Why not seek some OOC football/basketball w/MSU?

[WhartonHusky]

I admittedly know very little about the way football is scheduled, but why not reach out to MSU (perhaps not today) to gauge interest in some OOC games. Our basketball programs seem to have a lot of mutual respect, we attempted to hire a football coach from MSU (maybe that's a negative), and there is clearly a budding rivalry building.

Perhaps MSU isn't the alpha male in the B1G, but they are near the front of the pack.

 

[Mr Blueskin]

I admittedly know very little about the way football is scheduled, but why not reach out to MSU (perhaps not today) to gauge interest in some OOC games. Our basketball programs seem to have a lot of mutual respect, we attempted to hire a football coach from MSU (maybe that's a negative), and there is clearly a budding rivalry building.

Perhaps MSU isn't the alpha male in the B1G, but they are near the front of the pack.

...because they know we will be playing them yearly soon enough.

 

[Dooley]

I want to schedule as many B1G schools as possible. The problem with football scheduling is that we play in a small 40K stadium that "big" programs hold their nose up at (Michigan came here by miracle after we had to put in temporary bleachers). UCONN will have to look into stadium expansion at some point if they're serious about football and getting into the B1G. In the meantime, I think some neutral stadium games may be attractive to the huge traveling fan bases of the B1G. MetLife, Yankee, Citi, Gillette, Fenway, etc...might be able to get done. We just inked a home and home with Illinois so that's a good B1G start. Would love to get Sparty on the football schedule (basketball too).

 

[Carl Spackler]

There are a very limited number of out of conference football scheduling opportunities, especially now with larger conferences, and most schedules are filled several years in advance anyway. You get about 4 games a year out of conference, and it's a good idea to try to predict out and balance those 4 games with competition on the schedule that you are confident you can beat at least two of them. Hathaway was a disaster for scheduling after the debacle with the Notre Dame series. Seemed almost like he just decided not to give a hoot after that all fell apart. We were very fortunate to hold on to the Michigan home game. Tennessee has backed out of their scheduled series from several years ago.

Manuel has done a good job so far of scheduling, targeting the remaining independants other than Notre Dame (BYU, and Army) and holding on to series with Virginia and now a new one with Illinois. He got us a home and home with Boise St - a program that still has name recognition and not a slouch. Inbetween we've scheduled out in advance with programs like Stony Brook this year, Villanova next....to balance out the strength of schedule (Virginia/Illinois represent 'tough' outs - while a Stony Brook represents a theoretical 'easy' out in scheduling)

Long story short - a football series with Michigan St would be great but it's not realistic. It's highly unlikely because we don't match up well scheduling wise. Big 10 only has 3 games OOC a year now, and their schedules are pretty much full for the next several years, and probably won't open up for a program like ours if they were to open up because we - hopefully will continue to represent at tough out to other programs, rather than an easy out - when it comes to scheduling.

 

[woomba]

This is going to be interesting - I would imagine that Rutgers will do the occasional OOC FB game in NYC during conference play every few years to keep interest up so having UConn offer that up won't be as interesting as it was in years past.

At the very least it will have to be coordinated so that there aren't multiple neutral site games in NYC for the same year.