By Craig Meyer / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — West Virginia’s game Saturday against Liberty was agreed to almost exactly one year before Dana Holgorsen became the school’s coach and well before the issue of Football Bowl Subdivision schools scheduling Football Championship Subdivision teams became as divisive as it is today.
The fifth-year Mountaineers coach respects his team’s upcoming opponent — spending the first three minutes of his Tuesday press conference saying as much — but he wonders how much longer FBS programs, including his own, will enter such arrangements.
“We are one of the only teams in the country that are scheduling two Power Five schools in the future,” Holgorsen said. “If you look at our future schedules, we are scheduling them. I wish that everybody else would do the same thing.
“If we are scheduling two Power Five schools and a non-Power Five school, then I wish everyone else would, too, as opposed to what some of the other schools are doing by scheduling an FCS school or two FCS schools and two other non-Power Five schools. You can figure out who I’m talking about.”
Though a number of FBS programs cram their schedules with games against lower-level opponents, West Virginia, among others, wants to move away from that model.
In an interview with the Post-Gazette in June, new athletic director Shane Lyons said he plans for two of the Mountaineers’ three non-conference games every year to be against Power Five schools. The third game, he said, ideally would be against a non-Power Five institution.
“That is going to help us when we get to that selection process, where they’ll say that our strength of schedule isn’t hurting us,” Lyons said.
West Virginia will play FCS team Youngstown State next season, but it currently has no games against FCS schools in 2017.
While it could hurt smaller colleges that receive hundreds of thousands of dollars for games against top programs, some Power Five schools are beginning to avoid FCS matchups altogether. The Big Ten, for example, passed a measure in July restricting its members from scheduling FCS opponents, beginning in 2016.
The gradual disappearance of such games, however, has no bearing on the Mountaineers’ preparation for the Flames, particularly after Power Five programs like Kansas and Washington State lost to FCS schools last week.
“It happens and it’s been happening,” defensive coordinator Tony Gibson said. “It’s not like it’s a new thing.”
