Someone explain the incentive for scheduling tough OOC games

Well you also have to be confident in your team. It is a major payoff if you win, and a lose is might not hurt too miuch if you are sucessful the rest of the season.

Fans want to make the playoffs

Fans want the programs to have lots of money

Fans want to watch interesting games

#1 and #3 are easily resolved if the conference champion gets to go the playoffs and the conference championship does not depend on OOC games (as it currently does). #2 may or not be an issue since better games bring in more money, but we'd have fewer home games.

How about because it's ridiculous to schedule and play grossly inferior opponents just to pad the W-L?

What is the fun (for fans or players) of crushing an obviously inferior opponent?  Yeah, yeah, Appy State, I get it.  Remember, in basketball a #16 has still NEVER beaten a #1.  

Mismatches are boring and immediately forgotten.  Games against real opponents are exciting, and the memory lasts forever.  Our NC games against Miami, FSU, UCLA, Colorado, and yes, ND are classics.

I'll never fly across the country to sleep through a game against Ball State.  Give me a real game anytime.  

College football is supposed to be fun. This year's non-conference schedule was fun.

Because fuck playing nothing but MAC schools.

With the Big Ten going to a nine-game conference schedule with the plan that the top teams from each division will play one another, the non-conference schedule is sort of a non-issue.  There's no real incentive to "schedule up".

More likely than not, Jim Hackett and Jim Harbaugh are going to opt to keep just one major Power 5 team on the schedule and have two pay for play games in the other non-conference schedule slots.

We'll know more once the 2018/9 schedules are firmed up.  U-M opens with Arkansas (home in 2018, road in 2019) both seasons and has SMU in 2018 (scheduled by Brandon) and Army in 2019 (scheduled by Hackdett).  Hackett and Harbaugh are going to be responsible for picking the third non-conference opponent for each of those seasons.

Also keep in mind that Wisconsin is on the schedule every year from 2016 to 2019.  Here's the list of Western Division opponents for those years:

2016 - Wisconsin (Big Ten season opener after bye week), Illinois, at Iowa

2017 - at Wisconsin (the Saturday before hosting Ohio State), at Purdue, Minnesota

2018 - Wisconsin, Nebraska (Big Ten season opener), at Northwestern

2019 - at Wisconsin (Big Ten season opener), at Illinois, Iowa

Seeing that Wisconsin is the B1G season opener in 2018 and 2019, I have to imagine Hackett/Harbaugh are going to look for pay to play opponents those seasons--probably a team from the Mountain West or American Athletic Conference given recent history.

And yes, folks, the 2018 home schedule will include Arkansas, SMU, Nebraska, Maryland, Wisconsin, Penn State, Indiana and one TBD non-conference opponent.  That's eight home games and only four on the road (at Northwestern, at Michigan State, at Rutgers and at Ohio State).

I will be curious to see if Hackett and Harbaugh keep Washington and Virginia Tech on the 2020/1 schedule.  Given the nine-game Big Ten schedule and the plan to have the top teams in the two B1G divisions match up with one another, it might make sense to drop the UDub or VaTech home-and-home series and replace it with a couple of pay for play opponents from a non Power 5 conference.

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[Sorry, Gostofhoke... added before I read}

against quality programs.

That's the incentive.

It determines how good your football team is. 

That's the incentive.

Iron sharpens iron.

That's the incentive.

How it relates to this year's playoff and Utah is irrelevant. If we had beaten a cupcake as opposed to losing to Utah, that doesn't put us in the top 4 teams in the country.

Very little incentive.  It is set up to reward teams for going undefeated, period.   That's why they should expand it to 8 and make the conference champs auto-bids.  Then everyone could schedule whoever they wanted in the OOC without worrying that one early season loss was going to torpedo their entire season. 

Because they're die hard, they'll show up to East Alabama Tech in a storm and watch. But if you actually want to keep filling that big ol' stadium, you've got to schedule out of conference games that people want to see, especially when something called "Rutgers" and Maryland are on the home slate every other year with no way out of that.

Also the Big 10 is still a dumpster fire aside from the top 3 schools. Nebraska has set itself on fire because its fans don't realize that they made the biggest screw up ever leaving Texas and turning themselves into Uppity Iowa in the Big 10. Wisconsin seems to have finally screwed up a coach hire. Minnesota's preseason hype turned out to be a cruel joke on people with funny accents.

This is not a conference where the schools can afford to schedule the school of the blind OOC.

Ask Baylor. 

be our backyard brawl, against EMU! Easy way to have only 1 loss per year!

The incentive is to win the game like Alabama does every year. If you do that, you don't have anything to worry about. The only reason we care is because we haven't won a big regular season OOC/ND game in a long time. BYU is probably our best OOC win in, what, at least ten years?

In that time, we've lost to Utah three times, Oregon, and Alabama. If we start winning those games, scheduling tough OOC games would be a HUGE boost in program momentum (playoff chances, ranking, recruiting, etc. etc.)