jojatk
Helluva Engineer
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What I’m trying to say, is those teams are going to win 10 or more games, no matter who they schedule for those other 3 regular season games. Clemson always plays one marquee game(can’t help 8 ACC games or Cocky game, those are made). Same with Alabama and Ohio St., as Conference affiliations are done deals. How many times has GT won 10 football games in a season during the last 50 years? Not too many. We do things differently here. Why not put 53 k. in the seats with an in-State G5, instead of Citadel, Wofford, Furman, Alcorn St., GW, et al.? We are fighting for a .500 season, which is different than those football factories who schedule 2 cream puffs to “pace the season” knowing they have a good shot at playing 15 games.
I see what you mean. And I think there are several things at play, though of course I have no inside knowledge. It's clear now that we've actually put Ga State on the schedule that we're not trying to avoid them. So I would suggest that it's not quite as easy to pick your OOC opponents as one might like. A number of years ago I went through an exercise of trying to see who would be opponents we could schedule for upcoming years as our OOC games. I was specifically looking at P5 and good G5 type teams. What I discovered was that there are a number of things to take into account and I'm sure you can name every one of them (not in any order):
- Availability - there were not as many teams as I thought there would be that had an opening on their schedule, in terms of numbers of games at that time rather than available dates, for an OOC game. It got even harder when I felt like most of those teams would want a home/home series. But even without that it was still tough to find.
- Desire - I don't mean that teams don't want to play us in particular. I mean that many of those teams that HAD openings already had what looked like a very tough OOC schedule and probably were looking for cream puffs
- Home vs Away - many times when I found teams that actually had an opening in their schedule and I thought might have the desire to play us they needed an away game and we needed a home game.