Oklahoma State Needs to Rid Its Future Schedules of FCS Teams

Carson Cunningham and I spent the first 20 minutes of our podcast on Monday talking about the Tennessee-OU game (which Carson attended). That rubs some OSU folks the wrong way, but this is what happens when OSU plays the Central Arkansas’ of the world. There’s little to discuss and debate and the spotlight is left for other squads.

Philosophically, OSU playing Central Arkansas isn’t dumb. There are myriad reasons why a big time school like Oklahoma State (or OU) should schedule three cupcakes to start the year. Mike Gundy laid out one of them on Monday. Here’s Mark Cooper of the Tulsa World.

“If you (open) against an opponent that physically outmatches you, it changes your preseason practice,” Gundy said. “It changed us last year. We had to do so much to get ready for Florida State. We had to come up with a game plan to move the ball and score points against a team that we knew was physically better than us. We don’t want to do that. We want to work our way to a certain point. That’s my approach. I don’t want to be pressed into being physical earlier than we need to be.”

I certainly understand that, but if the alternative is playing Central Arkansas in front of 55,000 45,000, I just can’t choose that alternative. Neither can Dana Holgorsen.

“If we are scheduling two Power 5 schools and a non-Power 5 school, then I wish everyone else would, too, as opposed to what some of the other schools are doing by scheduling an FCS school or two FCS schools and two other non-Power 5 schools. You can figure out who I’m talking about.”

Not that Crazy Dana is the bastion of rationale, but in this case he’s correct.

Oklahoma State is almost never going to play for a national championship in any given year. So why the FCS teams? That’s the main reason schools schedule them, isn’t it? To boost that out-of-conference record for end-of-year evaluation? So if we can deduce that OSU won’t play for many national titles, why not give your fans something fun in September that’s actually not going to hurt you either way (see: tOSU vs. Va Tech last year).

Like Carson said, there are only 12 (or 13) of these things a year. Might as well enjoy the ones we have.

I realize this flies in the face of what I wrote last week which is that OSU shouldn’t be scheduling Central Michigan-type teams either. And therein lies the problem. You can’t have it both ways, and you can’t simply schedule three mosnter teams in nonconference.

If I have to choose, I’m choosing Central Michigans over Central Arkansas’ though. And luckily for me (and all of us), OSU’s future schedule-makers agree with this post. OSU has a FCS game again next season, but none on the foreseeable schedule after that (although these things tend to happen as a result of last-minute cancelations).

To me (and I think to a lot of you), college football is all about memories. To the players too, I would imagine. Georgia in ’08, FSU in ’14 and heck, Mississippi State in ’13. These are the games I’ll remember fondly 20 years from now. Not Montana in ’05 or Savannah in ’12.

Those games are simply unintended consequences of a sport so uneven in its postseason parameters, it doesn’t totally know if it rewards being great or being perfect. I hope it figures it out at some point.