If you are a University of Toledo football fan, its newly released 2018 schedule is perfect.
A blockbuster visit from Miami (Fla.). A get-your-tickets-now date with Bowling Green ... on a Saturday ... the first week of October. ZERO weeknight home games in November.
Cue the heavenly choir.
“It’s a fantastic schedule,” UT athletic director Mike O’Brien said.
Completely agree. Probably because it is not my body and brain — empty as it is — on the line.
Come on, you didn’t think we’d let the Mid-American Conference off easy, did ya?
The league’s sellout to ESPN — and its jumble of late-season, midweek games — assures it will stick it to its two most important constituencies: The players and the communities that subsidize its product. It’s just a matter of who feels more of the pain. This season, it literally will be the Rockets (and Ball State).
For the second time in three years, Toledo is set play back-to-back conference games on short rest. The Rockets will host Buffalo on Oct. 20, a Saturday, then play at Western Michigan on Oct. 25, a Thursday, followed by a home game against Ball State on Oct. 31, a Wednesday. Ball State faces the same squeeze.
Sorry, that’s indefensible. Can you imagine if a big-time conference tried to pull that stunt? Even the NFL — which requires the occasional Sunday-to-Thursday turnaround but of course compensates the players who hate it millions of dollars — never would allow this.
The MAC can’t talk a big game on player safety in this climate, then, with a straight face, ask amateur athletes to smash each other silly three times in 12 days in the name of cheap programming for ESPN.
No one knows for sure if these accelerated turnarounds puts players at greater injury risk. (The NFL cites in-house data that suggests it does not.) But I can assure it produces beaten-down players and a sloppy, diminished product. Take every Thursday in the pros, which Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger called “miserable.” Or last year in the MAC. Toledo played one time on a short turnaround, on the road against a fully rested Ohio team. For the only time in its otherwise perfect conference season, it was physically overmatched in a 38-10 loss. The next week, Ohio played its lone league game on short rest, and was handled by a mediocre but fresher Akron team.
Consecutive games on short rest is reckless.
The MAC has fought this suggestion in the past, and will tell you it is really, really hard to build a schedule. That is true, and here’s what happened to the Rockets this year: Toledo has an open date the second week of the season. The MAC hoped to plug in a conference game there, but only Ohio — a cross-division school UT was not scheduled to play this season — was available. That left the date open, meaning Toledo has to play 11 games — the final five of which ESPN set for weekdays — in the final 11 weeks.
Toledo coach Jason Candle was not available, but I asked O’Brien — who, to be clear, has nothing to do with the midweek schedule — if the MAC is sending the message TV money and exposure trump player welfare.
He declined to dignify the question, “because everyone knows that player safety is huge.”
Sometimes, the folks above him just have a strange way of showing it. As usual, a few dollars talks, conscience walks.
Contact David Briggs at: dbriggs@theblade.com, 419-724-6084, or on Twitter @DBriggsBlade.
First Published February 25, 2018, 8:53 p.m.
