Best of the Worst

As a member of the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly known as Division I-A), you are almost in a lose-lose situation playing a team from the Football Championship Subdivision (the former Division I-AA). Winning holds the slight upside that you get to put a tally in the “W” column, but even a win can be shoved in your nose by commentators and pollsters who don’t respect your weak scheduling. These games also come with a big risk, that of course being losing. There are few things more humiliating for a FBS team than losing to a school that isn’t even in your league. So here lies my question. Why, as a FBS school, would you want to schedule one of the FCS’s top teams instead of one its bottom-feeders? There seems to be no advantaged to doing so. You get no more respect from beating last year’s FCS champion than you do from beating Nowhere State. North Carolina evidently missed this memo though. You think they would have learned after last season’s heart-stopper versus FCS powerhouse Furman (ranked at #10 in CSTV’s preseason FCS poll). But this year we welcome James Madison to our home opener (ranked seventh in the same poll). Let’s just hope we don’t get a repeat of last years teeth-grinding finish to a must-beat FCS team, or worse.