of six and seven home games per year.  Third, it's a statement on where he thinks the committee deciding which four teams go to the playoff will be looking at concerning strength of schedule.  Finally, it speaks to the television networks desires to put more quality games on in return for greater revenue.  With the new teleivison rights contract negotiations starting in the fall of 2015, I imagine Brandon thinks he can more than make up the revenue from a lost game every two years with what ABC/ESPN, Fox Sports, the BTN, etc. are going to pay the conference.