So I went through a fun exercise since I was on vacation and my trip got cancelled so I was taking time off at home--I went through and crossed off OOC games with the PAC12, BIG10, and BIG12 since all have 9 conference games. Then all other teams could only keep 1 game from their OOC schedule to make a total of 9 games. Next I crossed off all FCS games as teams would not be able to keep them as their 9th game. Moving forward, I used the assumption that teams would want to keep the "best" game they could for strength of schedule against the 3 P5 conferences that only have P5 teams on their 9 game schedule. And I started the cascade of crossing out games that would be dropped (or rescheduled/bought out). The exercise was pretty fun--felt like a sudoku puzzle or something. In the end, the independents suffered the most as you might guess. Notre Dame lost some huge games (USC, Wisconsin, Stanford, Navy). But only ended up 1 game short. BYU lost Utah, Michigan State, Arizona State, Minnesota, and Stanford and ended up with 6 games (also lost North Alabama). UConn was the heaviest impacted dropping 8 games and a 9th in their FCS game--with only 3 games resulting on their schedule (UMass, Liberty, Army). UMass also suffered keeping only 5 games. Even if you allowed some of these independent teams to keep their FCS games and then played each other they would still struggle to get to 9 games and may have to add multiple FCS games to accomplish it.
Notre Dame would have a "whole" 9 game schedule by visiting BYU to close out that contract. BYU would just need to 2 "available" independent team to reach a 9 game schedule.
All this did not account for games that would need to be moved to account for holes in the schedule and eliminate the early September dates.
But like was said, this is very unlikely as it would be a massive amount of work to buy out or reschedule between 300 and 400 games. It would also quite possibly cause the FCS schools massive financial difficulty.
Man the Lord moves in mysterious ways to get ND to honor their contract. TIC. Interesting exercise.Statistics: Posted by BoiseBYU — Sun Apr 05, 2020 8:09 am
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