Why your Power 5 football team is playing at some mid-major stadium this fall

In the first three weeks of the 2018 season, 16 college football teams from power conferences will play road games against mid-majors. None of them is as jarring as when Miami showed up in Boone, North Carolina, to play Appalachian State a few years ago, but still: Why are the Hurricanes playing at Toledo? What’s Maryland doing at Bowling Green?

The guarantee game — AKA “the cupcake game” — is a longtime staple. For the right price, Power 5 teams don’t have to leave their campuses.

These are simple, one-off arrangements. A team from a power conference pays a six-figure (or occasionally seven-figure) sum to a lesser team for a visit. These payouts range from $200,000 or $300,000 for an FCS team to $500,000 to $1 million-ish for a mid-major from the AAC, Mountain West, or the like. The power team is supposed to get an easy win, and the smaller program gets money that makes up a big chunk of its athletic budget.

“Obviously the biggest [reason] is to help your budget, no question about that,” Russ Huesman, a longtime FCS head coach who’s now at Richmond, says. “And anybody who says that they play them for any [other] reason are probably not telling the truth.”

Other coaches have cited a recruiting bounce. It’s cool for an FCS player to play a game in an SEC stadium and to get the scouting exposure that goes along with it.

But the dollar sums are expensive, so Power 5 teams sometimes go outside the box to achieve their goals of money and wins.

One newer-school approach: Schedule a two-for-one.

It works for Power 5 teams because there’s less cost involved. Let’s take for example a series between Oklahoma State and South Alabama. According to the terms of a three-game contract between the schools, obtained by SB Nation, these are the pay values:

• 2017: USA hosted and paid OSU $300,000
• 2018: OSU will host and pay USA $625,000
• 2023: OSU will host and pay USA $300,000

Oklahoma State gets two home games against a Sun Belt team it should always beat (though Mississippi State didn’t) for an average guarantee cost of $462,500. That’s a normal amount for a game like this. But the Cowboys got $300,000 back for the road game they played and won in Mobile last year. They’ll pay $162,500 for a net one home game against an FBS opponent. They had to give up a ‘17 home date and the associated revenue, when they could’ve just scheduled another mid-major to visit Stillwater in 2017.

For a Group of 5 team like South Alabama, the arrangement has one big perk. The Jaguars don’t run off with the up-front payday they could in a one-off game, but they get to have a home game against a name-brand opponent that should put butts in seats.

“When you’re driving around town and on billboards and on advertising and on radio and electronic and print advertising, when you see a Jaguar helmet facing a Cowboy helmet, that sends a certain message,” Joel Erdmann, South Alabama’s AD, said before the 2017 game. “And I think it excites the people of Mobile and our region.”

Still, Power 5 teams appear to be scheduling one-for-ones even more often.

Pretty much any time you see a power-conference school playing in a mid-major’s stadium, there’s at least one return trip involved in the deal. The series breakdown for all of the power-at-mid-major games scheduled up through Week 3 in the 2018 season:

• Wake Forest at Tulane (2-for-1)
• Syracuse at Western Michigan (1-for-1)
• Washington State at Wyoming (1-for-1)
• Indiana at FIU (2-for-2)
• North Carolina at ECU (ongoing, alternating sites)
• TCU at SMU (ongoing rivalry game)
• Kansas at Central Michigan (2-for-1)
• Maryland at Bowling Green (2-for-1)
• Arizona at Houston (1-for-1)
• Arkansas at Colorado State (1-for-1, but Arkansas had to schedule it in a pinch)
• Utah at NIU (1-for-1)
• Baylor at UTSA (2-for-1)
• Georgia Tech at USF (1/1)
• Miami at Toledo (1-for-1)
• Oregon State at Nevada (1-for-1, though OSU’s home date was canceled)
• Arizona State at San Diego State (1-for-1, plus another 1/1 later)
• Virginia Tech at Old Dominion (meeting a bunch of times over the next decade)

A one-for-one achieves similar ends to a two-for-one. The smaller program still gets its home game, and it pays a smaller guarantee for that game that somewhat defrays the net cost to the Power 5 team. That team also retains scheduling flexibility in other years.

On the whole, there aren’t many more Power 5-at-mid-major games now than there were a decade ago. The total consistently falls in the teens nationally.

tl;dr: Why is that big school playing at that little school?

To strike the best balance possible between getting rich and winning.