Real Opponents Don't Cost Much

That game was uniformly painfuli, In some ways it was worse than The Horror. I don't mean this in a challenging or dickish way but are you a Michigan fan? I don't understand this comment.

But that's because they don't have ND.  They have one tough game every year (sometimes not that tough, sometimes really tough) and we have ND every year, who is sometimes not that tough and sometimes really tough.  The cool part about ND is that it's an established rivaly with fanbases that hate each other.  The cool part about OSU's deal is that it's a different team every two years.  But it basically comes down to a wash.  I'd be fine with a home and home if we took a two year break from ND, but I don't want to permanently kill the ND rivarly to play a team with equal prestige and less history, and I don't want to play ND and a big time team because ND is about to be really good again and I don't want to go 2-2 in non-conference games.

We play in a tough conference plus ND every year.  That's a solid schedule.

I think everyone is forgetting that in the 70's it was the Big 2 Little 8 primarily because the NCAA limited how many teams got to be on TV.  OSU and Michigan of course got the Lion's share of that TV exposure.  That TV exposure has a direct effect on recruiting, which of course has a direct effect on the team talent, and of course supports the continued existence of the Big 2 over the Little 8.  This changed when the NCAA was sued and the Supreme Court gave the individual universities the right to negotiate their own TV deals.  This happened for the 1984 season.  I think this was also very close to the time when they began reducing scholarships from 105 to 95 to eventually the 85 they are at now.  I think the 85 final total happened about 1990, essentially just after Bo retired.

During the Bo era, the non-conference games were almost all tough.  That's because if you wanted to be on TV the most, you had to play other key teams that were getting on TV, since the NCAA restricted the amount per team, trying to keep exposure equal amongst teams, but of course failing.  This is a big reason why the OSU-Michigan game is so well known as a Rivalry.  It was one of the constant matchups on TV every season, broadcast to a national audience.

One of (the only?) compaints about Bo was that he did not have a good win percentage in bowl games and did not win the national championship (I guess that's two).  It came from the fact that Michigan played a tough non-conference schedule, and the non-conference schedule was in the beginning of the year.  Basically the time when your new players are just getting sorted out.  This was why Bo didn't care about the polls.  The non-conference part of the season was exhibition.  It didn't count toward the Championship.  It only mattered to the voting and thus the newspapers.  He cared about winning the Big Ten and then rewarding his team with a trip to somewhere warm after Christmas.  I'm not saying Bo didn't prepare and try to win non-conference games and bowl games.  I'm saying that he didn't place as much emphasis on them.

Now of course the pressures are different.  Scholarship numbers are lower, TV exposure is broader (why haven't we heard about Boise State until after 1984?  TCU? it's the open TV market!) and revenues beyond ticket sales are becoming a bigger piece of the pie.  So I don't think things are as simple as Brian is stating in this post.  Nor do I think the that the players want to have more tough games than they do now.  Afterall, most of their statistics come from playing inferior talent.  And the guys who exist as the backup squad for 4 years only get a chance to play during the cup cake games.

Considering that the Big Ten is going to 9 conference games and next year is adding a game and removing the off week, it's already extremely tough on the players to make it through the season.  So how greedy do we need to be as fans?  Next season we are getting Alabama AND ND in the same season.  In 2017 Michigan will be playing 9 conference games, most of them pretty tough.

The bottom line is that we will never see all these cup cake games go away.  We may see them significantly reduced if we can eliminate voting for National Champion and just have a playoff.  But for that to happen, the conferences have to break apart the bowl system.  I for one am encouraged by the move of Texas A&M.  I'm hoping they really do move to the SEC.  It just adds more pressure on ND to join in, and with their present ties into the Big East for non-football related sports, it just seems too easy for the Big Ten and the SEC to divide things up into North and South.  Who cares what Texas does.  They are the Lone Star State for a reason.

If they want to keep us on the schedule, and not dump them for rotating teams. We have to fill 4, and soon 3 slots every year. They have to fill 12. Without regular opponents, that will be difficult.

PSU's place. The problem is the B10 scheduled them in opposite home/away years than PSU was.



I don't see playing twice in a row at one place as a big deal. It's happened before...I believe with Minnesota. They're all home and home's, so it's not like someone is playing more games at one place than another.