Thursday night’s Louisville-Houston game (8 p.m. ET, ESPN) will help save a lackluster week of college football and probably be fun to watch, but it also shows how much strategy and luck go into long-term schedule planning.
Louisville vs. Houston is an example of college football scheduling going right
A deal made three years in advance is turning out well for these schools, even though the game isn’t quite as big as we’d hoped it would be.
After Louisville’s Lamar Jackson exploded and Houston upset Oklahoma, UL-UH was pegged as one of the biggest games of the season and a possible Playoff elimination game. That didn’t quite pan out; the Cougars lost to Navy and SMU, and while Louisville is No. 5 in the latest Playoff rankings, they’re facing elimination from the ACC Championship (they’d need Clemson to lose vs. Wake Forest, and the Demon Deacons have a 7 percent chance, per Football Study Hall).
But even though 8-2 Houston isn’t in the committee’s top 25, this game is big for a No. 5 Louisville looking to bolster its resume with only Kentucky left afterward, much bigger than if the Cards had elected to schedule a weaker Group of 5 opponent.
For UH, the stakes include a home game against a top-five team, branding, bowl positioning, and the chance to reach 5-0 against the Power 5 conferences in two years under Tom Herman.
Almost no one involved in the scheduling of Thursday’s game is still a part of the two schools.
When the deal was announced in October 2013, Charlie Strong and Tony Levine were the head coaches, and Houston’s athletic director was Mack Rhoades.
Louisville AD Tom Jurich and his team — including Senior Associate AD Kevin Miller, who runs point on UL’s football scheduling — have seen this series through since the Cardinals needed a quality opponent that could play in Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium in 2015, a season when UL would also play a neutral-site game and be on the road at Kentucky.
“This level of quality is what you look for, but it’s pretty hard to project exactly what kind of game you’ll get when you set these up. But obviously now we’re excited to have them,” Miller told SB Nation. “They gave us a heck of a game last year for sure.”
Two good programs sought the best competition possible, as soon as possible.
In the fall of ‘13, Strong’s Louisville was headed to a 12-1 record in their final season as members of the American Athletic Conference before joining the ACC.
The Cougars would end up 8-5 that year, Levine’s second as head coach after taking over for Kevin Sumlin. Rhoades and Levine were trying to maximize their strong recruiting classes by playing bigger non-conference opponents when their current freshmen and sophomores would be upperclassmen. Houston wanted its future talent to peak in the largest games possible.
Louisville was piecing together its Power 5 non-conference scheduling philosophy, and the Cards were trying to complement marquee games with one-and-one series that would rotate opposite their annual season finale vs. Kentucky.
Louisville wanted quality and reached out to Levine, a former UL assistant under Bobby Petrino. Louisville officials familiar with Houston from their 2013 season together in the AAC banked on the Cougars as a long-term success.
“We jumped at the chance because we thought it was a great fit. Obviously it’s really hard to know what a team will look like in three years, but it’s possible to have an idea if you study their recruiting and know their coaches. Where Charlie had the program, we saw consistency and knew we’d get two great games out of it,” Levine said.
The specific metrics of the Playoff’s selection criteria were still TBD.
Louisville and other Power 5 programs bet heavily that non-conference scheduling would factor heavily.
(One committee member, Wisconsin’s Barry Alvarez, has implied that a team looking like it tried to schedule good teams can express the committee, whether those opponents ended up being good or not.)
“After eight conference games and Kentucky, we want to schedule another Power 5 school in either a home-and-home opposite Kentucky or a neutral site, buy out one home game, and then try and find quality opponents wherever we can.”
This wasn’t even the “big” non-conference game for either team.
Two months before this series was announced, Louisville agreed to play Auburn in the 2015 Chick-fil-A Kickoff, which would end up a week before their first meeting with UH. Louisville would lose both games and start 2015 2-4 before ending up 8-5.
Houston had secured a huge matchup: playing Oklahoma at “home” at the Texans’ NRG Stadium. The Cardinals’ trip to UH’s TDECU Stadium would be the same year.
“Our philosophy at the time was to improve scheduling as much as possible for recruiting and exposure,” Levine said. “We had Oklahoma. We’d signed Texas Tech [starting in 2017]. We were aggressive, so we welcomed having both [Oklahoma and Louisville] on the schedule in one season.”
The series makes sense, long after most of the people who set it up are gone.
Levine was let go by UH after his second 8-5 season. He’s now an assistant for Jeff Brohm, another Petrino tree coach, at Western Kentucky. Strong is Texas’ head coach. Rhoades left Houston in 2015 to take the same job at Missouri, where he spent a year before taking the job at Baylor this summer.
But the game still makes sense for both schools, even outside of the current Playoff circumstances. Strong and his UL staff wanted exposure for recruiting in Texas. Levine’s Houston wanted as much P5 credibility as possible.
“It’s something a lot of people don’t appreciate,” Levine said. “When you see everyone talking about strength of schedule affecting Playoff teams now, you’re scheduling three to sometimes five or six years out or longer. So not only is it hard to find opponents you know will maintain consistent success years later, it’s hard to find schools that fit yours.”
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