Pretty nice paycheck for doing nothing.

The LIU game in September had 18,000 plus in attendance and the Western Michigan game last week was slightly more than 16,000. FCS games don't always bring lower attendance numbers.

If you think that there were 16,000 butts in seats last Saturday, I have bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The LIU attendance figure was a lot more accurate. A certain poster, who will remain anonymous at this point, would probably tell you TB was in the house and counting attendance for the WMU game.

Better than South Alabama and Texas State. Should be playing SBC East not SBC West when those programs are relatively close by.

Or think of it this way. We got paid 500K to do what turned into a P5 payout game even though it wasn't supposed to be at the time. I think our fee is usually close to 1M these days but, I'm not sure, that's off the top of my head. If that's the case it clearly isn't a good thing.

We have several seasons in the future where we have our usual schedule. One end, home and road, each of a home and home, a payout game and a payin game with an FCS. Right now though there are also two seasons where the two road games are already set and nothing else. Typically, one of the missing home games in those seasons is a home game vs. FCS. Always trying to to sign G5 series with the home game first might work fit for a while but it is just kicking the can down the road. We might look for two payout games down the road to recoup some money but that might leave us with only three Saturday home games. And with P5 conferences playing 9 conference games they might be harder to come by and the payout might end up dropping. Or we could buy an extra FCS game and play a weak schedule if we have the cash to do it.

There's another element to this. We schedule some series knowing full well the other school is going to back out. Those dollars are used for capital projects such as the new hydrotherapy pools being installed in Peden (cost: $900K), equipping the Sook Center, renovating meeting areas in Peden tower, paying for recruiting visits, etc. We don't have the donor base to fund any of this stuff. In my opinion, Julie Cromer has been masterful in her scheduling strategy. She's got a lot of contacts/friends that Jim Schaus never had.

I agree with this, and if the game does go through, GREAT! What is WVU going to pay us when they back out next summer?

Why would you try to do this? Why not just schedule a payout game to begin with. The end result is the same and a lot less complicated.

In the end we played a road game at UC and got paid $500K to do it. I think that we can make a little more than $500K just by straight away getting paid to play a road game without all of the complication and probably lost opportunities and negotiating leverage for scheduling replacement games on short notice . What am I missing?

We may end up paying a lot of that $500K to some FCS team to get the home game back in order to keep having 6 home games every year.