(01-19-2021 02:00 PM)Wedge Wrote:  

(01-19-2021 08:00 AM)Crayton Wrote:  A question from another thread is, then, how to improve the regular season to make it more College Football -like?

1) Not expand the playoff or maybe even end the playoff
2) Bring back the bread-and-butter rivalries
3) ??? Stop scheduling a decade-out and give more year-of flexibility?
What else?

Flexibility can be good or not so good. Maybe if there are open dates not booked years in advance, you might get a fun game for neutral fans, like, say, Ohio State at Oklahoma.

On the other hand... Ohio State and Oklahoma played a home/home series a few years ago that was booked many years in advance. Sometimes when you wait until the last minute you don't get the best matchup. Maybe if teams waited for the last minute to fill their schedule, and OU wanted a home game but couldn't get a big-name opponent to come to Norman on short notice, then instead of selling out their stadium at premium prices and playing Ohio State in prime time on ABC, they end up with some empty seats for Ohio-Oklahoma at 11 am on Fox Sports 1.

Yes, and no school wants to be scrambling around at the last minute trying to get a game.

There are advantages to flexibility, and from the fan POV no apparent disadvantages, but to those actually responsible for putting together schedules, it can be very rough.

For example, while this season some schools were able to throw together attractive last-minute matchups, one big reason for that was the virus, which had scrambled almost everyone's eggs meaning there were others in the same boat looking for a game. In a normal year, a school that enters a season with a gap in the schedule is unlikely to find another opponent so easily. And then the fans will scream about why there isn't a game for them to watch.