More Evidence: College Football Teams Should Only Schedule Cupcakes for their First Game
As is typical for this time of year (which is to say, any time between April and August, also known as the "offseason") news has come out of some college football players being arrested. In this instance, the culprits attend Auburn. Naturally, there's been some snark about glass houses and all that, some disagreements about whether the offenses were serious (I believe marijuana is involved) and stuff like that.
Mostly, though, my mind drifts back to a belief I have held* for several years: No college football team with any intention of contending for a national title should ever schedule a big opponent for the first week of the season.
The offseason takes a long time. There are eight solid months between games. Those eight months include an entire semester of school and a long, hot, often boring summer. This is the time period in which players have the least to do in their lives--less structure, less routine, less supervision from those that have the most influence on them.
So it is totally predictable that some players are going to get in trouble on occasion in the offseason. For some it will be a minor issue, but for others the problem will be a bit more serious.
And in many cases a coach will be expected to enforce a consequence that involves the loss of playing time.
And such a consequence must, for both purposes of discipline and publicity, take effect no later than the next available game.
Now, if a contending team happens to be playing Eastern Michigan, it might elicit a chuckle from media and the player feels bad, but a contending team can still roll to an easy victory. No big deal.
But if that first game happens to be scheduled against, say, Notre Dame or Alabama, a missing player could be the difference between winning and losing.
Yet no coach** can, in the public eye, delay a suspension like that for purposes of being competitive in a tougher game. So they suspend the player, cross their fingers, and hope.
So a team suffers due to one (more more) player's infraction based not on the infraction but on a predetermined accident of schedule.
The obvious solution, one that thinking athletic directors across the country should be wise enough to adopt, is to never schedule a huge game in the first week.
It makes the schedule boring, and it might mean turning down money for one of those fancy neutral site games, but if you don't want your team's postseason jeopardized because a couple of players were at the wrong party at the wrong time in April or June, you schedule a cupcake to open the season.
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*I am not the first to think about this and I don't want to pretend that I am unique here; I may have even been prompted along this line by thoughts I read on this board, though I do not recall.
**Except Jim Tressel, but even he can get fired if things are bad enough.
They open their season on August 27 against Cal in Sydney, Australia.
Grueling. I bet our game will be at noon just like all ours were against the west coast teams last year.
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This post was too long. But....I agree? Or...NO WAY, IDIOT! Whichevs...
tl;dr Someone on your team is going to do something stupid and have to miss a game, so don't play anyone that you might need them for.
Thought about downvoting for the head-scratchingly bad logic, but the clarity and brevity is much appreciated.
Thanks for the summary, Stephenking, from all of us with mild ADD...
I'm not fond of scheduling cupcakes at all, but if we're going to have one on the schedule, make it the first game of the year.
My thinking is a little different though. I don't think that Michigan will often be in a position to be undermanned due to a rash of off-season suspensions being served in the first game. But having an easy opponent to tune up the team in an actual game environment is always beneficial.
Switch the UNLV and Utah games last season and we probably beat Utah.
I think this is a good point as well, and it used to be an issue in the late 80s when we would play Notre Dame in their powerhouse Holtz days as our first game while they already had one under their belt.
Michigan may not have a huge number of issues, but they do come up. Remember, Graham Glasgow got suspended in 2014 and nearly got the axe again last season. And you yourself have argued that certain recreational activities that are against team (and NCAA) rules are neither a big deal nor atypical for a college student, so you doubtless wouldn't be shocked to see a Michigan player accidently caught in a situation that forced Harbaugh to sit him. It can happen.
with your overall point. I'm sure that we'll see the occasional player suspended for MJ use or another minor (in my opinion) violation. I'm just less concerned with that possibility than I am with scheduling Alabama before our QB has taken his first snap.
I suppose as time goes on this will worry me less, but I have the same PTSD everyone else does about the last several years.
I liked having ND as an early game to see where the team really was against good competition, but having them as the first game was just as likely to bite us in the ass as not.
Beautiful for Michigan, ugly for Hawaii. It's going to be a curb stomp of epic proportions.
& the Colorado Buffalo Pies.
This is the worst OOC slate of my lifetime.
- Hawaii 3-10, one of them a win over Colorado
- UCF 0-12
- Colorado 4-9
Probably could have just as easily been 1-11
Wouldn't your concerns apply for both teams in a season opener - regardless of the relative strength of the opponent? Meaning that both teams face an equal risk of players getting into trouble so there's no inherent greater risk for team A or team B. You are just as likely to face a weakened opponent (because their players got in trouble in the off-season) as you are to be weakened yourself. The season opener (if the other team got in trouble) could be the absolute BEST time to play a strong opponent.
I don't think your reasoning holds.
That's a point. Still, it's not wise to bank on the possibility that an opponent may be missing somebody. As much as an opponent's personnel and activity determine what a team will do, coaches are still mostly concerned with their own team executing the plan well, and missing a key guy hurts that quite a bit.
I don't think any team that plans to contend for the playoff expects to be in a position where their best chance is another team missing a player. That is, essentially, expecting to be inferior. If you are a playoff-type team, you expect to be equal to or better than your opponent, and in that situation the variable risk of a key player being suspended seems worse than the possibility that a better player might get axed from the other side.
My thoughts here also apply to "good" but not "great" opponents. You know, mid-level Pac 10 teams that Michigan ought to beat but aren't nobodies. Now, on the flip side, a team like that (let's say, someone like Arizona or Texas Tech) can take on this kind of game since a situation where they are favored to lose can flip if a star player is out, and if they lose a guy their chances weren't as good anyway.
I'm definitely going to steal this and use it at work. I usually say "that's a great point" to make someone feel better before I disagree with their point. Saying "that's a point" is both factual and obscures whether you think it was a good point or an assinine one.
I have no idea if that's how you meant it, but I like it.
You could say that. I mean, you'd be wrong, but you could say that.
I thought as MGrowOld did at first, that maybe you DO want to schedule a high profile team that historically has had offseason issues as your first game of the year, but then you also have to consider that you're not just competing with the team across the field. You're also competing with every other team in FBS every week, indirectly.
So, it would always be better to schedule a cupcake early because your consequence of having a key player miss a key game is worse than any other team's consequence. That's because there are a hundred other teams that can take the team across the field's place in the rankings, but if you lose the game, stick a fork in you.
Take this to the limit and you should never schedule any teams other than cupcakes for your entire off-season schedule. That wouldn't be very interesting for the fans, and it would hurt your playoff committee resume, but I wonder if in the end an always perfect non-conf record is worth the perception penalty to the playoff committee. Hmmm.
Good topic OP.
I can see it both ways. Bo liked starting the season with ND because everyone's attention was focused during practice. However, having a tune-up game beforehand became all the rage and both sides tried to schedule teams ahead of their matchup. So, I guess it would be awesome to open with a great team if you yourself are a great team.
Otherwise, most of the time, go for a nice mid-level team to work out the kinks!
As Stephen pointed out in an earlier post, it really sucked when ND already had that tune up game while Michigan was playing its first game of the season. That initial game of the season helps reveal weaknesses that can be addressed that are not always apparent just from practice.It was a pretty big advantage for ND.
But as a cleaner program with better quality kids, doesn't it benefit Michigan to schedule teams which are major programs but are likely to have lots of problems? Ole Miss, come on down in week 1!
because they faced a strong Utah team in the non-conference schedule (rather than a cupcake).
With the rise of conference champ games and improvements in ranking methods, coming out of the non-conference schedule undefeated is less important than ever.
This year Michigan has an easy schedule until mid October and it won't matter one lick that they are undefeated going into the matchups if they can't beat OSU and MSU.
we should try to win all of our games, including against our rival and in-state rival?
You should email Coach Harbaugh.
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MSU over Stanford is not a good data point here. MSU lost to a worse team, yes, but it was on the road, it was flukey, and they had two HUGE road wins plus a home win against a real non-conference team, and they beat an undefeated team on a neutral field. Meanwhile, Stanford lost an extra game.
Losing is always going to hurt. And it may be better to keep the schedule a bit lighter. But when subjected to like comparisons (same number of losses, etc) schedule is going to matter. The idea that a program has "cache" to get it into the playoff simply doesn't hold water, based on the evidence we've seen so far.
It's not that you don't have a point, but your logic to back it up is flawed.
MSU vs. western michigan (cupcake)
Oklahoma vs. akron (cupcake)
Clemson vs. wofford (cupcake)
Alabama vs. wisconsin (legit, albiet more legit at time of scheduling)
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Oregon vs. south dakota (cucpake)
Florida state vs. oklahoma state (legit, albeit more legit at time of scheduling)
Ohio state vs. navy (legit, albiet less legit at time of scheduling)
Alabama vs. west virginia (legit, albiet more legit at time of scheduling)
So that's 4/8 teams in the playoffs that started with games that would obstensibly be against legit games at the time of scheduling (you can't predict so many years in advance how good those teams will actually be). The other teams all had legit opponents in their second games.
To start the season, OSU is going to have their hands full with the wishbone.
At the risk of mentioning something positive Brandon did, our future non conference schedule is pretty awesome from a fan perspective. Off the top of my head: Texas, Oklahoma, UCLA, Va Tech, Florida. He redeemed his doucherous ways by preceding to ruin the ND series and royalties crewing us with the MSU OSU home/away cycle, but that's another story.
I went to school when Michigan played a good Colorado and Washington, FSU, etc, OOC.
The Bill Martin years of non-conference scheduling SUCKED!
I'm so looking forward to Michigan's schedule in the next couple of years.
not exactly cupcakes...I hope we continue this type of scheduling..i LOVE it..wish they would add Georgia or Clemson..Tennessee..schools we never see
I think it's better to lose early than late is a better axiom than scheduling cupcakes.
National champ Ohio State lost early to VT and recovered. Yeah, VT isn't what they used to be but they aren't MAC or FCS either... that's NOT the point. The point is, especially now, the committee is going to respect SoS a lot more.
for Michigan at least. In a normal year a one loss Michigan will make the playoffs as long as that loss isn't against OSU (or whomever we play the week before).
Honestly, I don't think a two loss Michigan (or OSU) team would always be excluded from the playoffs, but that would require some chaos from the other conferences and a big win agaisnt the Big 10 West champ.
if we hadn't choked against MSU we would have been playing OSU for a playoff spot. So one early season battle isn't really a make or break game. It just makes the margin of error that much smaller.
That being said, if we had beat Utah but lost to MSU I don't know if we would have been playing OSU for a spot in the playoff. So losing earlier is definitely better.
I will assume that Alabama's reply to this will be that The Citadel could only do November due to scheduling conflicts with other teams that wanted to kick their ass for a few hours, but also for strength of schedule reasons because it makes the 63-3 win against Presbyterian the month before look a lot better, at least in their view.
I don't know if scheduling cupcakes is the best idea per se, but even then if you're going to schedule opponents with a pulse, it is probably better from a Playoff Committee for a lot of teams to do that early and get potentials upsets out of the way. I am guessing there, but early losses seem to hurt less...unless they truly stand out or, say, you go 0-3 or 0-4 in the OOC.
However until the playoffs expand to 8 or 16 SOS isnt as big as they say it is..when you are only dealing with 4 teams...when they expand SOS will have more of a impact. You can lose a early game to a big time opponent at the beginning and still recover if you win out under the current 4 team playoff...I do not understand how every other HS and College division can have playoffs and the DIV 1 cant....its STUPID...and I do not buy the extended playing time or away from classroom arguments because EVERYBODY else seems to manage that pretty well and have for YEARS
As long as a team can go undefeated in conference play and win their championship game the oc schedule doesn't matter. Let's say LSU loses to Wisky because of a few suspensions but get it together for Sec play, beat bama and win the championship game. It doesn't matter.
All big conference teams can afford a loss to a tough opponent in the occ. Playoff committee will look at it as the team challenged themselves and did it without some starting players and write it off.
Alternate perspective: if your team tends to be composed of solid, well-disciplined individuals, it might not be bad to play a tough game during the first week, because your opponent might have more of a chance to be missing key players than you do.
I'd be more surprised if Michigan had a player suspended for the opener due to offseason shenanigans than I would be if your average SEC or Big 12 team had a player suspended for the opener.
still thinking....
except the players are totally uninspired against those teams. They know they're being used to make $ for the golf clubhouse and admin salaries and nothing else. They can't even pretend it's an honorable opponent. This is why the 2006 team almost blew it against ball st and do i need to even mention the horror?
but i'm a realist too, so i'm ok with what *should* be a pushover in one NC game *so long as* the other games are legit. There are a few teams facing multiple P5 opponents every year so i know Michigan can do it too....Yet this will likely only happen in 2/10 coming seasons: Va Tech and Washington
and i believe it only happened in two seasons of the last 15 before that (ND+Oregon). No, vanderbilt does not count. I mean teams you have to play on the road too and teams that don't share facilities with intramurals
i don't really care about the postseason because it's always gonna be a long shot. I care more about memorable games, as any fan should
Saban has said the opposite repeatedly—that he wants a real opponent in the opener. His reasoning is that players work harder in camp when they know they'd better be ready in Week 1.
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Makes sense.