One of the best things the Pac-10 has going for it is the round-robin schedule – every school in the conference plays every other school in the conference, so you know who your champ is without a championship game, no muss, no bother (unless there’s a three-way tie for first). It’s clean, it results in the conference typically having a strong strength of schedule rating and it cuts down on having to spend money lining up non-conference opponents.
So, naturally, there’s talk about discontinuing it.
In an informal poll conducted by the Pac-10 blog, conference coaches voted 6-4 in favor of ending round-robin conference scheduling and reverting back to an eight-game slate, which was how things were before a 12th game was added in 2006.
That’s about how a straw poll went in May during the Pac-10 meetings in Phoenix, and feelings were strong enough against the nine-game conference schedule that the athletic directors will review the issue during their June meetings in San Francisco.
The vote mostly split like the current conference standings, with the top-half teams favoring nine games and the bottom half teams wanting to go back to eight.
There’s a good reason for that. Nine conference games insures five conference teams will lose an extra game every season, which could be the difference between earning bowl eligibility or not.
There’s your Exhibit “A” for why there are too many bowl games.
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I think 6 teams (or coaches, at least) out there are hoping to not have to play USC every year.
Maybe Pete could start scheduling home-and-homes with some big-time SEC schools to compensate. That would actually be fun.
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I think Pete did that within the past six or eight years with Arkansas and Auburn. It was a lot of fun for Pete, not so much for Nutt or Tuberville.
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Actually, a bunch of SEC schools have gone out west to the SEC and gotten wacked. UT by Cal, LSU by ASU, and of course all of them that play USC.
SEC is pretty proud when you visit them in the south, but in the rare occassion when they go west its a different story.
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That is just pathetic. They have a much better sysytem than the Big 11, but are even more suspect in terms of quality depth below 2 teams….at least the Big 11 usually has 3 of their 11 teams that occasionally win a conference title. Changing to eight conference games will make their mid-level teams even less credible as bowl teams. Chances are they will have played zero Top 20 teams, so who cares about their record. They may soon become a laughingstock like Notre Dame and get invited every year to a bowl they are incapable of competing in. We really need more mismatches, like the BCS doesn’t provide enough of those already.
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