Colleges adjust to midweek football
Rodney Tart
Rodney Tart
Still, Louisville’s Bobby Petrino doesn’t mind having some game-free Saturdays.
The Cardinals played six games on days other than Saturday last year and have three more on the schedule this season, making them the king of the midweek games — and giving the program plenty of TV exposure in the process.
“I like it. I think it’s something that really helps your recruiting because all the high school players are watching those midweek games on TV,” Petrino said. “They don’t watch a lot of them over the weekend because they have their own commitments.”
This season, 56 college games will be on regional or national television, up from 51 last year and 25 just five years ago. On Mondays and Tuesdays, there’s nine TV games, compared with none in 2000.
West Virginia, Pittsburgh and Toledo lead the way this season with four midweek TV appearances.
The midweek slots have allowed leagues such as the Mid-American Conference to thrive, bringing players such as Randy Moss, Chad Pennington, Byron Leftwich and Ben Roethlisberger into America’s homes. The MAC comprises one-fifth of this year’s midweek TV games.
“If I were sitting here six years ago and somebody walked up to me and said, ‘You know, between ESPN and ESPN2, we’re going to do 10 MAC games.’ I’d said, ‘Boy, I don’t think that day will ever come.’ But it has,” said Dave Brown, ESPN’s vice president of programming and acquisitions.
The Western Athletic Conference’s non-league schedule is popular for Saturday evening telecasts but it has just four league contests on regional or national TV this season, three before the weekend.
“I don’t have much of an objection to the Thursday-Friday combinations,” said Nevada coach Chris Ault, whose team opened the season last Friday against Washington State. “The tradition of college football is Saturday, but that tradition has been expanded, and it’s been expanded by TV.”
The Mountain West Conference has decided to go in a different direction. In the past, the league was asked to shift some games to Fridays, then last year to Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
“And that’s where we drew the line in the sand,” MWC commissioner Craig Thompson said. “We said not only are we not going to play ever on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, we really don’t like playing a whole lot on the Fridays.”
Starting next year, the Mountain West is returning to Saturday-only games to be shown on fledgling College Sports TV, which also has the rights to Navy and several Conference USA games.
When it comes down to it, teams must be ready to go at all hours, on any day — with or without TV coverage.
Schools like Arizona State, Cincinnati, Marshall and Wake Forest scheduled Thursday season openers to give them extra time to prepare for a tougher opponent the following week.
“We just thought with such a young football team, we should take advantage of it if we could,” Cincinnati coach Mark Dantonio said.
And for fans such as Derrick Godwin, who’s got a son attending Marshall and a daughter at West Virginia, watching his favorite teams on Thursday and Sunday, as he did the first week of this season, isn’t such a bad thing.
What was he going to do with his free Saturday?
“Maybe play some golf in the morning and do some family activities in the afternoon, and do things around the house and enjoy a normal weekend thing,” he said.