College Football: The North Carolina-Wake Forest Situation Points The Way Forward

For the University of North Carolina (and, for that matter, Wake Forest University), this is supposed to be basketball season, a time of year when sports news focuses on the true religion of the Carolinas. Yet, the Tar Heels and the Demon Deacons have raised a few eyebrows in the province of pigskin with an unorthodox move that is both wise and absurd at the same time.

TSS contributor Kevin McGuire works for College Football Talk. When it was revealed that North Carolina and Wake Forest are going to play non-conference games in the near future, Kevin wrote about the story and then offered analysis of it at CFT:

Without reduplicating anything Kevin has to say about the matter, here’s what’s essential to realize about this move: If teams in these 12- or 14-school conferences are going to schedule “non-conference” conference games to get around extended gaps in schedule rotations, we have already arrived at something I’ve been promoting for years — in 2014 at The Student Section, but also in my previous several years as a columnist for College Football News.

If fellow conference members that don’t play each other for several years are going to engineer a way to circumvent a scheduling gap, we have already arrived at flex scheduling within a conference-specific context. Unless or until such a maneuver is outlawed by college football, other schools are presumably free to do the same thing in response to a similar or identical situation. This being the case, teams in the Power 5 conferences that play eight-game regular-season conference schedules could go to nine games if they wanted to. That extension to nine games would be created not by a set schedule, but by a desire to add a piece that had been missing from said set schedule.

That is the basic principle behind flex scheduling: To look at a set schedule, see its deficiencies, and fill in gaps.

Now, to be clear about this, the ideal use for a flex schedule is not to sustain or renew a local rivalry such as North Carolina versus Wake Forest (though that’s a perfectly good and reasonable idea, given the flaws in the ACC’s schedule rotation). The better use of a ninth “flexed conference game” in the ACC over the past few years would have been to pit good teams against each other when the set schedule failed to pair them.

The foremost example: Duke and Clemson, teams that did not play in either of the past two seasons.

Duke played Florida State in the 2013 ACC Championship Game. Duke played divisional foe Georgia Tech in each of the past two seasons. Clemson played Georgia Tech each of the past two seasons, and the Tigers played Florida State as well. Duke and Clemson, though? Nope.

For a refresher course on how a flexed game would work — either within a conference context such as the one provided by the ACC, or in a national “BracketBuster” framework — here’s the short story:

Well in advance, two dates — probably the first and second Saturdays of November, before the season-ending rivalry games and conference title games — would be set aside for flexed games of either the conference or non-conference variety. After week seven of the season (which was the second weekend of October in 2014 and would generally occupy that point on the calendar), the conference standings or (if a BracketBuster is pursued) College Football Playoff rankings would create cross-matched games not established in the set schedule before the season. Teams with comparable rankings or records would be paired with each other to create more meaningful games at the top of the sport’s structure, both in the Power 5 and Group Of Five conferences.

Clemson probably would have beaten Duke each of the past two seasons, but the Blue Devils would have loved to prove their worth against the Tigers. The point of the story is that in bloated (12- or 14-team) conferences, important games are left unplayed. Duke-Clemson is the foremost example from the ACC over the past two seasons. The move by North Carolina and Wake Forest to schedule a non-conference conference game shows why flex scheduling has already arrived in a real sense. It’s time to push the envelope with flex schedules and carry that concept into the future of college football.

You might say this is just not realistic, to which I would say that a few logistical problems in terms of getting visiting fans to attend another team’s home game simply do not rate as sufficient obstacles to creating TV-friendly revenue-producing games ESPN would be all too happy to showcase in early November. This would especially be the case if college football chose the national BracketBuster route over the “conference flex game model” UNC and Wake Forest have obviously chosen for themselves. 

If such a plan for flexed games is — in your eyes — not realistic, step back and consider how stupid it is that two longstanding Power 5 conference schools felt the need to have to schedule a “non-conference” conference game because of the expansion of the ACC to 14 teams, combined with an inflexible schedule rotation.

North Carolina and Wake Forest have done something VERY important for college football: They have acted creatively to circumvent a problem. They are also playing a ninth conference game, which once again raises the question of why all conferences aren’t playing nine-game schedules and are existing on a level playing field. If there are so many lingering imbalances and oddities in college football scheduling, the notion that a flex system for future schedules is absurd or “unrealistic” (my favorite word) contains less and less legitimacy as we go along.

North Carolina and Wake Forest have shown college football that the sport is allowed to take a far more enlightened long-term view of how to creatively schedule games that meet a lot of currently unmet interests.

We’ll see if this sport dares to learn the lesson taught by two schools from the ACC.