Every BYU football game is exciting, regardless of who they're playing, and this week's game at Colorado St is no exception. Still, of all the games on BYU's schedule, this one isn't exactly the one that Cougar fans have circled on their calendar. It's a G6 team that finished 2-10 last year, and BYU's won seven straight against them. Even I ranked this game as the 11th most exciting game on BYU's schedule. And yet somehow, it's a road game?
Lame, right?
Actually, no. I think it's awesome.
The conventional wisdom has always been that when a bigger school plays a smaller school, they play it at the bigger school's stadium, and then the bigger school pays the smaller school a small fraction of the revenue. Maybe occasionally, you schedule a 2 for 1 where the bigger school gets two home games, and the smaller school get one.
(Or, if you're a certain team that starts with 'N' and ends with 'otre Dame', you schedule a 4 for 2 against team that starts with 'B' and ends with 'YU', play the first two games at your stadium, then ghost the other team's athletic director for almost a decade, then finally agree to schedule a game on a neutral site significantly closer to them than to you... only to decide that you get to sell the majority of the tickets. So it was basically a 3 for 0.)
And for some Power 4 teams, even scheduling a 2 for 1 with a Group of 6 team is beneath them. According to fbsschedules.com, of the 67 P4 teams, only 10 of them are playing a G6 team on the road this season. Five years ago, back when the Pac-12 was still a power conference, Reddit poster TepigLover2 made a series of posts where they listed the last time each Power 5 team had played a team from a non-major conference on the road, and there were five teams who hadn't done so since the 20th century, including Ohio St whose last road game against a team from a non-major conference was in 1953 against Penn from the Ivy League.
Now, to be fair, not all of this can be chalked up to snobbishness. Most of the time, it's more lucrative for both teams when the game is played in the bigger stadium. But still, if you're a fan of a G6 team, you'd probably like to occasionally have a P4 team come to your stadium because it's really exciting when they do. Plus, while I do agree with most people that there really is a significant gap between the P4 and the G6, I think the size of that gap is often exaggerated in a way that's harmful to G6 teams, and I think the fact that P4 teams have home-field advantage in most of their games against G6 teams is a small part of the reason people think the gap is bigger than it is.
But then there's BYU.
In each of the first four seasons that BYU has been in the Big 12, they have played exactly one G6 opponent, and this is the third consecutive season where that game has been a road game. Last year, they played at East Carolina, and the year before that, they played at Wyoming. And none of these games have been part of a 2-for-1 or anything like that. Each of them is or was part of a standard home-and-home series. After BYU's home game against Wyoming in 2022, people were arguing they should cancel the 2024 game to make way for their Big 12 schedule, but according to the Deseret News, Tom Holmoe said he was keeping that game out of principle.
Now, the one time BYU has played a home game against a G6 opponent since joining the Big 12 was in 2023 when they played Sam Houston, and that was not part of a home-and-home. But that was Sam Houston's first season as an FBS team, so it felt kind of like an FCS game (even though it ended up being surprisingly close) and it was scheduled only one year in advance in response to Tennessee cancelling their return trip to Provo.
Prior to that game, the last time BYU had played a home game against a G5 team that wasn't part of a series where their opponent got at least as many home games as they did was 2020 when they had four such games against Louisiana Tech, UTSA, Texas St, and Western Kentucky. But that was the notorious COVID year where BYU was literally scheduling games during the season.
Prior to that, the last time BYU had a home game against a G5 opponent that wasn't part of a series where their opponent didn't have at least as many home games as them was 2012 when they played Idaho in Provo for the second straight year. They even played a game at Georgia Southern in 2021 without scheduling a return trip to Provo. Georgia Southern!
Now granted, BYU was an independent for most of that time, not a P5 team, but many people saw them as a P5 team to the extent that conferences that required each of their schools to schedule at least one non-conference game against a P5 team were counting BYU as a P5 team. According to my count, while BYU was independent, they were 15-17 against P5 teams and 56-24 against G5 teams, so I would say they were competing closer to a P5 level than a G5 level. Plus, they had a P5-size stadium. So you could definitely argue that they had a right to do buy games or 2-for-1's with G5 teams, but they didn't.
At this point, you may be thinking, "What about FCS teams? BYU always schedules those games at home." Yes, but who doesn't? According to lordgilberto's response to a post on Reddit, the last time an FBS team played a road game against an FCS opponent was 2018 when Coastal Carolina played at Campbell, and that game was initially scheduled as a home game for Coastal Carolina and was only moved to Buies Creek because of a hurricane. So if BYU's being snobbish by only playing FCS teams at home, then so is everybody.
The beautiful thing about this is that BYU's repaying the kindness they were given when they were in the Mountain West Conference. In ten of the twelve seasons that BYU was in the MWC, BYU had at least one home game against a team from a major conference. I bet the size of LaVell Edwards Stadium had something to do with that, but that doesn't take away from how lucky BYU was and how much they're giving back by doing the same favor for G5 and G6 teams.
Speaking of kindness, as I always say at the end of every article, remember to be kind to the officials.
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