Friday, September 21, 2007
When Florida International leaves Memorial Stadium on Saturday night, it will reach the end of the college football equivalent of a death march. The Panthers played at Penn State in week one, took on Maryland in the Orange Bowl in week two and played Miami in the same venue last week — and lost by a combined 79 points to those three teams. They will travel to Fayetteville in late October to play Arkansas.
In the Sun Belt Conference, such brutal nonconference slates can be necessary to subsidize football programs. Schools from BCS conferences call looking to schedule easy home victories against this Division 1-A conference. Most don’t want to make a return trip.
The demand of BCS schools looking to book Sun Belt teams has at times created a bidding process that has guaranteed payouts regularly reaching $750,000.
“That conference will play games for a guarantee,” KU Senior Associate Athletics Director Larry Keating said. “The other non-BCS leagues are less inclined to play for a guarantee. They do that because as a group their budgets are typically not as healthy as a lot of the other 1-A schools.”
This can make Pete Garcia, Florida International’s athletics director, a very popular man.
“I have had so many schools call that wanted to play us,” Garcia said.
Garcia, however, said he took the FIU post one year ago with the caveat that he could construct the schedule to his liking. Eventually, this will include six home games a season. Garcia is aided by a new on-campus stadium set to open for next football season.
The Sun Belt passed a rule in May to prevent teams from filling their nonconference schedule with BCS road games. The legislation states that schools must play a minimum of 11 home games during a two-year period.
This will decrease guaranteed games and increase home-and-home and two-for-one contracts, which will get larger schools into Sun Belt venues.
But it also will decrease the available games for those schools to accept guarantees from BCS schools. This has ratcheted up the bidding war for the available games, with guarantees now inching closer to $1 million every year.
“There’s a big demand on the group of schools that are willing to play away,” Keating said. “There is a lot of opportunity and not many teams that will do it. So what does that do? It drives the price up.”
The University of Kansas has been able to secure Sun Belt teams at relative bargain prices the last few years. Louisiana-Monroe accepted $500,000 plus expenses to play in Lawrence last year. Florida International’s original contract called for $400,000 to do the same.
It is now common to see Sun Belt teams play five home and seven away games each season. Before Aug. 1, 2004, when the NCAA began enforcing legislation that required each Division I-A school to play five home games a year, it was not uncommon for Sun Belt teams to play four home games in a season.
Garcia said he wouldn’t have difficulty coaxing large schools to come to Miami because it’s in the middle of one of the country’s most fertile recruiting grounds. He is locked into some of the past administration’s schedule, however, including this year’s brutal slate and future dates at Kansas, Iowa, Alabama, South Florida, Florida and Maryland in coming years.
“When I took this over it wasn’t going to be an option for us to have one road game and get a big paycheck anymore,” Garcia said. “We are going to get home and homes. We won’t do two-for-ones, and I am not interested in guaranteed games.”
John McElwain, Sun Belt director of media relations, said an increase in home games would naturally lead to occasional upsets of BCS programs that increase media attention. In the past three years, Troy has upset a ranked Missouri team and Oklahoma State in home games on national TV.
“You can go on the road and make a substantial amount of money doing it,” McElwain said. “The money is obviously very important, but selling tickets at home is also a way that can balance the budget.”
With the Sun Belt’s eight teams having at most two open spots on the schedule to fulfill such requests and some refusing to even consider it, BCS teams will continue a bidding war to secure dates.
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