OK, I can understand why the weak school would accept the payoff to play the strong school: Money is money, after all. But why would the strong school be willing to pay to play the weak school? Nobody wants to watch a game like that for fun, and beating such a weak team won’t fool anyone into thinking you’re better than you are. Who on the strong school side benefits from such a lopsided matchup?
a win’s a win.
Practice.You’ll notice these games are almost always played before the big team starts its conference schedule. These are college football’s equivalent of the pro sports’ exhibition game. You get the equivalent of a full-speed, hemets and pads practice, and you can give your second-string players some actual game experience.
Florida State had its third-string quarterback playing at the end of its game. That’s almost certainly the only time this season that kid will see action this year.
Except that, in the pros, the exhibition games don’t actually count for anything, while in college ball they become part of the overall record that is used to determine standings.
As I remember it, point spread used to be used in the BCS formula, but was removed precisely because they didn’t want to incentivize teams to run up the score. Of course, this leads to problems with ranking the teams properly, since beating a team 50-0 is a lot more impressive than beating the same team 21-20, but both are equal in the computers’ eyes.
I don’t know; it seems to me that the skills you learn and reinforce by playing a really poor team wouldn’t bear any particular relationship to the skills you’d need to beat a good team. You could just end up reinforcing bad habits, since they’re likely to work anyway.
One thing I found interesting, is it’s usually the big team that’s Pitted for playing Weak Sisters of the Poor. It seems this time around, it’s Savannah State that seems to be getting the brunt of the criticism for scheduling like this.
How times have changed. In 1995, my Huskers were ripped for running up the score 77-28. Never mind that Nebraska’s subs only scored 2 TDs in the whole second half. The opposing coach howled very publicly and refused to shake hands. The team they destroyed? Not a Sun Belt or I-AA team, but Arizona State from the Pac 10!
I think the problem was that Savannah St did two of these games back-to-back. There was a real risk of serious injury to those kids. However, again, lest it be forgotten, this game was not the first (or in FSU’s case even the twentieth) choice for either of these teams. It only came about because WVU cancelled on FSU at (in college scheduling terms) the last minute.