Eliminate cross divisional games or treat them as OOC?

[ragtimejoe1]

I'm pretty sure I've brought this up a few times, but rather than worry about expansion, the MWC needs to modernize our approach to scheduling. Treat each division like its own mini conference and only require teams to play each team in that division. Winner of the division plays in MWC championship.

Currently, that only requires we play 5 conference games leaving 7 OOC games that we could schedule. If teams want to schedule cross divisional games, fine, but they do not count towards MWC standings. This is what the playoff committee says about scheduling:

"The [selection] committee will not be in the business of dictating to conferences their scheduling," Hancock said.
"Every game that everybody plays will be taking into consideration," Hancock said. "To the committee it won't matter whether you played an eight- or nine-game conference schedule. But it will matter who you played for your 12 or 13 games. And, of course, how you did against them."

If you are BSU, you can front load your schedule with P5 teams (if you can get them to play) or some of the better G5 teams. If you are a building WYO program, you can front load your schedule with a little easier road and perhaps get more marquee home games. If you need to balance your budget, you can take on more body bag games. If you want to play an exclusive MWC schedule, you could. It would give us flexibility to work out longer term deals with schools like Tulsa (recruiting reasons AND JUST AN EXAMPLE--not necessarily advocating Tulsa on the schedule) because you have 7 games to work with. 1-3 long-term deals would be fine.

Who in the MWC do you really care to play? For me it is CSU, AF, UNM, and to a bit of a lesser extent BSU. After that, I couldn't give a damn if we played any other team on a year to year basis.

 

[Bryoming]

This is a good idea, but we'd have to convince other conferences to go along with it or we'd have no one to play. On the down side if the P5 schools went this way they'd never play any of the G5 schools again.

 

[ragtimejoe1]

This is a good idea, but we'd have to convince other conferences to go along with it or we'd have no one to play. On the down side if the P5 schools went this way they'd never play any of the G5 schools again.

Scheduling could become an issue but we always have the "OOC divisional games" to fall back on. The other thing Hair needs to do is put this scheduling philosophy in motion and then establish 10-15 neutral site games for MWC teams. In the TV negotiations get enough money to get bigger name teams (i.e. someone like ESPN kick in x million to get a K-State vs CSU matchup or Nebraska vs. WYO in Denver or BSU vs Oregon in ___ or????)

Why you ask. To crush byu in the next round of TV negotiations and increase exposure of the MWC brand. Our "subcontract" for a slate of good neutral site games would be a way better product than a season of byu. It would also be better than most home games our teams would normally schedule. Maybe even run many of them Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before the (now normal) Thursday kick-off to the season. The MWC would kick off CFB with a Monday night game!