I want to see 10 P5 games on the football slate each year. I have a notion that a "down and out program" like say UNC should step it up to 11, and one pastry. Sign'em up and play serious P5 teams. It would help attendance and help getting noticed and might help recruiting. Yes, you might miss out going 6-6, but so what?
Imagine UNC played Oregon and Wisconsin and Texas A&M OOC one year. Excitement.
The top level teams have to consider whether an additional P5 would knock them out of the top four.
But play ten anyway. That only means one more for the B1G.
I have to disagree with you here a little.
Simply put, there's not much excitement in losing. There is excitement in a big win, but not in bad records. If UNC played that schedule, we'd talk about it all offseason. Tar Heel fans would grow tired of hearing about it. And if they went 0-3, no one would care about the team the rest of the year. If they went 1-2, there'd be some hope because the ACC is drek. If they go 2-1, well, they were a good team all along.
I've watched this sport for a long time, and it's dawned on me that as much as more nuanced fans such as those on here might appreciate the joys of a hard fought loss to a good team, more folks want wins and a team that feels like it has hope. And an understated part of the structure of college football is that hope gets drawn out a little bit longer.
Allow me to explain.
If my team is a so-so P5, I might still get a 2-1 or 2-2 start. This might just be inflating things, but one third of the way through the season, I'm more engaged. If I have a 1-3 squad or 0-4, might as well start basketball. And if I root for a G5, I might start 1-2 or 0-3, but I have the hope of my team playing more teams at its level.
As a TV watcher, I wouldn't mind more P5 vs P5, but frankly, I have a remote and can only watch five or so things at once anyway. As an in-stadium attendee, I don't necessarily mind the idea of seeing a team I like do good things.
Finebaum had a kind of loaded question after some rumbling about the South Carolina schedule. He asked if fans would rather have a soft 9-3 or a hard 7-5. Maybe the erudite fan wants the latter, but most would take the former. A 9-3 team has more buzz than a 7-5 one, in recruiting, in attendance, all that. Shoot, Clemson had one big non-conference and whipped a lot of soft underbelly of the ACC for a few years, and you know what we called them, 10- or 11-win teams.
One thing that is interesting is we'll have an experiment of this. WVU has 11 P5 games through 2024.