If you’ve been paying attention to the college football schedule, you’ve probably noticed the abundance of Friday night games. Just about every conference is throwing at least one Friday game on the schedule, some of them between fairly well-known teams. Virginia and Colorado, for example, will play two games on Friday night before the year ends, and every week this season will have at least one FBS game on Friday.
That’s a nice thing for the TV networks and the average fan watching on television. But for the players, coaches and the fans as a whole, it’s really not a good thing.
In the name of full disclosure, I wrote this while watching a Friday night college football game, so I’m certainly not blameless in this. I’ll watch just about any game, any time, so it doesn’t make much sense on the surface why I’d point out any problems here. But here’s why I think Friday Night football traditions are best left to high schools.
Ruined Rivalry Nights
In Indiana, there’s not a rivalry between Indiana and Indiana State. The schools are only about 60 miles apart by car, but they’re worlds apart athletically. So the schools don’t play often, and when they do, the game must take place in Bloomington because FBS schools cannot visit FCS opponents. And in September, that game did in fact find its way to the schedule.
That’s a fun thing for both schools, as well as the entire state, as it gives two different fan bases in Indiana a chance to come together for one night to enjoy a local matchup. Or it would have been, had television not forced it to Friday night.
That decision meant the Hoosiers and Sycamores suddenly had to compete with all of the high schools in southern and western Indiana for attention. In a case of exceptionally poor scheduling, both high schools in Bloomington happened to play road games at both Terre Haute (Indiana State) high schools that night, taking every high school football fan in both cities away from Bloomington. What should have been a celebration of football in Indiana instead became a missed opportunity for two programs who need help.
Virginia and Maryland faced a similar situation this year. The Cavaliers and Terrapins had a rivalry back when Maryland played in the ACC, and the schools finally decided to schedule each other. But the game at Maryland Stadium came on a Friday night, taking attendance away from high schools in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. These games are supposed to be for the fans, but they became for television instead. And that begged the question of what the point was of scheduling these games in the first place.
Locking Out High School Athletes
There’s another big reason college teams shouldn’t play on Friday nights: it keeps high school football players from experiencing the games. There are only so many weekends in a high school athlete’s life, and even fewer where the local college team happens to play at home. When a college team gives up its chance to play on Saturday for a paycheck, it sacrifices the chance to let prospective athletes take a look at their program.
Recruiting is a long process, and it often starts with a high school player getting a chance to see a game in person. When a player sees a game and can experience the atmosphere of a lively campus and stadium, they can fall in love with the school. But they’re not going to give up one of their own games to go see someone else play, no matter how much they might be interested in the action. As long as high school players keep having games scheduled on Friday nights, it’s going to be harder for them to make those connections to a nearby program. And locking those athletes out only makes it easier for them to look at a different school.
Friday Night Volleyball: An Alternate Solution
College athletes on Friday nights aren’t going away anytime soon. Television networks need content in the streaming era, and they’re going to do whatever they have to in order to get it. But there’s nothing that says that content has to be a football game.
Volleyball can be an excellent alternative to football on Friday nights. It’s a sport that’s rapidly growing in popularity, and while it’s not going to draw 90,000 people most nights outside of Nebraska, it’s an exciting, fast-paced sport that’s attractive for television. Most people who tune in to watch Charlotte play Florida Atlantic on a Friday night just want to watch a college sporting event, and selling them on a top volleyball doubleheader could be a great way to bring new viewers to the sport while keeping high school games on Fridays well protected.
Plus, high school volleyball isn’t tied to any one night on the schedule the way high school football is. Volleyball isn’t a sport that takes several days to recover from a game; it’s a fast-paced, highly athletic game, but it’s the kind of physical action that the body recovers from fairly rapidly. High school volleyball players could play their match on Wednesday or Thursday and then go check out a nearby college match on Friday night.
That gives television the content it needs, while making sure that football teams can keep their sport open to the next generation of athletes. It’s a win for everyone.