At our weekly Seven Win Society meetings in our red-bricked, white-columned lair on an otherwise nondescript Charlottesville street, I often rail about Virginia's schedule, and it finally got to the point where Red4z told me to stop complaining generally and actually make a coherent argument. Everybody knows that Virginia's trip to Southern Miss (and Wyoming before that, and Middle Tennessee State before that) were likely as not to end poorly. So what?
Coaches and athletics directors often like to act like building a schedule is subject to the whims of fate, that games materialize and disappear at random. I'm sure to some extent that's true, that things change (often at the last minute), resulting in compromises that make few people happy. But then there's Virginia's schedule, which has been a hodgepodge of undesirable opponents (from a marquee standpoint) and horrible road trips for awhile now.
The bottom line is this: Virginia's schedule has been a cause for anger among its fans for the past five years---and that's before the Cavaliers have stepped on the field, let alone after---and shows a lack of critical skills required for the job either on the part of Al Groh or Jon Oliver, the assistant AD who usually answers questions about such things.
Back in the Welsh days, it seemed pretty consistent how Virginia filled out its 11-game schedule: 8 ACC games, Virginia Tech to end the year, a known quantity nonconference opponent (either a BCS team or an established program like BYU) and a I-AA team or a I-A scrub to round things out in September. Virginia rarely went west of the Mississippi, and, most importantly, never played beneath its station on the road.
Now, considerations of how low exactly is Virginia's station aside, the answer as to why the hell Virginia played at Southern Miss last weekend remains unsatisfying to me. More than that, it remains a fairly unexamined heavy criticism of either Al Groh or Jon Oliver or both.
Let's get this story straight: the MAC said it'd give anybody three home games if you'd go TO Middle Tennessee State. Virginia went to Middle Tennessee State. Then the MAC called up UVa and said, sorry, man, no can do on the three home games from one of our 13(!) teams. Everybody's dance card was full, so UVa agreed to do a home-and-home with Southern Miss---except Southern Miss gets the first home game?
This begs the natural question: is Jon Oliver or Al Groh or whoever agrees to these deals a bigger sucker or fool? What exactly is to stop Southern Miss from canceling on Virginia at the last minute in 2011? Our fierce team of litigators which enforced the contracts we (presumably) signed with the MAC?
Presuming Groh had a high measure of control over the schedule starting in 2004, resulting nonconference schedules that have looked like this:
2004: At Temple, Akron, Syracuse.
2005: Western Michigan, at Syracuse, Temple.
2006: At Pittsburgh, Wyoming, Western Michigan, at East Carolina
2007: At Wyoming, Pittsburgh, at Middle Tennessee State, UConn
2008: USC, Richmond, at UConn, East Carolina
2009: W&M, TCU, at Southern Miss, Indiana
Some thoughts:
1) Obviously with the 12-game schedule, a I-AA game against an in-state opponent (likely with a Southern Conference team like the Citadel, Wofford or Furman mixed in from time to time) is going to be a part of the agenda from now on. Even more obviously, Virginia needs to schedule VMI or somebody that has even LESS of a chance of winning than W&M did, because apparently we can't do anything right.
2) Syracuse and Pitt are no-brainers, same as Indiana---these are meat-and-potatoes games.
3) The USC game is awesome, even if Virginia's outscored by 100, because it's USC, and the helmets, and the Song Girls, and that's awesome.
4) I even buy a home-and-home with Temple, because there's a lot of people in the Northeast that went to Virginia that can get to a game more easily in that half-empty stadium, and because most people forget that they got dumped to the MAC.
5) MAC teams at home, even those with a chance of winning, need to be welcomed, because I'm not unrealistic in thinking that there's a finite number of I-A teams, and there's no way somebody could be so diligent as to schedule the worst teams in the MAC and Sun Belt year after year. I get why the Middle Tennessee State deal looked good---I don't get why it wasn't enforced.
6) A home-and-home against ECU might well be a necessary (and convenient) evil---the Pirates are a decent-to-good program, are (relatively) close by, though Greenville's about as far from anything as anywhere within the ACC "footprint."
I'd say a reasonably competent athletics department consistently can get 1-5 right every year, and a very good AD can avoid ECU in favor of a bottom-rung Big East or Big 10 program. That's nothing against ECU, they've clearly accomplished more than Virginia recently, but Greenville is not a good trip to make if you can avoid it and there is not much more upside to beating ECU than there would be to beating a bad Big 10 or Big East team in the grand scheme of things, and a lot more downside, and that's not including spending time in eastern North Carolina, which is a downside in and of itself. ECU is clearly good enough (as is Wyoming) to demand a home-and-home, but it's still a great move for Virginia.
And yet....
At Middle Tennessee State, home-and-home with Wyoming, at Southern Miss. Three seasons begun on the road.
Good BCS conference programs don't do these things. They don't travel across the Mississippi to play at altitude. They don't travel to Mississippi to play an afternoon game in mid-September. They don't travel to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. (By the way, more people attend MTSU than attend UVa. So don't get too snooty.)
Two of these four games ended in easily-predicted disaster, and another nearly did, and it's almost egregious enough to give Groh a pass on those games if scheduling responsibility belonged to Oliver instead of Groh. Almost enough.
Now, let's compare that to three conference schools with (roughly) similar profiles program-wise, Maryland, UNC and NC State (we stopped being Virginia Tech's peer a long time ago):
Maryland:
2004: Northern Illinois, Temple, at West Virginia
2005: Navy (in Baltimore), West Virginia, at Temple
2006: W&M, Middle Tennessee State, at West Virginia, Florida International
2007: Villanova, at Florida International, West Virginia, at Rutgers
2008: Delaware, at Middle Tennessee State, California, Eastern Michigan
2009: at California, JMU, Middle Tennessee State, Rutgers
Future commitments*: Towson, Rhode Island, Navy in Baltimore, Eastern Michigan, home-and-homes with Temple, West Virginia, Connecticut.
A big thumbs' down on the at MTSU game---man, did those MAC officials work over the ACC or what?The West Virginia series was awesome for awhile. The Cal series is fine despite a long road trip, because, a) it's a Pac 10 team; b) it's at sea level. One objectively bad game, and only one season begun on the road.
UNC:
2004: W&M, Louisville, at Utah
2005: Wisconsin, Utah, at Louisville
2006: Rutgers, Furman, South Florida, at Notre Dame
2007: JMU, at East Carolina, at South Florida, South Carolina
2008: McNeese State, at Rutgers, UConn, Notre Dame
2009: The Citadel, at UConn, East Carolina, Georgia Southern
Future commitments: W&M, JMU, return trip to South Carolina, home-and-homes with Rutgers, East Carolina, Tennessee and Minnesota.
Not sure about a home-and-home at Utah during the 11-game era, but otherwise good scheduling by any reasonable definition---no road games to open the season, notice.
NC State:
2004: Richmond, Ohio State, at East Carolina
2005: Eastern Kentucky, Southern Miss, Middle Tennessee State
2006: Appalachian State, Akron, at Southern Miss, East Carolina
2007: UCF, Wofford, Louisville, at East Carolina
2008: at South Carolina, W&M, East Carolina, South Florida
2009: South Carolina, Murray State, Gardner-Webb, Pittsburgh
Future commitments: a trip to UConn, return trips to UCF, South Florida and Pittsburgh, home-and-homes with Cincinnati, South Alabama (in its second and third years in I-A), East Carolina, and a neutral site game with Tennessee.
The loss at Southern Miss in 2006 in mid-September should have provided a cautionary tale for Virginia, but one key factor not to ignore here: Southern Miss came to NC State FIRST. Otherwise, little to quibble with here, including but one road game to open the season (in a year with three nonconference home games).
In short, I would say that each of these three teams made one of Virginia's mistakes over the past five years, but none made two, and none began more than one season with a nonconference road game. (Maryland had a neutral site game in Baltimore against Navy, and a road game at Cal, but that is a minor quibble compared to Virginia).
A pattern seems to have emerged among these schools in the 12-game era: 8 conference games, one BCS opponent, one I-AA game, and two mid-major(MAC or Sun Belt) or near-major (MWC, WAC, Conference USA) I-A games. That seems reasonable enough to me.
Virginia's future commitments---to Richmond, a home-and-home against Penn State in 2012/14, return trips to USC and Indiana, a visit from Southern Miss in 2011---appear heading in the right direction, but there are a lot more gaps on its calendar than for the other teams. Particularly worrisome is the ever-present threat by the NCAA to reinstate the old rule of counting a I-AA win for bowl eligibility only once per four years, thus making I-A games harder to come by.
The bottom line is this: Virginia's athletics department has had a demonstrable critical failure of planning for years now, putting its football team in a bad position before it takes the field. It can argue that it was at the mercy of circumstances beyond its control, but it finds itself in that position far more than peer schools (beyond just the sample of three above). If the failing is Groh's, fine, add it to the list of black marks next to his tenure. If the failing is Oliver's, that needs to be addressed either by changing his responsibility or at least by him acknowledging the poor job the program has done over the past five years and the lessons learned in the interim. Either way, the lack of accountability is striking and endemic within the program, and it's further evidence (as if any were needed) that change needs to come, sooner rather than later, and it likely needs to spread beyond just the football coach's office.
*---Future commitments can be found here.
Coaches and athletics directors often like to act like building a schedule is subject to the whims of fate, that games materialize and disappear at random. I'm sure to some extent that's true, that things change (often at the last minute), resulting in compromises that make few people happy. But then there's Virginia's schedule, which has been a hodgepodge of undesirable opponents (from a marquee standpoint) and horrible road trips for awhile now.
The bottom line is this: Virginia's schedule has been a cause for anger among its fans for the past five years---and that's before the Cavaliers have stepped on the field, let alone after---and shows a lack of critical skills required for the job either on the part of Al Groh or Jon Oliver, the assistant AD who usually answers questions about such things.
Back in the Welsh days, it seemed pretty consistent how Virginia filled out its 11-game schedule: 8 ACC games, Virginia Tech to end the year, a known quantity nonconference opponent (either a BCS team or an established program like BYU) and a I-AA team or a I-A scrub to round things out in September. Virginia rarely went west of the Mississippi, and, most importantly, never played beneath its station on the road.
Now, considerations of how low exactly is Virginia's station aside, the answer as to why the hell Virginia played at Southern Miss last weekend remains unsatisfying to me. More than that, it remains a fairly unexamined heavy criticism of either Al Groh or Jon Oliver or both.
Let's get this story straight: the MAC said it'd give anybody three home games if you'd go TO Middle Tennessee State. Virginia went to Middle Tennessee State. Then the MAC called up UVa and said, sorry, man, no can do on the three home games from one of our 13(!) teams. Everybody's dance card was full, so UVa agreed to do a home-and-home with Southern Miss---except Southern Miss gets the first home game?
This begs the natural question: is Jon Oliver or Al Groh or whoever agrees to these deals a bigger sucker or fool? What exactly is to stop Southern Miss from canceling on Virginia at the last minute in 2011? Our fierce team of litigators which enforced the contracts we (presumably) signed with the MAC?
Presuming Groh had a high measure of control over the schedule starting in 2004, resulting nonconference schedules that have looked like this:
2004: At Temple, Akron, Syracuse.
2005: Western Michigan, at Syracuse, Temple.
2006: At Pittsburgh, Wyoming, Western Michigan, at East Carolina
2007: At Wyoming, Pittsburgh, at Middle Tennessee State, UConn
2008: USC, Richmond, at UConn, East Carolina
2009: W&M, TCU, at Southern Miss, Indiana
Some thoughts:
1) Obviously with the 12-game schedule, a I-AA game against an in-state opponent (likely with a Southern Conference team like the Citadel, Wofford or Furman mixed in from time to time) is going to be a part of the agenda from now on. Even more obviously, Virginia needs to schedule VMI or somebody that has even LESS of a chance of winning than W&M did, because apparently we can't do anything right.
2) Syracuse and Pitt are no-brainers, same as Indiana---these are meat-and-potatoes games.
3) The USC game is awesome, even if Virginia's outscored by 100, because it's USC, and the helmets, and the Song Girls, and that's awesome.
4) I even buy a home-and-home with Temple, because there's a lot of people in the Northeast that went to Virginia that can get to a game more easily in that half-empty stadium, and because most people forget that they got dumped to the MAC.
5) MAC teams at home, even those with a chance of winning, need to be welcomed, because I'm not unrealistic in thinking that there's a finite number of I-A teams, and there's no way somebody could be so diligent as to schedule the worst teams in the MAC and Sun Belt year after year. I get why the Middle Tennessee State deal looked good---I don't get why it wasn't enforced.
6) A home-and-home against ECU might well be a necessary (and convenient) evil---the Pirates are a decent-to-good program, are (relatively) close by, though Greenville's about as far from anything as anywhere within the ACC "footprint."
I'd say a reasonably competent athletics department consistently can get 1-5 right every year, and a very good AD can avoid ECU in favor of a bottom-rung Big East or Big 10 program. That's nothing against ECU, they've clearly accomplished more than Virginia recently, but Greenville is not a good trip to make if you can avoid it and there is not much more upside to beating ECU than there would be to beating a bad Big 10 or Big East team in the grand scheme of things, and a lot more downside, and that's not including spending time in eastern North Carolina, which is a downside in and of itself. ECU is clearly good enough (as is Wyoming) to demand a home-and-home, but it's still a great move for Virginia.
And yet....
At Middle Tennessee State, home-and-home with Wyoming, at Southern Miss. Three seasons begun on the road.
Good BCS conference programs don't do these things. They don't travel across the Mississippi to play at altitude. They don't travel to Mississippi to play an afternoon game in mid-September. They don't travel to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. (By the way, more people attend MTSU than attend UVa. So don't get too snooty.)
Two of these four games ended in easily-predicted disaster, and another nearly did, and it's almost egregious enough to give Groh a pass on those games if scheduling responsibility belonged to Oliver instead of Groh. Almost enough.
Now, let's compare that to three conference schools with (roughly) similar profiles program-wise, Maryland, UNC and NC State (we stopped being Virginia Tech's peer a long time ago):
Maryland:
2004: Northern Illinois, Temple, at West Virginia
2005: Navy (in Baltimore), West Virginia, at Temple
2006: W&M, Middle Tennessee State, at West Virginia, Florida International
2007: Villanova, at Florida International, West Virginia, at Rutgers
2008: Delaware, at Middle Tennessee State, California, Eastern Michigan
2009: at California, JMU, Middle Tennessee State, Rutgers
Future commitments*: Towson, Rhode Island, Navy in Baltimore, Eastern Michigan, home-and-homes with Temple, West Virginia, Connecticut.
A big thumbs' down on the at MTSU game---man, did those MAC officials work over the ACC or what?The West Virginia series was awesome for awhile. The Cal series is fine despite a long road trip, because, a) it's a Pac 10 team; b) it's at sea level. One objectively bad game, and only one season begun on the road.
UNC:
2004: W&M, Louisville, at Utah
2005: Wisconsin, Utah, at Louisville
2006: Rutgers, Furman, South Florida, at Notre Dame
2007: JMU, at East Carolina, at South Florida, South Carolina
2008: McNeese State, at Rutgers, UConn, Notre Dame
2009: The Citadel, at UConn, East Carolina, Georgia Southern
Future commitments: W&M, JMU, return trip to South Carolina, home-and-homes with Rutgers, East Carolina, Tennessee and Minnesota.
Not sure about a home-and-home at Utah during the 11-game era, but otherwise good scheduling by any reasonable definition---no road games to open the season, notice.
NC State:
2004: Richmond, Ohio State, at East Carolina
2005: Eastern Kentucky, Southern Miss, Middle Tennessee State
2006: Appalachian State, Akron, at Southern Miss, East Carolina
2007: UCF, Wofford, Louisville, at East Carolina
2008: at South Carolina, W&M, East Carolina, South Florida
2009: South Carolina, Murray State, Gardner-Webb, Pittsburgh
Future commitments: a trip to UConn, return trips to UCF, South Florida and Pittsburgh, home-and-homes with Cincinnati, South Alabama (in its second and third years in I-A), East Carolina, and a neutral site game with Tennessee.
The loss at Southern Miss in 2006 in mid-September should have provided a cautionary tale for Virginia, but one key factor not to ignore here: Southern Miss came to NC State FIRST. Otherwise, little to quibble with here, including but one road game to open the season (in a year with three nonconference home games).
In short, I would say that each of these three teams made one of Virginia's mistakes over the past five years, but none made two, and none began more than one season with a nonconference road game. (Maryland had a neutral site game in Baltimore against Navy, and a road game at Cal, but that is a minor quibble compared to Virginia).
A pattern seems to have emerged among these schools in the 12-game era: 8 conference games, one BCS opponent, one I-AA game, and two mid-major(MAC or Sun Belt) or near-major (MWC, WAC, Conference USA) I-A games. That seems reasonable enough to me.
Virginia's future commitments---to Richmond, a home-and-home against Penn State in 2012/14, return trips to USC and Indiana, a visit from Southern Miss in 2011---appear heading in the right direction, but there are a lot more gaps on its calendar than for the other teams. Particularly worrisome is the ever-present threat by the NCAA to reinstate the old rule of counting a I-AA win for bowl eligibility only once per four years, thus making I-A games harder to come by.
The bottom line is this: Virginia's athletics department has had a demonstrable critical failure of planning for years now, putting its football team in a bad position before it takes the field. It can argue that it was at the mercy of circumstances beyond its control, but it finds itself in that position far more than peer schools (beyond just the sample of three above). If the failing is Groh's, fine, add it to the list of black marks next to his tenure. If the failing is Oliver's, that needs to be addressed either by changing his responsibility or at least by him acknowledging the poor job the program has done over the past five years and the lessons learned in the interim. Either way, the lack of accountability is striking and endemic within the program, and it's further evidence (as if any were needed) that change needs to come, sooner rather than later, and it likely needs to spread beyond just the football coach's office.
*---Future commitments can be found here.
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