Biggest "beat 'em up" CFB cupcake payouts?

It's a major, major struggle for the lower-level DI teams to get home games, even home-and-homes against lower-level DIs. Unless you're Mississippi Valley State, you don't want your team not to play ANY home games in the non-conference so these get scheduled. It's no different than Carolina scheduling Gardner-Webb or Florida scheduling Bethune-Cookman.

The one tangible benefit to the BracketBusters was that it gave you a non-conference game the next year (or two years down the road, if you wanted to wait).

 

Florida's situation's also a little different because it plays one of its games in Jacksonville every year, so a home-and-home means giving up a seventh home game. The Gators will only have six games in Gainesville in 2013 because of their return end of a home-and-home with Miami, but that's atypical.

 

It only gives up a "home" game in Jacksonville every other year. And if Florida does it like Georgia does, it's got the schedule arranged so that it plays FSU at home in the years that it's the home team in Jacksonville. That said, it does have to play all three remaining nonconference games at home if it wants seven home games, which seems to be the new normal.

 

Northern Illinois finished the season ranked higher in the BCS than any Big Ten team, so that one might be more of an embarrassment for the MAC.

 

Your boycott didn't last very long.

 

You guys are right. Speaking of NDSU, anyone catch its semifinal game against Georgia Southern? What a doozie.

 

Apparently the Sam-EWU game was too.