To me, it would make sense to give everyone the same off week after week 6. This would be fair to the teams and give the players a “refreshing” start to the second half of the season. And if a game is cancelled for bad weather, it would make it easier to reschedule during everyone’s off week.
That’s like trying to design an even playing field…which many schools and the NCAA aren’t very interested in creating.
Plus, the networks would never agree to having an entire weekend with no college football on TV.
This is a silly thing to even bring up. Teams schedule their out of conference games 3, 4, 5 years ahead of time and then the conferences schedule around that. The conferences each have their own tv contracts. If the conferences don’t give weekly games worthy of national television, the next tv contract won’t be as lucrative.
So now you want the NCAA to step in the way of something that has been working this way for 50 years and say that all teams must schedule within certain dates so the conferences can schedule a break at the same time and cost everyone more tv dollars? Would the teams also be forced to have no practices during this week?
We have Lamar, Texas State, UConn, SMU and Tulane on our schedule. Most top 25 programs would consider that 5 breaks.
In fact, when looking at our schedule, it looks like the conference was setting us up for a run with UCF at home, bye and Tulane at home to lead into our Louisville game. Our toughest game in conference was going to be at Navy and they gave us extra days to prepare by having us play on a Thursday the week before.
NCAA only steps in when it comes to the playoff and NY6. It’s up to the conferences to build their own schedules and they have to work around a school’s OOC schedule.
For example, do we play SMU after their bye week if we don’t have the Louisville game late in the season? Maybe. Just don’t know.