Wolverine247 Board

I'm a fan. Hopefully the couple of OOC games will be high quality and we'll just basically be missing out on games like CMU and Toledo.

I don't want to miss out playing teams like Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, whoever will be in the other division, so I'm a fan of more conference games.

Also less home games, which means less revenue

I like 10. Think about where we're going with expansion. Mich will be playing teams from Nebraska, Rutgers to Maryland and maybe even Ga Tech.

You would still have two games to add ooc marquee matchups which is about on par to what major powers do anyway. 10 games severely limits the bums on the schedule which I'm getting tired of playing.

Plus it sucks knowing Osu won't be playing braska and MSU for another four years. That kills SOS and is unfair advantage to you guys and penn state who has to play us every year.

Especially because a cupcake schedule leads to national championships like last year's. (Not saying ND had a cupcake schedule, just that the NC outcome would be similar). I like seeing teams play quality opponents right out of the gate, so hopefully we can do that instead of replicating OSU's 2012-13 schedule.

10 conference games would leave zero room for marquee OOC games. If you start scheduling home and home OOC games with marquee teams, that leaves you with 6 home games at best. Programs won't last long with that. Unless, of course the NCAA expands the number of games to play during the regular season.

I guess I'm in the minority as someone who doesn't like this. I think things are fine the way they are, and I see little to no benefit to scheduling more conference games. You look at the Pac-12 model where they have 9 conference games, and I'm not sure I see the benefits. It's possible that the extra conference games has prevented one or two teams (Stanford? Oregon?) from making the MNC game.

Yesterday, a couple tidbits leaked out of the B10 CFB coaches spring meetings. One, apparently the B10 schools have agreed to stop scheduling FCS opponents. Generally, I think this is a good move though it will probably make it harder for the lower tier programs to reach bowl eligibility. The thing that really struck me, however, is that Barry Alvarez is the one who leaked this news:

"The nonconference schedule in our league is ridiculous," Alvarez said on WIBA-AM in Madison, Wis. "It's not very appealing ... "So we've made an agreement that our future games will all be Division I schools. It will not be FCS schools."

http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/8942451/barry-alvarez-says-big-ten-schedule-fcs-teams

Of all the schools to criticize B10 OOC scheduling, Wisconsin is the last one that should be doing it. Wisky has elevated itself up to become one of the better programs in the conference in recent years and yet it has consistently had one of the weakest OOS schedules of anyone.

The second tidbit, also leaked by Alvarez, is that the divisions appear to be headed in the direction of a simple East-West geographical alignment. The one remaining question seems to be whether Sparty can lobby its way out of the East to escape annual meetings with both OSU and UM:

Alvarez reiterated geography will play a critical role in realigning the divisions to incorporate Maryland and Rutgers, set to join the league in 2014. “You’ve got a couple schools on the bubble,” Alvarez said. “If you went straight geography, let’s start west: Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Illinois and probably Purdue is the way it seems to break down. “I know Michigan State was lobbying in the West Division instead of the East.”

http://m.jsonline.com/blogs/sports/190957011.html

Sparty just being Sparty.

I'll give Sparty credit for being logical. They have to know that they'll never sniff a division title if they have to play Michigan, OSU, and PSU every year, especially once PSU is off sanctions. Even if one or two of those powers is down, the remaining one will probably beat Sparty.

I'm fine with not scheduling FCS teams, though it makes it very tough when going to 9-10 conference games. Programs will need to have home games somehow, so I'm betting AD's will be fighting over MAC schools.

They seem to want to mimic Pac-12 scheduling, which I have a hard time believing is that good of a model.

How is it trolling to say if you guys have won your big games it would have helped Ohio State's strength of schedule? You pointed out our schedule was weak, which i agree with, and a big part of that was our win over Michigan wasn't valued from a national perspective. Had you guys beat Notre Dame or Alabama it would have helped our weak SOS. I am not antagonizing, I am pointing out the truth.

I agree. I would prefer a stronger schedule and you will hardly get an argument from an Ohio State fan for insulting Gene Smith. He's not very popular in Columbus. I admire Michigan for paying a top notch schedule, though. While you guys lost two big games, we had Wisconsin and Michigan State as our big games after U of M. The entire BIG needs to get better. I am optimistic for the playoff, now the incentive is there to schedule legitimate opponents. It's a win for all college football fans.

One big game over us doesn't matter if the rest of your schedule is pathetic. FFS, you didn't play a single top-10 team all year. We played 4 - that's a difficult schedule. Your one game against us really wouldn't have made that much difference even if we were undefeated at that point too. A truly good undefeated team plays more than one difficult game all year.

My apologies if I come off as abrasive. The influx of Buckeye trolls here and on tBB has rendered me less-than-inclined to be charitable towards Buckeye posters that I'm not already familiar with.

Hopefully the B1G can pick it up so we don't need to schedule massive OOC games to pump our SOS, but at the very least, we can count on The Game to be a marquee matchup on our schedules every year.