So I see the usual suspects down South are up in arms again about how Vandy should be playing Middle Tennessee. This is hogwash, and rather worse than hogwash, for reasons I will now enumerate.
Let’s start with the obvious one: whenever your opponent is giving you advice, it would generally be a very stupid thing to take it. That is a fact of life and it’s one too many people (especially media types) don’t pay enough attention to. The fact that the Blue Raiders think a game with Vandy would be a good thing for the Dores DOES NOT MEAN that it would be a good thing for the Dores.
Second fact: Vanderbilt is in the SEC East, which might be the hardest division in sports right now. Let’s do the rundown, courtesy of the AP:
Kentucky (8)
Florida (9)
South Carolina (11)
Georgia (12)
Tennessee (NR)
Go back and look at that again. Four of Vandy’s five divisional rivals are RANKED IN THE TOP 12. Add in Auburn, Alabama, and Tennessee, and seven of Vandy’s eight conference games are against teams that are either in the top 25 or have been there at least once this year. At this point, we could schedule the Poor Claire Sisters and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and nobody could say a damn word about it.
(As an aside, it’s a show that the AP has Steve Superior’s Gamecocks at 11 and the coaches’ poll has them at 18. Proof, if any were needed, that the coaches’ poll isn’t worth the paper I used to wipe over it. But I digress.)
Anyway: we’re NOT a top 25 team. We may never be a top 25 team in my lifetime. We don’t even have the luxury of the pity vote that Spurrier throws Duke every season. We are going to struggle like hell just to clear .500 every single season. We’re not competing for a conference title, we’re not contending for a BCS berth, we’re not going for a national championship. We’re just trying to break the cycle.
So when we have those four non-con berths to fill every year, there is only one criterion: WILL THIS GAME CONTRIBUTE TO RAISING THE PROFILE OF THE FOOTBALL PROGRAM?
In the case of a Michigan, sure. Absolutely. Play Michigan in Ann Arbor on ESPN, and you get the opportunity to be seen nationwide, to hang tough the whole way, to make people give you a second look. You don’t think Vandy could pull the same thing that some I-AA school seems to do annually now? I guarantee you we’d beat Stanford if we played them tomorrow. In Palo Alto. You play games like that, you stand a chance of a good loss, one that makes you look better for having made the effort and gives you something you can take away.
So if it won’t be a good loss, it had better be a sure win, because if you want a bowl game, you need six of them. Six wins to play in December, take a trip, be the only game on TV while kids throw the snow around (or the leaves and mud, whatever). You can probably get one win every year in conference – beat Ole Miss, or Kentucky, or maybe get an upset off Georgia or Tennessee. If you’re really lucky, you can string two of them together. But go back and look at that list of teams again. Tennessee tends to be ranked. And if Alabama and Auburn aren’t there, those seats go to Mississippi State (ask Auburn or Bama what pushovers Croom’s boys are). Or Arkansas. Or LSU. It would take a miracle to piece together three conference wins out of eight. Which means that out of those four non-conference games, you basically need to win exactly four. Every profile-elevating loss you risk means that you’re probably putting your six-win bowl season in a blender and pressing PUREE.
What, then, does Vandy have to gain by playing MTSU? Nothing. “Oh, it’s a natural rivalry!” So why aren’t they playing Memphis or UT every year? Proximity isn’t rivalry, or why doesn’t UAB play Samford every year? Hell, why doesn’t UAB play Auburn again? “It’ll build interest!” No it won’t. MTSU might someday be the 3rd most prominent college program in Tennessee, but probably not, and once you get more than 30 miles outside Nashville, nobody else gives a damn. “Vandy’s scared to play us!” I wouldn’t say scared, but it hasn’t gone well lately – but here’s the point: if there is an outside shot of a bowl, of a non-losing season, of breaking the biggest streak of futility in major college football – is it worth taking a chance on throwing that away for the sake of playing a non-BCS team from nearby just so they can say they played against an SEC team?
HELL no. If you said yes, take a cinder block and drop it on your head. Vandy gains NOTHING by playing MTSU except a handful of gate receipts and the opportunity to piss away a shot at something approximating success.
Maybe someday when the Commodores have been to more than one bowl game in a generation – hell, maybe when we can go less than a decade between winning seasons – when one loss isn’t enough to completely derail the program for the year, we can consider changing our scheduling for the sake of 30 extra seconds on the Channel 4 highlights and another 5000 single-game tickets. But the program keeps hovering right there at 5 wins, with something always bouncing just the wrong way to prevent 6. Until we break through on a semi-permanent basis, it’s not worth risking a single shot at Big Six on Little Middle.