Few things get fans more excited for an upcoming season than a marquee game on the schedule.
Penn State playing Alabama at home was reason enough to fill the stands, even if few people expected the Nittany Lions to win.
As a result, scheduling is perhaps one of the most scrutinized aspects of a football program beyond the performance on the field.
Everyone wants to win, but watching your favorite team beat up on the little guy can get old pretty fast.
So for James Franklin and athletic director Sandy Barbour there is a balance to be found. They have to bridge the line between scheduling games that fans can get excited about and finding games that will help with the bigger picture. Frankly speaking, Penn State is years from the college football playoff being a reasonable goal.
Right now it’s about picking up wins and moving the program forward.
As a result the out-of-conference challenges aren’t going to be the toughest anyone has ever seen.
“I think it’s a balance,” Barbour said late last week. “You can’t have all of one or the other. You have to protect our football program’s ability to be successful … we’ve got to make sure that we set up our football program for overall success and we’re absolutely going to have some folks in our non-conference schedule that we anticipate that we’re going to beat. So as long as we’re not loading up our schedule with that, I expect that fans will understand that, and understand that we’re putting together a schedule for success.”
In the new era of college football playoffs, that scheduling formula has only just begun to take shape. As Barbour points out, Ohio State lost its only real marquee out-of-conference game and still managed to make and win the playoffs. So if anything, the waters have been a little murky on the perfect way to go about the non-conference schedule.
Barbour’s anticipation though — and good news for fans — is that eventually it will come down to which teams you played out-of-conference. Now it’s just a matter of finding the sweet spot.
“I think there is going to come a time where the selection committee, because they’re human, is going to look at ‘so here is the part you can control’ so what did you do?” Barbour added. “But look at Ohio State, they played what would be considered a national tier intersectional game (against Virginia Tech) and they lost it and still go in to the college football playoffs.”
Ask Franklin about his scheduling strategy and you’ll find that it isn’t far from Barbour’s. In short, his primary objective is to win the Big Ten. A secondary goal (and in many ways a prerequisite to the primary goal) is simply learning how to win. It’s getting used to the feeling of winning and roll that over into conference play.
Penn State ought to get plenty of chances to do that in the coming years. Of the eight out-of-conference teams the Nittany Lions will face between 2015 and 2019, only San Diego State has had a winning season in each of the past five years. Six of the eight teams have had a winning season no more than twice in the past five years. Even a sanctioned Penn State team has done better than that, putting up a 38-25 record since 2010.
To be sure, Franklin isn’t against the notion of playing marquee games outside the Big Ten. It’s just that the interest in playing in big games shouldn’t override the larger picture. The payoff for playing in a big game is worth it if you win, but for a program still in the process of finding stability, losing against a marquee opponent doesn’t bring many positives.
“You look at the BCS before (the playoff) and can look at the teams that have consistently won, because that’s what we’re trying to do,” Franklin said. “People say ‘How do you teach you team how to win?’ … by winning, by winning as much as you possibly can. So I’ve seen evidence that shows that those things will take care of themselves. I think everybody needs to understand, including our fans, that there is a difference between a seven game conference schedule — that it used to be — and then it goes to an eight game schedule and now a nine game conference schedule.
“The Big Ten has taken care of strength-of-schedule for us. If you’re comparing the Big Ten to the SEC and the SEC plays eight conference games and then the SEC goes and schedules an out-of-conference what people would consider a “sexy” game, that’s not a whole lot different than playing nine conference games in the Big Ten. I’ve talked to people on the playoff committee and I feel pretty strongly about that. I think that creating excitement on your schedule is something that has to happen, but it’s only one slice of the pie.”
Franklin’s point is a valid one. If Penn State is already playing nine high level opponents, adding another one for the sake of a challenge isn’t necessarily in the program’s best interest. Both he and Barbour believe having excitement on the schedule is important, but at the end of the day a decision has to be made as to whether some early season excitement is worth the possible loss of late season potential.
In that light Penn State’s out-of-conference schedule isn’t much more complicated than picking up wins. For the Nittany Lions to play for a conference title they’ll have to go through Michigan, Ohio State and Michigan State. If coming out on top against those three teams and winning the conference title isn’t enough to make the playoffs, it’s unlikely that one opponent in the first three weeks of the season will have been the tipping point in either direction.
But as Penn State approaches a 2017 meeting with Georgia State, the Nittany Lions could probably do a bit better than playing a football team that has won just five games in the past four seasons.
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