I woke up this morning thinking about the South Florida's upcoming 2011 season (I wish I woke up every morning that way). After running through home and away games, it occurred to me that the out-of-conference football games are rather weak. In the weeks following the biggest challenge of the season in Notre Dame, USF plays Ball State (4-8 last year), Florida A&M (an FCS team), and UTEP (a below-average team in C-USA). USF's only non-conference BCS opponent is Miami, who will be experiencing a transition year after the firing of coach Randy Shannon.
After thinking of my disdain for this year's schedule, I began thinking about OOC schedules of previous years. I'll link each schedule to the respective season. Last year, we opened with an FCS team in Stony Brook, went to Gainesville to play Florida, and prepared for conference play with games against two bad Sun Belt teams in FAU and Western Kentucky. In the year before, USF scheduled TWO FCS teams and a game AT Western Kentucky(!) in preparation for a trip to Tallahassee. Not to mention the large sum of money USF has to pay these fluff teams to come in for a thrashing. FAMU is getting $400,000 to come in next season, while UTEP is getting $650,000. In addition to losing that kind of cash, there is no income since no fans want to go see USF put up 70 points on a team mostly of big high schoolers. What I see going on here is the schedule makers putting one marquee OOC game per season on the list, and then fluffing the rest of the schedule with cupcake teams.