(08-25-2009 08:22 AM)PGPirate Wrote: A big key to would be keeping money out of it.
Then there's no point for the athletic department, is there? Going through the pure cost of staging a preseason game without revenue with a matchup that could've been a regular season game with a lot of revenue doesn't sound like a good sell for any athletic department that's trying to meet budget contstraints.
At a lot of basketball schools, tickets to preseason games are sold in season ticket packages at regular season prices, thereby giving those schools an extra 2 home games of revenue. There would be little incentive to pay the cost to bring in Division II schools if you couldn't sell tickets to those games. Similarly, NFL teams also have their season ticket holders buy tickets to preseason games at regular season prices - those teams are now dependent upon 10 home games of revenue (8 regular season, 2 preseason). If I'm going to pay full price for a ticket (and don't be so naive to think that schools won't charge full price for college football preseason games), then I want to see an actual game with implications as opposed to a scrimmage.
Here's another consideration: the main on-the-field purpose of preseason games is to evaluate talent on your rosters and trying out plays as opposed to actually winning. However, if, say, #1 Florida comes out looking flat in its hypothetical preseason game against a Division I-AA school, then pollsters are going to start questioning how good that team is before the regular season starts (it might not be logical or the correct way of looking at things, but it's just human nature). Whether we agree with it or not, the poll rankings matter a whole lot in college football. The power schools risk a whole lot by playing a preseason game with virtually no upside since they're not going to want to play their starters for very long (and thereby risk looking bad when the second and third teams are in the game). It's not the same in college basketball, where a poor performance in a preseason game is mitigated by the sheer length of the regular season along with the NCAA Tournament.
Anyway, I am very much in favor of the NFL replacing 2 preseason games with 2 regular season games and hope that the concept of a preseason never comes to fruition in college football.