With Liberty Bowing Out Because of Covid, BYU Is Now Stepping In To Take On Coastal Carolina This Saturday
There have not been very many good things to come from this pandemic, particularly as it relates to sports. But if there's anything this college football season has taught us, it's that the archaic way we have been scheduling games for decades can easily be scrapped.
No. 18 Coastal Carolina had a big game with Liberty scrapped due to COVID and was able to immediately schedule a better opponent in No. 13 BYU for a game that will take place in 48 hours. Meanwhile, Alabama and Virginia Tech have a home-and-home scheduled for 2034 and 2035. Some of the guys who will play in those games are currently in pre-school.
I'm not saying overhaul the entire system and do what basketball does where the schedule comes out a month before the season, but teams scheduling quality games on two days' notice surely shows that we can do some things differently.
Now this is a great way to do it. And let's just make it this week. We move the conference championship games back one week and leave the first weekend of December open for teams to schedule games in-season.
For instance, Tennessee and Michigan are both much worse than they expected to be. So in a normal season where they'd both be ineligible to participate in a bowl game, they should probably call each other and play one last Power Five team to try to get some pseudo momentum heading into the following season. Conversely, you could have teams like BYU and Cincinnati who are probably better than they expected to be and can schedule another quality opponent to boost their résumés and try to get to a New Year's Six Bowl or the College Football Playoff.
And this should also eliminate much of the whining from whichever Group of Five team inevitably goes undefeated and gets left out of the College Football Playoff. Give that team an opportunity to schedule whoever it wants and try to go earn a good win to help itself in the eyes of the committee. And if it chooses not to do that, then there really is no more argument about being left out.
And that's obviously just one way to do it, but with so many games getting moved around and altered — albeit by unfortunate circumstances — we have proven that it can be done. So let's figure out some way to take what we've learned this year and apply it going forward so that kids in kindergarten don't already have their non-conference schedules picked out for them.