Stephen Bupp
Sports Writer
Nothing symbolizes the essence of student life in Morgantown like football Saturdays each autumn.
There is electricity in the air as excitement and anticipation build for another Mountaineer win. There are alumni and fans pouring into the city. There is fanfare, and of course, there are tailgates.
It's an atmosphere of fun that exists in only a handful of college towns around the country and is a defining event for West Virginia University, especially when a number of marquee schools parade into town each year.
But it's hard to get enthused for a game against Eastern Washington, and that's exactly what Mountaineer fans are being asked to do.
On Tuesday, the WVU athletic department announced that the Sugar Bowl champion Mountaineer football team will play host to the division I-AA school on Sept. 9.
The instinctual response is to ask, "Why?" Let's face it - Eastern Washington is an automatic win before the game is played. And won't this mark the third straight year, and fourth time in five years, that a D I-AA gimme has appeared on Mountaineer Field at Milan Puskar Stadium? Well, the answer is more complex than Rich Rodriguez and athletic director Ed Pastilong getting together and deciding to schedule cupcakes.
And it's not completely the MAC softy Buffalo's fault either, though the Bulls did back out of their contract with WVU and force Pastilong to scramble for a last-minute replacement. And it's not even the fault of Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College, who threw a wrench in the scheduling process by bolting from the Big East for the ACC.
The real villain is the NCAA.
That's because it's the NCAA that has expanded the schedule from 11 to 12 games. At first glance, that may seem like a good thing. What can be wrong with an extra college football game to watch each year?
First of all, simple arithmetic says that 11 is better. When you play an odd number of games, you end with either a winning or losing record - none of this 6-6 business where bowl teams can end the year with a sub-.500 mark. Bowl games are supposed to be a reward for a good season, and I have a hard time accepting that 6-6 is a "good season."
Additionally, the college football season is traditionally played during the first three months of the school year - September, October, and November. Typically, there are 13 Saturdays during those months, which lends itself well to an 11 game schedule with two weekends off for rest.
An extra game means one of three things: a non-stop schedule of 12 games in 13 weeks, the season starting a week earlier, or the schedule stretching into December. And don't forget, this added game is on top of the conference championship games that are played by more and more conferences every year.
The most perplexing part of the NCAA allowing a 12th game is that it's so flamboyantly hypocritical. This is the same organization that steadfastly resists a playoff system to decide an outright national champion because it claims student athletes would miss too much class. (Yet, it's apparently okay for lower division student athletes to miss class for playoff games.)
As is all too frequently obvious, the truth is that the NCAA isn't concerned about the student athletes. Its concerns are Jackson, Grant and Franklin. Bowl games (which I fully support) have continued, not because of some noble loyalty to the sanctity of the student athlete and his GPA, but because they are thought to be more lucrative than a playoff system.
The same is true for the 12th game of the regular season. It's about the money, and giving schools an extra week to earn the green necessary to run their cash-strapped athletic departments.
But finding a 12th game that would fit onto the schedule is hard to do on short notice. That's how teams like Eastern Washington end up in Morgantown and subdue what would otherwise be a glorious game-day afternoon.
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