Scheduling-Colleges want $$$ without the L's

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San Francisco Chronicle article posted on the MUTS board by SpaceRaider

BEHIND THE SCENES

Football scheduling

Colleges want the $$ without the L's

Tom FitzGerald, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, April 9, 2006

Why is the Stanford football team opening next season at Oregon, never an easy place to play? Why will Cal have no byes on its schedule in 2007 and probably many future years? And why on earth is San Jose State playing at Tennessee in 2008 and USC in '09?

The easy answers are money, money and money, but in the speculators' market that is college football scheduling, nothing is that simple. As spring practices continue at Bay Area schools, another sort of competition is going on behind the scenes, the struggle to book opponents who either pay well or are beatable -- preferably both.

"The toughest thing for an athletic director to do is schedule football,'' said Steve Holton, who handles that task at Cal as deputy director of athletics.

It's a little easier at Stanford because a long-term commitment to Notre Dame takes care of a third of the Cardinals' dealings outside the Pac-10.

"Once we get things settled in the next year or so,'' said Scott Schuhmann, Stanford's associate athletic director in charge of football operations, "we'll have things pretty much booked up until 2014 or 2015.''

While Cal hunts for its fourth straight bowl and possibly a spot in the Bowl Championship Series, Stanford is trying to regain respectability. Meanwhile, San Jose State is in its second year of rebuilding under former Arizona coach Dick Tomey -- and his former Arizona schedule-maker Mark Harlan, the Spartans' senior associate AD.

"When you come to San Jose State,'' Harlan said, "you put on a different pair of glasses than you had in the Pac-10.''

Football scheduling can help make or break the careers of administrators as well as coaches, although it's the coaches you're most apt to know about. The schedules are generally done with the head coach's blessing, but by the time the game is played, the coach and the official who booked it may be long gone. Schedules are typically done six to eight years in advance.

And in the last year the rules have changed significantly.

Beginning this fall, Division I-A schools will be allowed to play 12 games a year. Eleven-game schedules had been the norm since 1970.

Additionally, I-A schools can count one win a year over a Division I-AA opponent toward bowl eligibility. Previously, the larger schools could count such a win only once every four years.

That's why Cal will play Portland State on Sept. 16, Arizona will play Stephen F. Austin, and Arizona State will play Northern Arizona. It's also why San Jose State will play Cal Poly.

A Pac-10 school will need only a 6-6 record to qualify for one of the six bowl games to which the conference is committed. Schools will need seven wins for bowl games with no tie to the conference.

So a cupcake opponent can help. As long as it doesn't bite back.

When Stanford lost three years in a row to San Jose State, Schuhmann remembers ruefully, "People were saying, 'Why are you playing San Jose State? Why don't you go play UC Davis?' "

The Cardinal did just that last fall -- and lost 20-17.

Another new development is that, as a byproduct of the 12-game schedule, each Pac-10 team will play a full round-robin for the first time since the league expanded from eight teams in 1978.

The new format eliminates a built-in inequity. Playing just eight Pac-10 teams could be a boon or a blessing, depending on which school you avoided. Stanford didn't play Washington last fall, but if the Cardinal had beaten the Huskies, who were mired in a down year, they would have been bowl-eligible.

Most Pac-10 schools had favored a round-robin even in the 11-game format, but USC, UCLA and Washington preferred to book bigger money-making games outside the conference.

"We wanted a true conference champion,'' said Dan Coonan, who handled Cal's football schedules for three years before becoming AD at Santa Clara in 2004. "We didn't want to lose out on going to the Rose Bowl because we played a tougher team than somebody else played.''

Holton said that coach Jeff Tedford has "an A-B-C philosophy'' about scheduling. That is, each year he wants to play a school from the A list -- a BCS-caliber team from a major conference. He wants a B team from the Mountain West or the Western Athletic Conference. And he wants a C team, or, as Holton said, "somebody you think you have a pretty good opportunity to beat.''

With Tennessee and Minnesota this year and Michigan State and Maryland in 2008, "he's a little bit more A-A-C,'' Holton said.

The timing of the games can be critical. Maryland, possibly wary of Cal's increasing stature, recently asked that the 2009 opener against the Bears be pushed back a week since Cal has a bye. Cal declined, not wanting to play Maryland and Minnesota in back-to-back weeks.

Timing was a big issue in the 2008 Pac-10 schedule. The conference originally booked the Big Game on Nov. 29, but neither Stanford nor Cal wanted to play that day because its students will be off for Thanksgiving week. "It would have been a disaster for our fans,'' Holton said. As a result, the entire Pac-10 schedule had to be redone, putting the Big Game on Nov. 22. (Stanford isn't happy that the new schedule forces them to open at Arizona State.)

Stanford officials take great pride in their series with Notre Dame, and the Irish, who host the Cardinal on Oct. 7 this year, are expected to contend for the national championship. But Lars Ahlstrom, publisher of the independent Stanford sports magazine The Bootleg, thinks that, since Stanford's attendance for the Notre Dame game has tailed off, "Notre Dame is getting more benefit (in recruiting and profits) from it than Stanford.

"Notre Dame's (academic) standards are much closer to an average Division I school than to Stanford. Getting to play Notre Dame is great, but it's overkill to play them once a year. I'd like to see it every other year. There's a bunch of other interesting schools we could play, schools that have the same attitudes toward student-athletes.''

In that spirit, Stanford recently added Duke in 2011 and '12. The Cardinal also will play Northwestern in 2014 and '15, and are talking to Vanderbilt and Rice about future dates.

Stanford isn't about to drop Notre Dame, though. The schools are booked through 2014, and Schuhmann says the series is both a money-maker and a recruiting tool for Stanford. "We have a national recruiting base, and Notre Dame is centrally located for a lot of people,'' he said.

The game is always on TV, if only on a regional basis some years, and it's TV that puts the financial muscle in college football. It's often TV that dictates the schedule. Stanford agreed to open this fall at Oregon because it's a guaranteed TV game.

ESPN, in particular, has taken an active role in getting nonconference teams together. It was ESPN, Coonan said, that got Cal and Tennessee interested in each other. "We already had Minnesota on the (2006) schedule, but Jeff's not ducking anybody. He realizes the exposure of a game like that.''

Fresno State would quarrel with the no-ducking part of that statement. Cal hasn't scheduled the ambitious Bulldogs since they beat Cal at Fresno 17-3 in 2000, during the disastrous regime of coach Tom Holmoe. FSU coach Pat Hill promises he'll play anybody anywhere -- e.g. Oct. 21 at LSU -- and Berkeley is just three hours away.

But if Cal is going to play an A school, it would prefer to play someone other than Fresno, even though it is Tedford's alma mater. Part of the reason is that Cal has too much to lose and too little to gain by playing Fresno.

"Four years ago, we could have brought in 30,000-40,000 Fresno fans,'' Holton said. "But now with our season-ticket sales, we've shrunk that (visitors' allotment) down.'' He said, "Cal people will regard Tennessee as something special,'' implying that they wouldn't feel the same way about Fresno.

San Jose State has often played major national players, too. Unlike Fresno, it generally has had little chance of beating them. Under Tomey, the program is still willing to play the big boys (like Tennessee and USC) but less willing to travel far every year to do it. It asked out of 2007 and '08 games at Kansas State, although it will pay a "substantial'' penalty if it doesn't play the '07 game or can't find the Wildcats a suitable replacement, according to K-State senior associate AD Jim Epps. And a Division I-AA school won't do, he said.

A so-called "guarantee game'' at a school like Kansas State can bring in $400,000 to $500,000. Tennessee -- thanks to a 104,079-seat stadium -- can offer as much as $800,000 to visiting teams. That's enticing for an athletic department like San Jose that needs all the money it can grab. But losing is costly, too.

"We're trying to build a winner,'' Harlan said, "and part of that is building revenue streams that are based on people coming to your home games and on corporations and general donors buying into that. When you're sending your teams to (major conference) opponents, your record is not as good and people don't want to come to your games.''

In other words, the schedule-maker is trying to perform a broken-field run with two goals -- money and victories -- that are not always found in the same end zone.