There’s a trend infiltrating major college football.
Major conference teams like Wisconsin, eschew high-profile intersectional matchups and instead schedule non-conference games against overmatched teams from lesser conferences.
Wisconsin schedules Cal Poly Tech, Texas takes a date with Florida Atlantic, and Florida plays The Citadel.
Fans can take to the message boards to complain about paying full price for glorified exhibitions, and pundits can criticize the practice all they want, but it won’t change anything.
And it shouldn’t.
Sure, it would be fun to see more games like tomorrow night’s Ohio State-Southern California match-up. But that’s not going to happen.
Why not?
Because with the way the current bowl system is set up, it makes perfect sense to load up on cupcakes. Three pushover non-conference wins gets a team halfway to bowl eligibility, a third of the way to a 10-win season. And let’s not forget the motivation behind nearly everything in major college athletics.
Sure, there’s the student-athlete song and dance, but the underlying motivator in most instances is money. Big numbers in the win column and bowl games keep donors happy and their pocketbooks open. Victories provide coaches security to go along with their multi-million-dollar salaries.
Plus, the only sure way to stay alive for a national championship is for a team to sweep its non-conference slate. At the end of the season, an undefeated team from a BCS league will have enough big wins to deserve a national title shot, almost regardless of non-conference opponents.
That’s not the case for teams from non-BCS leagues. In those cases, you better win every game you play and pray the computer math works out.
All of that makes Pat Hill such an anomaly.
The Fresno State head coach rejects the “easy is good” approach to scheduling, instead choosing to throw down the playground gauntlet: anybody, anytime, anywhere.
Since 2000, Hill’s teams have won 12 games against teams from BCS conferences, a remarkable achievement for a team from the Western Athletic Conference.
While that success has brought the program notoriety, that ambitious scheduling has yet to yield a trip to a BCS bowl. And as the Bulldogs took on all comers to try and make a splash nationally, conference rivals took an easier path to early January bowls.
WAC rivals Boise State and Hawaii have parlayed undefeated regular season runs through embarrassingly weak non-conference schedules to BCS berths, while Fresno State has been locked out. Sometimes — like in 2005 — close losses to prominent national programs like Oregon and Southern California have derailed hopes for big bowl glory. Other times, perhaps as a result of overexertion in earlier wins against top competition, Fresno State has dropped winnable league games.
In other words, Hill’s brash strategy has left the Bulldogs habitually picking up the pieces after each quixotic run of games.
Sure, it’s great for recruiting when you offer the chance to routinely play against the best competition in the country. But at the same time, a better sales pitch would be pointing to a Fiesta or Sugar Bowl ring. Real victories beat moral victories in close losses to elite teams.
Much of Fresno State’s success has come in early season games, like the one the Bulldogs and Badgers will engage in tomorrow. In 2001, Fresno State knocked off Colorado, Oregon State and, yes, Wisconsin to open the season. Three years later, the Bulldogs beat Washington and reigning Big XII champion Kansas State in its first two games.
Couple that with the Badgers’ recent struggles in initial road games since Bret Bielema took over in 2006 — a narrow 20-13 win over UNLV a year ago and a 27-13 loss to Michigan the previous season — and an upset doesn’t seem that unlikely.
In fact, despite the fact Wisconsin is a two-point favorite by most sports books, if you were to ask many people who cover the team, a Badger victory over the No. 21 Bulldogs might be more surprising than the alternative.
Hill and Fresno State have been building this game up since the end of last season as the biggest game ever on campus. With that type of hype, there’s no way Fresno State comes out flat in front of a sellout crowd of rabid fans. Any sort of slow start like they’ve shown in the first two games, and the Badgers could be cooked.
Wisconsin went out on a Hill-like limb in scheduling this game.
I just don’t think that limb is sturdy enough not to break.
Ben Voelkel is a former Herald sports editor. A senior majoring in journalism and political science, he now is a freelance sports writer and contributes to BadgerNation.com. Contact Ben at [email protected].
