Conference bylaws aren’t easily changed, but this year, the “bye-laws” of the American Athletic Conference are changing in a big way.
This story from the Football Schedules blog site is definitely worth thinking about, roughly five weeks before the start of the new season:
Number of Bye Weeks Slashed in Half for 2015 College Football Season – http://t.co/g8vkP1N8fi pic.twitter.com/y55lF37sRn
— FBSchedules.com (@FBSchedules) July 27, 2015
You can (and should) read the story to get every last detail available, but the main news item to flow from this development is that eight of the American Athletic Conference’s 12 teams will experience a reduction of two byes relative to the 2014 football season. That’s two-thirds of the league. If injuries meriting one- or two-week periods of recuperation hit any of those eight teams this season, the AAC race could take an abrupt turn.
Realize this about the finer points of a schedule, especially in a league that can be divided into a large upper class (Cincinnati, Memphis, Navy, UCF, Houston) and an equally large lower class (SMU, Tulane, Tulsa, South Florida, Connecticut), with only a few schools (East Carolina, Temple) in between: A bye week cushions the schedule in more ways than one.
The mere existence of a bye is itself a buffer, but the timing of bye weeks also factors into the manageability of a schedule. SEC schools master this by scheduling FCS teams the week before Thanksgiving weekend rivalry games.
The better teams in the AAC, if needing important players to heal, might have encountered a bye week last season before playing a weak sister in the conference. This essentially gave the team in question two full weeks in which to regain a player’s services if it needed them. The bye week was and is a single breather, but it could often form a two-week bridge during a rough period if a game adjacent to that bye was comparatively easier.
Now, with a two-bye reduction, those eight AAC teams are going to play with a much smaller margin for error.
You will also note in the story linked above that three important Big 12 teams — two secondary contenders and one primary contender — will witness a two-bye reduction in their 2015 schedules, compared to 2014. Even the quickest and most casual glance at the whole of the 2015 Big 12 schedule tells you that the league is purposefully back-loading its slate to make the strongest possible impression on the College Football Playoff committee. That approach makes sense. However, the trade-off for that upside is that the league’s best teams won’t be fresh heading into their signature showdowns of the season.
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Beyond any details specific to The American or the Big 12, you might be wondering if this is any kind of policy change or shift in philosophy among college football power brokers. To underscore the analysis made by author Amy Daughters in the Football Schedules story above, that’s not going on here.
This is, as Daughters states in her piece, a reflection of a squeezed calendar with fewer opportunities in which to place bye weeks. As commenters to that post noted — yes, it’s possible for comments to augment a story, rather than detract from it — this season of reduced byes is actually more representative of a typical college football season than the previous two years. The 2013 and 2014 seasons, with their enlarged amounts of byes, were the actual exceptions to the larger pattern.
The value of highlighting the reduction in byes this season comes from noting that the previous two seasons owned enlarged amounts of byes. We haven’t had a steep drop-off in byes from one season to the next in several years. Now, we’ll get to find out again just how much a two-bye reduction can mean for a team… and very possibly, a conference.
