Big 12 Big Picture: The Centrality Of Schedule Rotations

The schedule — it’s a variable which constantly plays a part in shaping college football seasons.

In the heyday of their rivalry, Miami played Florida State in the middle of October instead of late November. The Hurricanes clearly benefited from facing the Seminoles when they were still rounding into form.

The schedule mattered in a similar way when the 2001 Tennessee-Florida game was pushed back to December by the events of September 11. Florida played that game a week after facing Florida State. The Gators would have been much better served playing Tennessee in September, something history had borne out over the previous several seasons (save for 1998, of course).

In 2006, Ohio State hosted Michigan. It’s true that Jim Tressel’s teams regularly defeated Lloyd Carr’s teams, but it certainly helped the Buckeyes that they were able to host the Wolverines in one of the most anticipated and brilliant games of that classic series.

In recent years, Duke has avoided Clemson and Florida State on the ACC schedule. Georgia and Alabama rarely play each other in the SEC regular season. Wisconsin and Michigan State have sometimes avoided paths. Many split-division conferences have steered certain formidable schools in opposite directions, keeping them very much apart.

This stuff doesn’t always matter, but it matters often enough to notice, and often enough to want to ban divisions.

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Look at the Big 12 as an example of how wonderful a college football conference season can be… even though the Big 12’s higher-ups can get in the way, and even though last year’s College Football Playoff Committee made a mockery of the weekly rankings shows by pulling an end-stage switcheroo on TCU, vaulting Baylor ahead of the Horned Frogs in the face of previous results.

Say what you want about the Big 12’s off-field political stumbles last fall; on the field, this conference is a thing of beauty. Like the Pac-12, a nine-game conference schedule exists, removing one cupcake from the 12-game regular-season recipe. Unlike the Pac-12, though, the Big 12’s 10-team makeup means that a nine-game conference schedule enables everyone to play everyone. This is precisely why a conference championship game is a redundancy, and therefore completely unnecessary. If the Big 12 champion wants to play a 13th game, the various Power 5 leagues should seek to change the rules of college football and explore legislation allowing for far more liberalized structures pertaining to the allowance of 13th games.

However, in the absence of such reform movements and subsequent legislation, one can only hope that a nine-game conference schedule will do the job it ought to be able to do. It is in the sport’s best interests if, in the 2015 season and beyond, the Big 12’s nine-game schedule creates a much clearer picture for the Big 12, one everyone else in college football can handle with poise, logical consistency, and basic fairness.

There’s one point to be made about that nine-game schedule, and it’s a point which accompanies today’s Bloguin Top 50 team, Kansas State.

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A year ago, you might have noticed that the West Virginia Mountaineers had the perfect schedule rotation in the Big 12. Coach Dana Holgorsen’s team got Baylor, Oklahoma, TCU, and Kansas State all at home. The ‘Eers heard their boisterous home fans against the toughest teams in the conference. That’s what every college football team hopes for within the context of a given season.

It’s a trickier matter in the other power conferences, because in 12- or 14-team leagues, part of the equation for a highly successful season is avoiding at least one (if not two) of the toughest teams in the opposite division. The list of non-divisional opponents matters, as does location. In the Big 12, though, no opponent can be avoided, so the home-road splits take center stage. Last year, West Virginia got exactly what it wanted. However, the Mountaineers went just 1-3 in those four showcase home games.

This year, WVU has to travel to Waco… and Norman… and Fort Worth… and Manhattan, Kansas. Basically, West Virginia is in a situation where, unless the power dynamics in the Big 12 appreciably change in the coming years, it will need to strike in the even years and merely survive the odd-numbered ones.

This season, the reality is exactly the opposite for Kansas State.

The Wildcats get to spread out the big buffet table in their own restaurant this season. Their fans won’t have to travel for a tailgating spectacular; they can stay in the Little Apple and fire up the grill as their KSU crew hosts Baylor, TCU, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. It’s a guarantee of big crowds in a sport for which ticket sales on Saturdays are more of a concern, but it also gives KSU the portal to a potentially big season. The tough games are at home, and the not-quite-as-tough games are mostly (but not exclusively) on the road.

We saw Kansas State carry the run of play for most of the first half last year on a Thursday night against Auburn, but a nightmarish placekicking performance and some Football Follies moments in the red zone cost the Wildcats a boatload of points against the Tigers. That game slipped away from KSU, but the team’s ability to be fast, physical, and imposing on defense reinforced the value of home-field advantage. KSU’s defense wasn’t nearly as effective in its visits to Baylor and TCU later in the season, and the Wildcats needed the worst field-goal gack of the 2014 season — Michael Hunnicutt’s miss of a 19-yarder inside the final four minutes — to win at Oklahoma on a day when the offenses usually outpaced the defenses.

Getting the Big 12’s best teams at home in 2015 puts Kansas State in a situation where its defense will be in a better position to make a defining impact on games. If there’s no place like home for the Wildcats this fall, Dorothy will know that she’s still very much in Kansas.

About Matt Zemek

Editor, @TrojansWire | CFB writer since 2001 |

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