What Could A Regional Schedule Look Like for Boston College in 2020-2021?
As college football continues to grapple with the 2020 season in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic, different options continue to be explored. Whether it is moving the schedule slightly back to late September/October, holding the season in the spring, or scrapping the season all together, it seems like there have been many different possibilities throw around.
One that has mentioned a few times, is regional scheduling. What about cancelling the current schedule and redoing the schedule with more regional opponents to try and prevent high cost of travel and going to places that are seeing surges of the virus.
Obviously due to logistics this would never happen if the season kicks off on time, but it may make sense if the season were to start in the spring.
In terms of media coverage, the school that hosts the game, their conference would have first crack of covering the game. For instance if BC played Penn State at Happy Valley, the Big Ten Network would cover it. This would not be considered a conference, for instance if Pitt wanted to schedule Cincinnati or Virginia Tech they could because they were closer in proximity, this regional schedule would only be for Boston College.
But if Boston College was part of this, what would be a solid schedule of regional opponents? Pat Forde's realignment reimagined gave us a good basis to start with, but we made some adjustments. Unlike Forde we are not going to remove an FCS opponent because those games are huge for those programs. However we are going to remove Holy Cross because it looks like that conference may not play this season.
Here is what we would propose for a 2020-21 regional schedule:
Option A:
Maine
Syracuse
Pittsburgh
Penn State
Rutgers
Temple
Army
Navy
Maryland
West Virginia
UConn
UMass
Or if it is safer to travel a little further they could expand the net a bit and do a schedule like this:
Option B:
Syracuse
Pittsburgh
Army
West Virginia
Virginia Tech
Virginia
Cincinnati
UConn/UMass
Maryland
Penn State
Ohio State
Rutgers
This schedule would give you the Ohio State game (finally!) and beef up the difficulty, but bring some more exciting matchups to the schedule.
Figuring out which games would be home and away would be a bit tricky. But maybe it would make sense to use Gillette as a neutral site game against UMass and UConn, and then have six home games and four away.
What do you think, would you be okay for either of these as a schedule if it ensured that we got college football in 2020-2021?
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