Why these college football teams are meeting 4 times in 2 regular seasons

Six of the 130 FBS teams don’t play in conferences. Of those schools:

Then there are three independents that need to scrap to find opponents: UMass, Liberty, and New Mexico State, the latter two both in their first year as FBS indies. The Flames are just up from FCS, and NMSU’s on its own after the Sun Belt forced it out.

Football independence brings a few challenges. One of the biggest is scheduling.

They’re doing it in both 2018 and ‘19, with two games on each campus.

New Mexico State athletic director Mario Moccia has never heard of it happening before. Neither had I.

“It’s not much more than a marriage of convenience,” he told SB Nation.

The schools are paying each other even money for their visits. No one gets anything out of the four-game, two-year series other than having games.

After NMSU took a few months to sort out its post-Sun Belt plans, the Aggies needed games. They reached the deal with Liberty about a year later.

“I wouldn’t say we jumped out of the gate on scheduling like probably could have,” Moccia says. “So in the early years of scheduling this year, next year, et cetera, there was much more of a need to get games quick. I think when you get into 2020, 2021, ’22, and beyond, you can be a little bit more strategic, and people have a little bit more openings. A lot of people were full up, so it certainly helped both of us out.”

When the Sun Belt made clear NMSU would have to go, the Aggies had two games scheduled for 2019, against New Mexico and UTEP. Scheduling Liberty twice that year was key in getting a full schedule. In the second year, the Aggies are playing three Power 5 road games.

The Aggies view five games per year on their schedule as fairly set in stone: two at Power 5 teams to get what Moccia calls “SEC money” — usually in the high hundred-thousands to low millions — plus one against an FCS team and one each against UNM and UTEP. But without an eight- or nine-game league schedule, there’s more to fill. NMSU really wants to win six Division I games and play in a bowl, as it finally did in 2017 after 57 years off.

“We’re always gonna play five that we can get,” Moccia said. “It’s getting those other seven that were a little more difficult. And that’s why, God, when you play Liberty, boom, now you’re down to five. It makes the bite of the apple much more manageable.”

Liberty’s not in that different a boat. The Flames announced in February 2017 that they’d jump to FBS, giving them a little more than a year to set most of a 2018 schedule.

In NMSU’s case, the Aggies have had to agree to games Moccia concedes they have an “infinitesimally small opportunity” to win. He didn’t want to schedule four games in two years against Liberty, and he didn’t want to throw in a trip to Washington State in 2019, when the Aggies are also facing likely blowouts against Bama and Ole Miss.

“Sometimes you have to do things you don’t wanna do when you’re an independent to get other games,” he said. “As much as I can say, ‘Hey, we got so and so,’ and I don’t wanna mention it because they’ll think I’m being rude, but it’s like ‘Oh, crap, three Power 5 games.’ I mean, that’s brutal for a school like ours, but a lot of it is because of finances.”

NMSU and Liberty are capable of beating each other. One or the other could drastically improve its chances at making a bowl in these two years, and success might mean a little more money ... so it doesn’t have to do this again.