The New Threat to Fans' Fun

© Copyright 2013, Paul Kislanko

A funny thing happened on the way to the bank. Although more popular (and profitable) than ever, big-time college football is actually seeing a reduction in average attendance. It's not hard to find the root cause of the paradox: fans aren't going to spend hundreds or thousands on a weekend to see Enormous State U scrimmage against FCS College when they can catch it on pay-per-view or the local sports bar.

This year only 19 of 125 FBS teams play a 12-game FBS schedule. That's in the same range as the number of FCS games back in the day when a non-opponent could only be counted once every four years.

Surprisingly (OK, not) instead of the obvious "schedule better interconference games" approach, the Big Boys are looking to "solve" the problem by scheduling more conference games. I suppose that's an inevitable step on the road to becoming "NFL Lite" with little interregional play of consequence until the playoffs, but I don't believe it will lead to a better product.

By the end of the regular season all 7,750 team-pairs will be connected by no worse than an A plays B plays C plays D Plays Z chain. The 696 games are the paths of length 1. These translate into 15,528 A-plays-B-plays-C paths of length 2 (for 1392 of those A and C are the same!), 173,256 A-plays-B-plays-C-plays-D chains of length 3 (5460 to the same team) and 1,933,614 4-step paths (66,600 with the same beginning and ending team.)

Taking out the paths that begin and end at the same team and accounting for the fact that A→B and B→A are really the same, the 7,750 team-pairs are connected by 1,025,169 paths of lengths 1, 2, 3 or 4.

These paths are what make computer comparisons of teams that haven't played and have no common opponents possible - the majority of that million data are the length 4 paths. This is why adding games within a set of teams that already has a large number of length 1 and 2 connections is not good: most of the length 3 and 4 paths contribute little additional data.

These graphs show how most of the weakly-connected team-pairs involve teams from the two conferences that play a 9-game conference schedule, and the most weakly connected team-pairs involve one team from each of them. The one on the left shows a color code representing the number of paths of length 4 that connect the row-team to the column team. The one on the right is coded to show the length of the shortest path between the row team and column team regardless of how many paths that long there are.

# paths of length 4
# paths of length 4
Shortest path for team-pair
Shortest pathlength for team-pair

The bands of silver in the chart on the left (and concentrations of fuschia and green in the one on the right) mostly correspond to the Big 12 and Pac 10 teams. Connectivity is also weak between the Big 10 and SEC/Conference USA, and there's an absence of games between MAC teams and Mountain West teams.

Should the ACC and (especially) SEC choose this route, we'd be most of the way to a four 16-team conference structure with eight division winners providing the first interconference play in round one of the playoffs.


Interconference Games

There are the same number (48) of interconference games involving "BCS conference" teams but alas, 15 of those involve AAC (former Big East expanded to include part of CUSA) and three more BCS vs FCS games (66 vs 63.)

Home→
↓Road
AACACCB10B12NDP12SECCUSAIndMACMWSBC
AAC03110231210
ACC31101414000
B1021114001000
B1210010031000
ND01201000010
P1201102102040
SEC24130100101
CUSA38120173332
Ind24212213273
MAC321320052211
MW02400712501
SBC12050082310
non-FBS916108091475121010

Leaving out the AAC, the "Big 5" collectively play 33 games between themselves and 57 against non-FBS opponents. All of the latter at home, of course.