At Nebraska.
Home against Boise State.
At UCLA.
At Michigan.
Home against Cincinnati.
At Missouri.
At Utah State.
Those games comprise the majority of BYU’s regular-season schedule for 2015.
The Cougars are the football program we all admire. BYU has taken risks. BYU wants to prove itself against the best teams from various other conferences. Athletic director Tom Holmoe and coach Bronco Mendenhall want BYU to be a national program again, a perfectly legitimate and reasonable aspiration in light of the fact that the school won the 1984 national championship and produced a Heisman Trophy winner, Ty Detmer, six years later. The legacy BYU cultivated in the LaVell Edwards era is a substantial one. Hall of Fame NFL players such as Steve Young and Super Bowl-winning coaches such as Mike Holmgren came from that immensely fruitful period of almost 30 years. It is good and right that BYU should shoot for the moon. The 2015 schedule proves the program means business.
Yet, stop and realize this while you admire the Cougars for wanting to take on all comers: BYU will almost assuredly play in one of only two bowls, the Las Vegas or Hawaii Bowls. Its season will be done before Christmas, just as it was last year, when it played in the Miami Beach Bowl against Memphis. That’s not much of a reward, especially if the team finishes 10-2, which — against this slate — would represent a tremendous accomplishment.
We saw this in the Mountain West Conference in recent years when the Kellen Moore Boise State teams were left out of the BCS mix despite signature non-conference wins away from the Smurf Turf of Idaho. BYU isn’t even in a conference (fault the Pac-12 for not wanting to accommodate the Cougars and their Sunday basketball restrictions, among other things…), but it’s facing roadblocks at least somewhat similar to what the Broncos had to put up with in the past, before the arrival of the current New Year’s Six bowl format.
Boise State clearly benefited from the New Year’s Six setup, which isn’t perfect, but is certainly better than the BCS. In the “Group Of Five” structure, access to premium bowls has increased for the lower-tier FBS conferences. The 2014 Boise State team wasn’t nearly as good as the 2010 or 2011 versions, but it received the VIP bowl card the Kellen Moore teams were denied. You can see that for the Group of Five, life is better these days.
For BYU, though, it’s not, and this is a chief casualty of remaining independent.
It really shouldn’t be like this: We say we want schools to schedule tougher games. We say we want programs to be aggressive instead of seeking the easy way out, no matter how prudent it might be. We say we deplore the SEC’s practice of scheduling an FCS cupcake in November the week before a rivalry game, something we know will be overlooked because the SEC shrewdly begins the regular season in late August and early September with a mixture of tough conference games and high-profile non-conference games that immediately propel the more successful schools in the rankings conversation.
We say we want other schools to follow the kind of example BYU is setting in 2015.
Yet, where’s the payoff for BYU? More precisely, where is the postseason protection (something afforded by the Group Of Five substructure, feeding into the New Year’s Six) for a school that takes so many risks but isn’t automatically given access to a higher tier of postseason competition?
As long as BYU isn’t given more protections, play-in opportunities, and points of access under the current system, it has to be said that for all the admirable and noble qualities of its gleaming, glistening 2015 schedule… it’s plainly stupid for the Cougars to risk defeat on so many occasions.
Perhaps in 2015, BYU is just trying to build its brand, hoping for more political and economic leverage at the bargaining table a few years down the line. Seen from that vantage point, one can make a case that this 2015 schedule is entirely logical and lacks a single weakness. However, when viewed solely through the prism of giving the team a chance to play in a premium postseason game, a high-risk regular-season schedule is clearly not the recommended pathway in modern college football.
Playing one reasonably tough opponent in a home or neutral game and one moderately tough (but clearly inferior) opponent at home, in addition to a conference schedule, gives the best Power 5 schools the ability to maintain schedule strength but minimize the risk of defeat, all while enabling them to still fit in a pure cupcake without negative consequences. Sure, BYU doesn’t pay the kind of rent Ohio State or Alabama does, but the larger principle should remain obvious: BYU isn’t in a position to take calculated and measured risks the way the Buckeyes and Crimson Tide are. Sure, OSU and Bama scheduled better than Baylor did last year, a reason why they got into the College Football Playoff, but the way BYU has scheduled is of an entirely different order of magnitude.
Will the Cougars get rewarded for their act of scheduling valor? Only if they go 12-0. Anything less — any single stub of the toe — likely locks them out of the playoff. A 10-2 record against this 2015 slate should mean a New Year’s Six bowl, but under the present arrangements arrived at by college football, BYU won’t get there. Even an 11-1 mark might leave the Cougars out of the mix.
When scheduling the right way is actually a portrait in scheduling the wrong way — with a terrible risk-reward equation hanging over Provo, Utah — one is reminded how many flaws still exist in a college football system that, while a big improvement relative to the BCS, is far from ideal for the likes of Brigham Young University.