Saturday, July 29, 2006

Future Scheduling

It looks like we have added a two game series with Nebraska for the early part of the next decade. Washington continues a tradition of battling strong intersectional opponents.

Turner is going to try to schedule more responsibly than Hedges did. The schedules she put together were murder. Fortunately due to the new 12 game season most programs are currently shuffling their schedules around. This has allowed him to get rid of things like Oklahoma/Ohio St, and Michigan/Miami back to back. What was she thinking, oh ya televison dollars, not the good of the program. Talking about killing the goose who layed the golden egg!

In the future your going to see scheduling more like this.

  1. Elite Program (Notre Dame, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Ohio State etc.)
  2. Mid Major (Syracuse, Boise St, Fresno St, Air Force, BYU, etc.)
  3. A Cream Puff (San Jose St, Nevada, Idaho, Duke, Wyoming, etc.)

The Elite game is made for television, the hopes are that it will be picked up nationally as the Oklahoma game is this year. These games are always two game series with both teams getting a home game. These are great games to recruit with, PSA's love the fact that we play in at least a couple of big time opponents per year.

The next level is the mid majors, not as easy as it used to be. Two of the teams I mentioned, FSU, and Air Force defeated us in recent years. In some cases such as Syracuse, and Air Force these are two game series. Fresno on the other hand has no problem scheduling us without a return game at their field. Rule of thumb is you have to have at least 50,000 seats for Washington to consider playing in your out of conference stadium.

The bottom level are the cream puffs. You need to schedule one game you know you can win, of course that didn't work against Nevada a couple of years ago. These teams come to Husky stadium for the money, no other reason, and we never have to reciprocate in most cases.

I would like to see more games against ACC, and SEC opponents just because it would be fun to roadtrip to one of their stadiums. Realistically though we will mostly play the Big 12, Big 1o, and Notre Dame.

The Notre Dame series is a new thing. They swore they would never play us again after the 1948 season where we jobbed them with the refs. Time passed, Moose Krauss died, and Hedges did a nice job getting them to schedule us. While it is not listed, we still have two more games scheduled with them in future years. Look for the relationship to continue. Same with Michigan, and Nebraska, you can expect them once a decade in Husky Stadium.

A look at future Husky schedules

2006: San Jose State, Fresno State, at Oklahoma.
2007: At Syracuse, Boise State, Ohio State.
2008: BYU, Oklahoma, Notre Dame.
2009: Nevada, at Notre Dame, TBA.
2010: at BYU, Nebraska, TBA.
2011: Syracuse, BYU, at Nebraska.

Who would you like to see us play in the future?

5 comments:

hairofthedawg said...

If we're playing well, I'd love games all over Texas and a few in Florida or Alabama. Not because they're great places to travel to but for recruiting, although that time of year isn't too bad in FL, and Austin is always fun. I should think a bit longer but one of my fonder memories is stopping Miami's streak. The payback sucked, but that was a great game to read about. All we have to do is get back to being a good team and I don't care who we schedule.

John Berkowitz said...

I like the Midwest games because most are within driving distance to Chicago.

hairofthedawg said...

can't blame you there!

Anonymous said...

Hair said it best, if we're playing well. Then we travel well, and teams may want to schedule us. An occasional trip to Florida, Texas or elsewhere is okay but not annually. We are not a national recruiting based team a la USC, Stanford, ND (for he who must not be named). I would like our mid major to be a team from MWC,(Colo St, BYU, Utah etc,) or a less than annual powerhouse Big 10/12 team(Iowa St, Northwestern,Minn, Texas te, Baylor, Okla St, Wisconsin, Purdue). I know some of these teams i just mentioned have had great years (TT, Okl St, Wis) but by and large we match up well. Maybe schedule a now top tier program from Big10/12 with now mid major from other conf i.e. Ohio st and Iowa St , followed by Nebraska/Wisconsin. I still want to play Hawaii but not on a regular basis. Top tier programs I would love to see: Penn St, Tenn, Flor, Flor St, Texas, Colo again. Mostly to see their stadiums and crowds. But all in all, we should stay mostly west. BTW, Syracuse makes no sense at all to me, if you are going to travel that far, make it a big one.

John Berkowitz said...

What you guys are seeing right now is most of the opponents Hedge's picked reshuffled a bit by Turner. We still have Notre Dame, and Oklahoma in the same year, he couldn't get that moved around.
He still has a couple of games left to schedule.