Western Carolina, Colorado, Vanderbilt, Indiana, Arkansas, Charleston Southern, Washington State, Samford.

Is this Saturday’s slate of college football games historically bad? We’ll see if upsets occur, but on paper, this is a conspicuously weak Saturday schedule at this point in the season with those opponents matched up against Top 15 teams. There are three matchups between Top 25 teams this weekend, but only USC-UCLA involves a Top 10 team.

Week five of this season (Saturday, Sept. 27) was hard to stomach. You will often see cupcakes litter the landscape in weeks three and four of a season, so September football deserves to have its own separate place in a discussion of college football scheduling.

It’s this day — the Saturday before the SEC’s stream of season-ending rivalry games — when a college football campaign takes a deep breath before its final, fateful showdowns. SEC teams play Football Championship Subdivision opponents as “unofficial bye weeks” before the bragging-rights battles that mean everything to the local fan bases: Auburn-Alabama; Florida-Florida State; South Carolina-Clemson; Georgia Tech-Georgia.

At The Student Section, associate editor Bart Doan quite accurately outlined why the SEC and Mike Slive schedule all these cupcakes so late in the season. You might not like it as a fan and television viewer, but the SEC bets that these games won’t override the league’s built-in strength of schedule, and that bet has always been right in terms of placing a team in the national title game since the 2006 season.

What’s unique about this Saturday from a viewer’s perspective is that it does seem to have fewer quality attractions compared to previous editions of “SEC Cupcake Saturday.”

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In 2013, the noon and 3:30 Eastern game windows were quite dreary, but they were spiced up by a blowout upset (Arizona over Oregon) and Johnny Manziel playing Les Miles’s LSU Tigers. Then, the night window featured Oklahoma State’s blowout win over previously unbeaten Baylor. That game shook up the Bowl Championship Series race, and with Missouri defeating Ole Miss in that same night window, the SEC East race changed in a fairly dramatic way. South Carolina had hoped to win the division, but Missouri’s victory in Oxford tilted the calculus and set up the Tigers to play Auburn for the SEC title. (Missouri clinched the SEC East a week later at home against Texas A&M.)

In 2012, SEC Cupcake Saturday looked like this. The noon window was absolutely awful, but you’ll then notice a string of seven games involving ranked teams in the 3:30 window, beginning with USC-UCLA. Not all of those seven games proved to be interesting, but most of them were. Then, in the night window, the 2012 season received the double-shock which propelled Alabama into the title game against Notre Dame: Stanford defeated Oregon and Baylor crushed Kansas State to roll out the Crimson carpet for the Tide. SEC Cupcake Saturday was an electric day in 2012.

In 2011, here’s how the schedule unfolded, complete with results. The day was a total snooze-fest until the night window, when Robert Griffin III changed the Heisman race with his dazzling display against Oklahoma. USC’s electric and significant win at Oregon — easily the greatest win of Lane Kiffin’s brief and failed tenure as the Trojans’ head coach — also juiced up that Saturday. Yet, as a collection of 45 to 50 games, that Saturday packed very little punch. It stands up (or is it down?) to this upcoming Saturday as a stinker of a slate. This Saturday, however, could very well be worse.

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What should we make of this? Here are the two storylines you need to follow in the coming weeks as far as future college football scheduling is concerned:

1) TCU versus Baylor if both teams finish 11-1. If the College Football Playoff Selection Committee disregards Baylor’s head-to-head win and conference championship under this hypothetical (which might not even happen — Texas could easily beat TCU on Thanksgiving), TCU’s inclusion in the four-team playoff field would send a thunderously clear message about non-conference scheduling. You would see athletic directors scramble to reduce their cupcake intake and put more Power 5 conferences on the menu.

2) Mississippi State finishes 11-1 as the second-place team in the SEC West, behind Alabama. This scenario would play out if Mississippi State beats Ole Miss on Nov. 29 while Alabama defeats Auburn to clinch the SEC West title. If the selection committee puts Mississippi State into the field under this circumstance, the Bulldogs’ non-conference schedule — Southern Mississippi, UAB, South Alabama, Tennessee-Martin — will not have been held against them. You would see college football and the athletic directors of power-conference schools maintain their previously existing scheduling philosophies.

It’s a debate we’ve had at The Student Section: While rewarding head-to-head matchups and conference titles should matter, the sport finds itself in a precarious and unique position in year one of the new playoff format. Since college football has now adopted a selection committee, it’s quite necessary to point out that the basketball selection committee (for the NCAA tournament) has been relentlessly consistent on one point above all others: soft non-conference scheduling gets punished. SMU, which beat lots of ranked teams in conference play, was left out of the field — behind an underachieving North Carolina State team — because it scheduled far too many cupcakes in non-conference play. Given the shift to a selection committee model, college football is in a position this year to set the tone for the next five, 10, 20 years of scheduling… if it wants to.

You can — and probably should — debate whether playoff selections represent the best way to send a message about non-conference scheduling. It’s fair to question that. What’s beyond question, though, is that college football — as a (loosely-governed) sport — has failed to create policies or requirements which severely reduce cupcake scheduling. No one has really stepped up to the plate to disincentivize this part of the way the industry operates.

Consider this: The Pac-12 and Big 12 play nine conference games, thereby sacrificing a cupcake game each year. If the old Bowl Championship Series existed, there would be a real chance that Oregon would be left out of the title game, showing exactly why four playoff teams are needed to prevent such an injustice from happening.

Let’s say that 11-1 Mississippi State — as the SEC West runner-up — gets the fourth and final playoff spot over Baylor and TCU. What would that say about non-conference scheduling? It would give athletic directors license to continue to eat four non-conference cupcakes a year. Days like this Saturday would continue to proliferate, when — in a saner world — one of the final weeks of a college football season should be popping with compelling matchups.

If you don’t like this Saturday’s schedule, you’re not alone. You’ll want to follow the next few weeks — leading up to the announcement of the four playoff teams on Sunday, Dec. 7 — to see if meaningful change will define the next 10 years of college football scheduling.

About Matt Zemek

Editor,
@TrojansWire
| CFB writer since 2001 |

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