CougarCorner

The biggest disagreement I have with this story is that Mitch Harper is reviewing the games individually and saying "gotta keep this game"--like with 2023 keeping Tennessee and Arkansas for example.

Does BYU really want 8 P5 Big 12 games followed by 2 SEC games in the same season? Sounds like a formula for disaster. No P5 team should be looking for 2 P5 games OOC, let alone the 3 P5s OOC that appear on his schedule.

As I read Tom Holmoe's quote, this is what I'm hearing most:
“The first thing we do is we look at our contracts, and we have many varying and widely different contracts with different teams,” said Holmoe to the Zone Sports Network powered by KSL Sports earlier this month. “Those were contracts that took a lot of time to put together and schedules that took a lot of time to put together. And now, some of those will have to unwind. So we’re in the process of that right now, looking at each individual year and the games that will fit into the schedule of a Big 12 [schedule]. We’re in that process right now.”

What is meant by games fitting into the Big 12 schedule? I read a Bowlsby quote that said there were questions about the details like divisions, number of OOC games, etc. that will be worked out, but also gave some "Big 12 scheduling principles" like OOC games will be during the first 4 weeks of the season. Maybe an exception here and there during the transition timeframe--but generally I'm reading this as "no keeping USC/Stanford Thanksgiving weekend games going forward--even though those games are high profile. Gotta start thinking about being part of the conference rather than "it would be great to keep these exceptions to what the conference does". I'll analyze any other new members' future schedules to see if post-week 4 games appear likely at all in a bit.

Right. I would cancel the Miami series as that would be easy to do. None of the games have been played yet. Teams that owe us a home date will be kept. 2025 at Hawaii will allow us a 13th game. Some games could be moved back. We do not get paid extra for these games once we are in the Big12 so no incentive to keep high profile games unless the Big12 wants us to do it. 7 home games a year makes sense. I think we will drop FCS games for a while. CCU also owes us a game sometime. No rush but lets get it scheduled.

As far as the other 3 new Big 12 members go, there is only 4 OOC games outside the first 4 weeks already on their schedules (others are in Sept or have TBD dates). And 2 of them are with BYU:
UCF - 2023 11/11 vs BYU
UCF - 2024 10/5 @ Florida
Houston - 2028 10/7 @ BYU
Cincinnati - 2031 10/04 @ Army

I'd expect the UCF-BYU and Houston-BYU games to get cancelled since they are now in the same conference. But the conference could very well live with the 2 games in early October since BYU could potentially hang onto a game that same week to keep conference games balanced.