BYU in the thick of football scheduling

Darnell Dickson
Daily Herald

If there were want ads for scheduling Division I football games, BYU’s might read something like that. - College Football -

Director of Athletics Tom Holmoe and football coach Bronco Mendenhall are hard at work trying to hammer out the details of BYU’s schedule for next season and the years to come. There’s some recognizable names on future schedules (see graphic) but a more pressing need is filling the 2006 slate. The NCAA recently approved a 12th regular-season game in college football. BYU has eight Mountain West Conference games and a trip to Boston College scheduled for next season. That leaves three open spots to fill, the sooner the quicker.

“It’ll be done when it’s done,” Holmoe said. “I could finish it next week, but that might not be in our best interests.” - College Football -

The “best interests” of a football program are the crux of the scheduling issue. Everybody is protecting their own interests, be it home field advantage or maximizing the opportunity to achieve the number of wins it takes to get to the postseason.

There’s a fine line between scheduling yourselves out of a bowl game (which is essentially what BYU did last year with Notre Dame, Stanford, USC and Boise State on its non-conference slate) and setting up an easy schedule where the pollsters forget you exist.

“We realize we have some control over the schedule and you try to be careful,” Holmoe said. “It’s kind of a roll of the dice because you don’t know what a program will be like in five or six years. Some teams don’t want to play BYU at home. It’s not in their best interests to play us. But we’ve talked to a lot of programs. It all comes down to what a program is trying to accomplish.

“We’ve had some teams tell us they’re not interested and we’ve told some teams we’re not interested. The teams we are negotiating with, they wouldn’t be talking to us if they weren’t interested.” - College Football -

Holmoe said the major considerations are financial guarantees, travel and timing. And some schools are inflexible when it comes to protecting their elite status.

“Some schools can’t stand going home-and-home if they have to play the first one on the road,” Holmoe said. “It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it means a lot to some programs.”

Mendenhall said he submitted a list of games to Holmoe that he thought would work with the progress of his program. - College Football -

“I’m involved at deepest level,” Mendenhall said. “Between Tom and myself, we’ve inherited some games up to 2012. We have two opponents for most of those years and one year we have four. We’re only at the beginning of the process. It’s a work in progress and it’s more complex than I originally thought.”

Mendenhall said the 12th game has become a boon to Division I-AA schools like Eastern Illinois, which BYU defeated 45-10 last week. The EIU program received more than $225,000 for its trip to Provo. A Division I team can now count one win against a I-AA team towards bowl eligibility each season. In previous seasons, a win against a I-AA team could be counted only once every four years. - College Football -

“All I can tell you is that in some of the negotiations we’ve gone through, the I-AA teams are asking for more to play,” Mendenhall said. “We might schedule a Division I team that could pull an upset, one 50-50 game, one team you can beat and probably a I-AA team. That’s just one way of doing it.”

With three games left to fill in 2006, Holmoe said he’s confident he’ll get some good teams involved. Why? BYU, he said, has a lot to offer.

“Teams realize when they play us at their place, we’re going to bring people to the game,” Holmoe said. “When we played USC two years ago in Los Angeles, we had 15,000 fans there. When we played Stanford last year, we brought 5,000 to 8,000. When we played Georgia Tech in Atlanta in 2002, they said ‘Where did all these people come from?’ They came from all over the south. Some teams travel well for bowl games; we travel well for regular-season games, too.

“I’ll have them call (USC athletic director) Mike Garrett or (Stanford athletic director) Ted Leland. They’ll tell them we travel well.” - College Football -

Holmoe wouldn’t disclose too much information on specific teams because deals are being negotiated daily. He did say he’s talked to Utah State athletic director Randy Spetman about renewing that series. This summer, an Oklahoma newspaper reported that Tulsa and BYU had agreed on a deal for a home-and-home series, but Holmoe said nothing has been set yet. Notre Dame, which BYU played twice in South Bend and once in Provo in the most recent series, would be a long shot to renew.

He also said some athletic directors are looking into playing a home-and-home series at a neutral site, a practice that has become popular in college basketball. Holmoe said a deal just like that was discussed for BYU but fell through. - College Football -

If the BYU football team gets better and moves into the national rankings, it may be even harder to schedule games. But Mendenhall knows scheduling is a key element to success for program like BYU, which hasn’t been to a bowl game since the 2001 season.

“I do know the Mountain West Conference is very competitive, top to bottom,” Mendenhall said. “I know that postseason play is directly attributed to preseason schedules. I know how important this is.” - College Football -