Jake's Take: The Challenge of Scheduling Games
6/18/2001 1:42:50 PM | General
<b>By Jake Crouthamel</b><br>Do you have a question for Jake? <a href="mailto:feedback@suathletics.com">Email it!</a>
As the leader of the Syracuse University Department of Athletics for the past 28 years, Jake Crouthamel has played a major role in the landscape of intercollegiate athletics in the Northeast and across the country.
The following Jake's Take provides insight about the challenges of football and basketball scheduling. In late December Jake shared his perspective on the evolution of football Bowl Games. In February Jake's Take provided his insight about hosting the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament. The March edition of Jake's Take discussed Pay-for-Play for Student-Athletes.
Overview
Annually, our competition schedules, game times and even the date of a contest become subject to considerable public debate as to the rationale and practical (or impractical) nature of the way Syracuse University puts together its schedules in both football and men's basketball. In an effort to provide a perspective to the challenges faced every year in scheduling, please consider the following.
We play 11 games in football with conditioned control over the four non-conference games. All four are to be played in September. Of the 28 regular-season games in men's basketball, we have conditioned control over the 10 non-conference games, seven to eight of which must be played in December around final exams, Christmas and the New Year. As you can see, the Big East Conference schedule dictates the majority of our games. Our lack of control over conference schedules, combined with the NCAA's minimum scheduling requirements, and limits on the length of each respective sport's playing seasons, presents a challenge.
Our opportunities to schedule games are further limited by many factors that require us to schedule games on dates and at times, or even with opponents, that may be less desirable. The challenges to scheduling are magnified when we try to work with facility availability, minimize conflicts with our student-athletes' academic responsibilities, religious observances, other major events occurring on campus and in the community, fan interest and excitement in our teams, and occasional difficulties finding schools willing to compete against us.
In both football and basketball, our conference schedules traditionally are released later than other conferences. Many of our schools, especially in basketball, share home facilities with professional teams which, as the primary tenant of the buildings, receive scheduling priority. As a result, our conference schedules cannot be confirmed until the NBA, NHL, AHL, and on occasion the NFL, have released their schedules and games times. In addition, we have a major scheduling issue on our own campus. The Carrier Dome is home for our football, men's basketball and lacrosse teams. We take that fact for granted, but it presents scheduling issues for the Big East Conference and SU, particularly in the month of November when Dome availability for football and basketball conflict, and late February/early March when basketball and lacrosse conflict.
In football, game times may not be established until as late as one week prior to the game. For anyone planning other events or making arrangements to attend the game, this becomes a source of frustration. In football and men's basketball, by contract, the Big East's television partners own the entire schedule of each member's home games, including the non-conference games. Television wants certain games in specific time slots to maximize regionalization opportunities, and to ensure the best match-ups based on each team's recent successes. Thus, TV will wait as long as it can to make sure the best games are selected. In football this can mean delaying a decision until the results are in from the previous weekend.
The late announcements of kickoff times are not easy for SU. For a typical home football game we have to mobilize a work force of some 1,000 people, including city traffic police, campus security, parking attendants, shuttle bus service, ushers, ticket takers, custodians, the Dome staff, concessions staff and the civic groups that man the stands, medical personnel, ambulance service, etc. Uncertain game time also presents difficulties for road games. The logistics of moving a travel party of some 120 people by charter air to the game site the day before the game is relatively easy. However, the return trip is problematic with a game time that could be anywhere between noon and 8:00 p.m. We can't simply pick up the phone six days before a game and be assured that we can get a convenient return flight. We can't just pop into a restaurant with 120 people and order off the menu. Last year we waited six hours for return flights from both Boston and West Virginia, with much of that time spent on the runway in buses.
A Thursday night football game in the Dome would be of significant interest to many in the community and especially to television. However, it would be too disruptive to the academic environment on the campus with evening classes and the parking demands of football. For years we have requested relief from, and been successful in, avoiding a 9:00 p.m. tip-off for mid-week basketball games in the Dome. We are the only conference team that hasn't been required to play at least one such late game.
Last year's difficulty in resolving football stadium availability at several Big East schools resulted in the latest ever announcement of our schedule. We also had the challenge of playing two home games on weekends surrounding major religious holidays, two others when our students were not in class, and we were unable to host a football game on SU Parent's Weekend for the first time in anyone's memory.
We would like to play more home basketball games on the weekend and would prefer to play a game like Georgetown on a Saturday or Sunday to give more people the opportunity to attend without work or school conflicts. Unfortunately, so would every other school in the conference. With so many other factors that must be taken into account when developing a schedule, it is impossible to please everyone, or even to meet everyone's top priority.
And much was made two years ago in the national media about men's basketball playing its first 10 games at home in the Dome. Despite the considerable efforts to schedule SU's road games at South Carolina and Louisville for early December, issues such as final exam periods, conflicting games, conference scheduling requirements, television, and facility limitations pushed both games into the heart of our conference schedule.
Game scheduling is not an exact science; in fact, it is not a science at all. Scheduling a single game with a non-conference opponent is not simply a two-team exercise. Comparable play dates must be identified. If none exist, then other teams must be included in the discussion to see if certain dates can be cleared. They in turn must then go through the same exercise, etc., etc. In the end, one simple non-conference game can cause a ripple that affects 10-15 teams.
MEN'S BASKETBALL SCHEDULING
Except for a quality schedule that provides us with 16 tough conference games, we schedule 10 men's basketball games per year, excluding special tournament games like the NIT. We typically schedule three to four opponents from among the major national conferences. In 2001-02, we will play North Carolina State, Tennessee, Georgia Tech and South Florida. We approach the remaining non-conference schedule with a goal of achieving a delicate balance between the best opportunity for success, preparing the team for conference play, maintaining a home schedule that is of interest to our fans, and trying to minimize academic conflicts for our student-athletes.
Everyone who follows Syracuse men's basketball looks forward to the NCAA tournament. While it has become the expectation, we should consider ourselves fortunate to have had enough good wins, student-athletes, and coaches to help us get there regularly. Basketball is a demanding sport with games played on any day of the week. To address the issue of missed classes we consciously schedule as many home games as possible in November and December, which is the end of the fall semester, because the team is required to travel so much in the spring semester during the Big East schedule.
Other than our Big East opponents, we usually schedule a home and away series only with teams from the major conferences. With some opponents we may arrange two/three home games with a single return game or simply play a game in the Dome only. This scheduling pattern impacts the perceived "quality" of teams that will consider coming to the Dome and limits the pool of possible opponents. While we have won many games against teams with lesser profiles from smaller conferences, we've been able to maintain a very respectable overall strength of schedule.
During the last four years we have maintained a Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) in the top 40, and a strength of schedule that has been within the top 75 out of more than 300 schools. The RPI is a calculation based on the wins/losses of each team, the wins/losses of each team's opponents, and the win/losses of each team's opponent's opponents. A single opponent on each team's schedule is compared with several hundred other teams. Since the RPI is based on results during the season, it is not a particularly useful guide in scheduling. Nobody thought playing and beating Wisconsin two years ago in the NABC Classic was very impressive until Wisconsin ended its season in the Final Four. The series with South Carolina was just the opposite. CBS asked us to make that two-game series for the 1998-99 and 1999-2000 seasons. South Carolina had some great young players returning and was expected to be very strong for those two years. We scheduled the games and the best players promptly left early for the NBA. We beat them in the first game 84-37.
On paper, one of the toughest games on our schedule this coming year will be with Conference-USA member South Florida. The name may not conjure up a great deal of excitement in terms of the perceived quality. However, it doesn't take much research to learn that this team might be one of the better teams we face all year, should compete for the Conference USA championship, and may find itself in a good position to make a solid NCAA tournament run.
We also think it is appropriate for local interest and outreach to our fan base throughout New York to play teams such as Colgate, Albany, Buffalo, etc. and we've emphasized more of that recently. There are many Division I teams in the state that elicit local/regional interest, and are easier to schedule because of the location, travel costs, and time away from campus. We think it is better to do that than schedule comparable teams from various parts of the country for which there is little local interest.
FOOTBALL SCHEDULING
Football non-conference game scheduling is generally completed from five to 10 years in advance. As a result, little planning can be made with respect to the projected quality of our team or the opponent. We know that in 1987 when Michigan agreed to a series with Syracuse, they couldn't have anticipated that we would have the caliber of players like Will Allen, Keith Bulluck, Morlon Greenwood, Kevin Johnson, Donovan McNabb, Rob Konrad, etc. We didn't know in 1988 when we scheduled Tennessee that it would be the national champion in 1998.
NCAA rules generally allow 11 regular-season games per year. As a member of the Big East Conference, we play seven league games. All the other major conferences play a minimum of eight conference games, four home and four away, and must schedule only three non-conference games. Typically non-conference games are scheduled as either a single home game or as a two-game series (one game at home for each team). It is also typical that each of the major schools play a minimum of six home games each year. That means they need to schedule two of the three non-conference games at home. In fact, by flexing their financial muscles, many of the bigger schools play seven games at home.
Because the Big East plays a full round-robin schedule among its eight member teams, there is an imbalance of conference home games from one year to the next. That presents added challenges in scheduling non-conference games. It requires us to schedule two non-conference home games one year, and three the next in order to achieve six home games every year.
Schools from the other major conferences don't have as many dates to fill or the necessity to play as many away games. This makes it harder for us to find opponents who are willing to play a team like Syracuse on the road. Further complications arise when we might play a school one year and cannot play the return game for a few years. Additionally, there are many schools that just do not want to play a game in the Dome. That is a tribute to the fans of Central New York for their passion and commitment to making the Dome a difficult place to play.
We hear the argument that our football schedule is not comparable with that of other major schools. The reality is that we are no different than most other major conference schools except that we need to find an additional non-conference game. The challenge is finding the middle ground between a competitively interesting schedule, an impossible schedule, and one that gives us a chance to win. A competitive non-conference schedule is important for many reasons, including fan interest. However, in the current structure of major-college football, the priority has been shifted to winning conference championships. If you do not win your conference championship, any chance at a major bowl game is unlikely.
Currently most people point to Miami as the marquee game on our home schedule every other year. If possible, we need to schedule a marquee type "name game" at home for seasons when we play at Miami. We have been able to accomplish that with the likes of Auburn, Notre Dame, Virginia, and Illinois on the home schedule in the next few years opposite Miami. However, we still have three other games to schedule.
What is the perfect schedule? Quite frankly, I don't loose sleep thinking about it for two reasons; first, you don't know what it should be until after the season is over; and second, it isn't possible to put such a schedule together in six months anyway. We do the best we can, given all the above, and hope you will support the Orange, whoever we play.
