Why college football’s Week 12 FBS schedule is terrible

At the FBS level, college football’s Week 12 schedule is objectively bad. There is one ranked-versus-ranked game (Michigan-Wisconsin) and a bunch of other contests that, uh, hey, at least they’re football games. There is no blockbuster on the schedule this weekend.

(There is a solution, however: watch a few of Saturday’s FCS rivalries with postseason stakes.)

Week 13 is the big one. That week’s schedule has a wide selection of the country’s most intense rivalries, and it’s when divisional races come down to the wire.

Between Thanksgiving night and Saturday, there’s the Egg Bowl, the Iron Bowl, Iowa-Nebraska, the Apple Cup, Wisconsin-Minnesota, Georgia-Georgia Tech, Notre Dame-Stanford, Arizona-Arizona State, Florida State-Florida, Oregon State-Oregon, Clemson-South Carolina, and you get the idea.

Those are all games people care about, whether they have postseason implications or not. And whether by their own doing or their conferences’, a lot of the teams’ schedules are designed to give them little more than a light jog in the week before them.

The SEC has an eight-game conference schedule, and that league’s made a habit of going light in Week 12. Alabama and Auburn play Louisiana Monroe and Mercer, respectively, the week before their meeting decides the West. South Carolina has Wofford the week before Clemson. Florida has UAB before Florida State. (This didn’t work out as planned.)

Last year, Bama and Auburn played Chattanooga and Alabama A&M, respectively, this week. Kentucky played winless Austin Peay the weak before seeing Louisville in a rivalry game UK would win. It’s all planned out, and it all goes back to 2005, when the Division I-A (now FBS) schedule added a 12th game.

The Orlando Sentinel wrote at the time:

Athletics directors and NCAA leaders like the additional game for three reasons:

It brings in revenue. For the biggest schools, such as those in the SEC and ACC, an extra game translates into an extra home game and that means at least an additional $1 million for some schools.

Florida reported it would add at least $1.8 million.

Tennessee’s figure was closer to $3 million. For schools such as UCF, the extra date provides an option to bring in a team at home or play another guaranteed game on the road. The Golden Knights have made as much as $450,000 for a road game.

Paycheck games are a two-way street. The bigger program gets an easy win, and the lower program gets money that helps fund its entire athletic department. The timing of this weekend makes it even more enticing for bigger schools to play cupcakes.

Ask Florida about Georgia Southern and South Carolina about The Citadel.

Some games were supposed to be good and are not.

LSU-Tennessee under the lights in Knoxville should be a great game. It’s got two legacy programs that haven’t played each other since 2011. They were both ranked in the preseason AP Poll. It wasn’t that hard to imagine a Vols-Tigers SEC Championship Game. But UT turned out to be terrible and fired its coach, and LSU had three losses by the first weekend in November, rendering this game way less cool than it could’ve been.

UCLA-USC at the Coliseum should be a great game. It’s a storied rivalry, both teams are talented, and both have quarterbacks who could be top-three NFL picks in April. It’s rare for two rivals to have QBs as touted as Josh Rosen and Sam Darnold. But the Bruins are 5-5, and USC was out of the Playoff race with two losses by Week 8.

If those two matchups had lived up to their potential, we’ve have three juicy games this weekend, also counting Wolverines-Badgers.

At least it’ll make Rivalry Weekend feel better when it comes around.