Is mid-week football good for college?
Nov
4
Written by:
11/4/2010 12:38 AM
Traveling throughout the great state of North Carolina this week, I have had some time in the evenings to spend in my hotel room watching some different things. Tuesday evening was pretty much exclusively spent watching election results except at some point I flipped over and saw Middle Tennessee playing Arkansas State. Wednesday evening while grabbing a bite to eat, Rutgers was playing at South Florida. Now while my day Thursday should be a bit more pleasant with the 28-27 South Florida victory (my director is a South Florida fan and season ticket holder from day one), it was a Wednesday evening. Thursday evening Georgia Tech travels to Virginia Tech for an important ACC Coastal game. Looking at the schedule, there is a college football game every evening this week Tuesday-Saturday. Looking forward to next week, the same Tuesday-Saturday schedule is in place. Is nightly football becoming a regular thing and is this really a good thing?
Now this may come as surprise to many, but I was never afraid to miss a class or two in college, especially if the professor didn’t take attendance. The kids playing in a game on Tuesday most likely left mid-day Monday and didn’t get back until early Wednesday morning. Most classes seemed to build one day’s lesson on another so if a player missed class on Monday and makes it back for his Wednesday class, most likely he is going to have missed something needed for Wednesday’s class on Monday. Tutors can try and get you caught up, but potentially that player has missed two days of class and he was present for one of those.
Thursday night college football has become accepted and anticipated by many. The fans of UNC were ecstatic to have a home game last year against Florida State. Virginia Tech gained a lot of National exposure in the 90’s by playing on Thursday evenings and continues to take advantage of that opportunity today. The Thursday night college game on ESPN has become the beginning of the sports weekend for many. This game is normally unopposed by any other major sports providing a great recruiting tool and platform for the schools playing that evening.
My biggest issue with nightly college football is playing on Fridays. Anyone playing on Saturday has to remember how special it was to playing on Friday nights. Hell, there is a television show, Friday Night Lights, that deals with this very subject. We were out last Friday evening with some friends and looked up at a television showing West Virginia playing a home football game. Do you think the high schools around Morgantown drew comparable to what they have done all season without that college game? I cannot imagine what the people in Raleigh connected to high school athletics would say if NC State were to host a Friday night game against a Florida State. Replace the town of your choice with the college of your choice and see what happens. How would the NCAA feel if the NFL decided to begin play on a random October or November Saturday? This is what colleges have done to the High Schools and why wouldn’t the NFL do this if television asked them to?
We all know that television rules the sports world now and television has hours of programming to fill. Athletic Directors at some of these smaller schools may recognize that playing on these non-traditional days allows them some national exposure they might have otherwise not received. Didn’t ECU play on a Sunday earlier this year before the NFL Season began? Maybe once Charlotte begins to play football and steps up to D1, they will take advantage of playing on a Tuesday or Wednesday evening to gain some exposure. What do you do if you are a season ticket holder to a Wednesday evening game? It is much simpler for someone to take a Friday off and schedule accordingly than potentially two days in the middle of the week. While these are normally smaller schools, I would like to see what the average attendance is for a mid-week game versus a Saturday game at these schools. Does the television exposure for your program offset the potential lost income by the empty seats of ticket holders unable to make it to that game?