In the aftermath of the Indiana Hoosiers’ loss in Fort Wayne last week, I was thinking about the concept of scheduling games for high schools and colleges. In the pro sports leagues, your schedule is made for you. But in prep and college play, each school chooses to craft its schedule in a way that you can clearly see what the program is trying to accomplish. A team that might have a chance to be really good, or that might have an exceptional player on it, might schedule games against higher-caliber opponents, or schedule games in different regions so they get notoriety and exposure in places they wouldn’t get from just playing games in their own area. It also provides your team with a chance to play teams that will challenge your own and make them better, so that when tournament time comes they are prepared. Conversely, a team that is likely to struggle might shy away from superpowers, and it makes total sense. If a coach’s job is to put his players in a position to succeed, then who they schedule as opponents would certainly fall into that. If you are a high school basketball team and you graduated 11 seniors like Columbia City did, for example, you probably don’t want to go searching for 4A top 10 teams to add to your schedule. That wouldn’t be fair to your kids. When schools sign contracts to play each other, the reasons why each agreed to sign that deal might be very different – even completely opposite. Money is a factor, even at the high school level. Tippecanoe Valley and Warsaw have been an off-again-on-again rivalry over the years. But the bottom line is it’s a “local game” and people will turn out in big numbers to watch it. That means cash in the bank for athletic departments, and there aren’t too many of them that can afford to walk away from cash like a good, local game on the night before Thanksgiving. Money matters even more for colleges when it comes to scheduling. Most major college basketball programs play 10 to 15 non-conference games, of which only a handful are really interesting or challenging. The big boys are looking for easy wins to make sure they will be relatively close to 20 wins by the end of the season to improve their resumé for the NCAA tournament. The little guys are quite OK with participating in a mismatch for three reasons: 1) it should make playing the teams on their normal schedule easier, 2) playing teams like that helps recruiting, and 3) there generally is a pretty good payday promised to those smaller schools in exchange for losing 85-52. The best example of this was in 2001 and 2002, when Ball State’s athletic department sacrificed the health and safety of some really good football players (including guys from our area) to fill the coffers of the their bank account with road games at Auburn, Clemson and Missouri. Those kids played their tails off in those games, but they were never in contention in those games. But ‘competition’ was not part of why it was set up to begin with. That happens a lot in college football. College football is a whole different animal. Because there are only 12 games in a regular season, the thought process of a college football schedule is based on the concept “let’s play as few good teams as we have to.” Most major college football teams have two or three signature games in a season that determine whether they have a good season or a great season. The month of September in college football is filled with a lot more Alabamas vs. Western Kentuckys than Wisconsins vs. LSUs. Not every team can play a white-knuckle, nail-biter against the elite of your level of play every night and no one should expect that. But when you watch a game and you wonder “how in the world did these two teams get paired together?” understand that there are as many motivations for manufacturing a schedule as there are ways to break down a 2-3 zone defense.
