Article: Money is Killing BYU Football
Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 10:12 pm
Good article from KSL. I included the main part of the article in the excerpt below. The entire article can be read at the link.
However, more than injuries, and more than the schedule itself, money is responsible for the not-so-subtle undoing of BYU football. While the Cougars have very little option but to play a front-loaded schedule if they want to have the exposure of a Power 5 conference team without belonging to a Power 5 conference, it doesn’t allow them much room for growth during the early stretch of the season.
While even the best teams in college football may schedule fellow juggernauts in the opening weeks of the season — see Alabama playing Florida State on the opening week of the season, and Ohio State hosting Oklahoma in Week 2 — none of these premier programs play more than one top-tier program before entering conference play. Some schools like Washington, which started the season against Rutgers, Montana and Fresno State, avoid any tough games before conference play.
Financially, for BYU to remain appealing to its TV partners at ESPN, it must play these upper-echelon programs while trying to work out its own early season kinks without the benefit of guaranteed wins against lower-level teams. And when the Cougars suffer an inevitable loss playing against some of college football’s best, they are resigned to playing in a predetermined bowl game, with a less than top-tier financial payout.
Additionally, when nearly every other team in college football enters league play, the Cougars start their season over, competing for a league championship, regardless of how they fared in non-conference play. BYU is stuck matching up with lesser opponents like UMass and Fresno State in games that only serve to get it to bowl eligibility.
For BYU to best compete with Power 5 programs, it relies on the money it gets from its TV deal with ESPN to stay relevant. However, to get that money, it is forced to remain independent and play an early season schedule that could topple even the best programs in college football, taking the Cougars out of the national spotlight over the final month and a half of the season.
While the debate continues surrounding BYU’s lack of conference affiliation, and whether the Cougars should rejoin a lower-level conference, the quest for money has forced the program into a seemingly unfixable Catch-22.
https://www.ksl.com/?sid=46111678&nid=294