How the College Football Playoff is raising scheduling stakes

In a world where schedule strength is supposedly of paramount importance to the College Football Playoff selection committee, Arizona athletics director Greg Byrne is thrilled that he recently signed the No. 1 team in the country to a home-and-home football series.

There's only one glitch. Arizona and Mississippi State won't actually play until Sept. 10, 2022, a date so far in the future it's impossible to predict whether either or both of those programs will have the same coaches or be relevant on the national scene. Freshmen who will play in that game are currently in fifth grade.

And yet, it represents a trend that has become more and more common in college athletics as schools make long-range scheduling plans for the rest of this decade and well into the 2020s, hoping to secure games that will boost their football program's profile if it happens to be in playoff contention.

"What we hope is there will be some intent recognized when you schedule a game," Byrne said. "I'll make sure in 2022 and 2023 to remind everybody Mississippi State is No. 1 (right now)."

Though Byrne was half-kidding, what strength of schedule really means for the playoff promises to be a hot-button issue if the margins between 1-loss teams turn out to be as paper-thin as they appear right now.

And it brings up a question athletics directors may need to consider going forward. Why does it still make sense to schedule non-conference games 7-10 years away rather than 1-2 years when you have a better sense of whether your opponents will boost schedule strength or hurt it?

"In a perfect world, I would love to not have to look beyond five years," said Georgia Tech senior associate athletics director Ryan Bamford, who does most of the Yellow Jackets' scheduling groundwork. "But all of us have to work within the market that has been set."

And the market is dictating deals made years in advance whether it's Notre Dame and Ohio State hooking up in 2022-23, Wake Forest and Ole Miss recently signing a contract for 2024-25 or LSU and Oklahoma agreeing to play in 2027-28

"It's just what everybody has done," Byrne said. "Schools have seen (other schools') schedules fill up, so they've decided they need to schedule as well."

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What's complicating the issue, though, is that the selection committee is apparently not going to give any credit for scheduling traditionally strong programs that happen to be in the midst of a bad year.

One of the reasons Notre Dame is 10th in the selection committee ranking despite being 7-1 with a last-second loss at Florida State is that teams it has beaten, such as Michigan and Stanford, are having below-average years. In other words, even though Notre Dame intended to play a strong schedule, the schedule it has actually played to this point hasn't impressed the committee.

"We're really looking at the teams and how they performed against those teams and how good those teams were that they either beat or lost to," said Arkansas athletics director and committee chairman Jeff Long. "Scheduling intent has not been a conversation within the committee room."

The other side of that coin is Auburn, which ranks first among the FBS' one-loss teams largely because it owns a road win at committee No. 7 Kansas State — a game that was scheduled in 2007 when Ron Prince was the Kansas State coach and the Wildcats were in a stretch of five missed postseasons in six years.

It was impossible for Auburn athletics director Jay Jacobs to know at the time that Kansas State would fire Prince, bring back Bill Snyder and once again become a Big 12 title contender. But so far, it has worked to Auburn's benefit and could very well be the difference between making the playoff or not.

"It's not frustrating, but it's challenging," Jacobs said. "It's helped us. My vision is to play the best we can possibly play, but it's just like the (NCAA) basketball committee; they give you credit for teams you schedule but sometimes you get to them and they're not as good as you thought they were going to be. It's challenging to say the least."

Scheduling in basketball, though, is usually a bit more scientific due to the Ratings Percentage Index (the metric used by the selection committee) and the fact that teams usually compile their non-conference opponents no more than one or two years out. If a coach needs one more good game to boost schedule strength, it's not impossible to find a dance partner at the last minute.

Could that same model be used in football? It wouldn't be impossible, but it would definitely be complicated.

SEC executive associate commissioner Mark Womack, who oversees football scheduling, said the process to put together the schedule even as far out as 2016, 2017 and 2018 is a "pretty big jigsaw puzzle" that has one big difference from basketball: Whereas non-conference basketball games could theoretically be played any day of the week, almost all football games are going to fall on Saturdays.

In other words, when the SEC gives schools their conference schedules for future years, they have to plug those non-conference holes. By scheduling games so far into the future, schools can have more control over who they play rather than scrambling for a more limited pool of teams that might have a coinciding available date.

If an SEC school had an opportunity in the next three years to upgrade a non-conference opponent but could only do it on a date that was previously targeted for an SEC game, Womack said the league would try to shift things around but couldn't guarantee it.

"You may find there's no place you could put that other conference game you were trying to move," he said. "We'd certainly look at the opportunities to make that happen and try to move those conference games around. But unless you get lucky, one move turns in to about four or five moves — not to say that can't happen either in order to create that. It would just depend on each situation."

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The other concern for schools is that if they don't complete their non-conference schedule several years in advance, they may be in a situation without any leverage as they're scrambling for an opponent. That's how Boston College, for instance, ended up playing a game at New Mexico State last season. It's also how Power Five conference schools get stuck paying guarantees in excess of $1.5 million for schools from leagues like the Sun Belt or Conference USA to come visit their stadium.

Though that may work for programs like Michigan, Penn State or Tennessee, which have huge stadiums and can easily recoup the money, it's not financially feasible for a Georgia Tech or Arizona, which is how the Wildcats ended up playing a road game at Texas-San Antonio this season and have home-and-homes coming up with Nevada, Houston, UTEP and BYU — all outside the Power Five.

"I don't hear much of a clamor for (shorter scheduling windows)," Byrne said. "More of what I hear is, How do you afford paydays on what some teams are asking for? You've got to decide. Some schools will have to look at it more that way, that you make a trip or two that other schools may not over the course of a five-year period."

Georgia Tech has the advantage of a built-in non-conference game every season with Georgia and an occasional Notre Dame game due to its ACC agreement, but that doesn't make Bamford's job easy. He's looking not only at attracting fan interest with the non-conference schedule but also making sure Georgia Tech is in position to take advantage if a playoff opportunity arises.

Georgia Tech's philosophy is to schedule one more Power Five opponent in addition to Georgia, one school at a level just below that (Tulane and South Florida are signed for future seasons, with discussions ongoing with Central Florida) and then an FCS opponent for the final game. In a normal year, that array of opponents should give the Yellow Jackets enough opportunities to make a case.

"I think that'll protect us," Bamford said. "We may not know if Ole Miss is going to be good (in 2022-23) or Notre Dame or Vanderbilt or Tennessee, but at least we've got enough of them there that you're going to get five or six really quality opponents most likely."

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