I’m making some guesses.
Knee-jerk reactions to the ACC's scheduling model through the 2030 season.
www.espn.com
Clemson only got one permanent rival—FSU. This looks like a matchup set up for ESPN. Clemson lost a bunch of historical matchups. The NCST one hurts them too.
If it weren’t for FSU being in Ireland, our home slate would be really good. NCST should bring fans. It’s the game in Ireland that doesn’t line up well for us
The ACC has 17 teams, with two in the Bay Area and one in TX. The constraints are
- Get good matchups
- Don’t have teams that never play each other
- Don’t fly the east coast teams across the country too much
- Find a schedule that works for 17 teams and part of Notre Dame
If everyone could have gotten one rivalry game, they’d have done that—but with 17 teams it was going to be uneven. It is uneven. So, what you need to do is make sure GT and Louisville get enough marquee games.
Having some teams with three rivalry games is silly. That’s giving up scheduling flexibility the ACC needs.
As for what happened in the room none of us were in. Either the ACC tried to generate 12 years of schedules where everyone played at least once, and couldn’t with the constraints, or they ran into a ton of other issues.
We have a prime number of teams. With 15 teams we could have 3 5-team pods or 5 3-team pods. With 16, we could have 4 4-team pods. With 17, you’re coming out uneven. If you have a 6, a 6, and a 5, you’ll never play a bunch of teams for ages. You could do 5 3-team pods and 1 2-team pod.
Still, scheduling is going to be a mess
The distribution for post season is still uneven (I believe). So, one of Batt’s primary goals is going to be getting us bowl eligible. If he views Clemson as a loss 70% of the time (and it’s been worse than that for a while), are you going to fight for that game?