ATHENS — Mike Neu remembers distinctly when his athletic director came told him that Ball State would be playing Georgia in Game 2 of the 2023 season.
“That was one of the last things that happened before she left,” the Cardinals’ coach said of Beth Goetz, who is now athletic director at Iowa. “We were scheduled to play Army and had played them at home back in 2021. We beat them here, which certainly was a tough game. She told me about the possibility of Georgia buying out the Army game. It wasn’t a very lengthy conversation. Obviously, I don’t get very caught up in the scheduling piece of it, but I knew we were going to be in for a challenge.”
That is a part of schedule changes that fan bases often overlook. It wasn’t just Georgia that had to alter long-scheduled plans. It also was Ball State, Army, Oklahoma, SMU and others.
Oklahoma, which was scheduled to play the Bulldogs at home this year and in Athens in 2031 before conference realignment changed things, now has a home-and-home with SMU. The 18th-ranked Sooners (1-0) will host the Mustangs – old rivals from their Southwest Conference days – Saturday before making a return trip to Dallas in 2027.
Army picked up Delaware State, which it’s playing Saturday. And so on.
On Saturday, Georgia and Ball State will make good on their end of that hastily arranged agreement. The teams will meet for the first time in history at Sanford Stadium (noon, SEC Network).
For their trouble, the Cardinals (0-1) will receive $1.6 million. The two-time, defending national champion Bulldogs (1-0) get, well, mostly grief.
Once the 2023 schedules were posted, the national narrative quickly became that Georgia doesn’t play anybody. Never mind that their non-conference slates under Kirby Smart have included Clemson, Notre Dame, North Carolina and Oregon, not to mention Georgia Tech every year.
In the end, the Bulldogs say they did the best they could.
“We just got stuck in a situation where there really weren’t a lot of options,” Georgia Athletic Director Josh Brooks said. “Obviously, we looked at all the options. We looked into the possibility of playing (Oklahoma) in a neutral-site game. We just couldn’t work it out, and there weren’t a lot of options at that point.”
Ultimately, it was scheduling guru Dave Brown who worked it out for everybody involved. Brown was ESPN’s college football programming director for 32 years. He developed his own scheduling software and in 2015 started a company called Gridiron that brokers college football games.
“Dave Brown is a great resource for finding out who has open weeks,” Brooks said. “Thankfully he was able to find Ball State for us.”
The mandate to drop the Oklahoma game came from the SEC office in Birmingham in September last year. And Georgia wasn’t the only team that had to deal with it.
Tennessee also was scheduled to play the Sooners in 2024. That was supposed to be Oklahoma’s return game in a home-and-home series that was to begin in Norman in September 2020. But the first game was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
All that was planned before Oklahoma and Texas were granted permission to join the SEC in the summer of 2021. Their first season in the new conference originally was set for the 2025. But after a long and complicated negotiation between the SEC and ESPN, their memberships were moved up to 2024.
“The conference is directing the postponement of the Georgia at Oklahoma game in 2023 and the Oklahoma at Tennessee game in 2024 until such time that those matchups become part of the conference rotation of games in future years,” the SEC said in a press release circulated Sept. 14 last year.
The new additions also affected a Georgia-Texas, home-and-home series that was scheduled for 2027-28.
Now both the Longhorns and Sooners simply will be rolled into SEC normal schedule rotation. For the moment, that is going to remain at eight games per year, as voted on at the SEC spring meetings in Destin, Florida, in May. That means that all 16 teams will get the opportunity to play all the other members home-and-away over a four-year period.
That eased some of the initial disappointment Georgia fans felt over the cancellations.
“We have a great group of fans that loves to travel, and many of them were looking forward to going to Norman,” Brooks said. “I just had to reassure them that we’re going to have a much better scheduling model going forward.”
Now that it’s Ball State rather than Oklahoma on the docket, the No. 1-ranked Bulldogs vow to not drop their guard. Such matchups are often referred to as “guarantee games” because of guaranteed money and because the outcome rarely is in doubt.
But you’ll never hear Brooks refer to them that way, having been on the other side of such transactions. Brooks was Louisiana-Monroe’s director of football operations in 2007 when the Warhawks went to Tuscaloosa to play an Alabama team coached by Nick Saban with an assistant head coach named Kirby Smart.
The Crimson Tide were stunned in a 21-14 upset Nov. 14, 2007.
“That’s why I’ll never look at matchups like this as anything just another game,” Brooks said. “I’ve seen this from both sides.”
Georgia enters Saturday’s game as a 42.5-point favorite. The Cardinals enter it as hopeful history-makers.
Ball State had Kentucky a little worried last week when it carried a 7-3 into the second quarter and remained within striking distance of an upset until late in the third quarter of what ended as a 44-14 defeat.
“We’ve been hard at work, first and foremost, trying to get things cleaned up from Kentucky,” Neu said. “We were right on the fringe of doing some big things. … I’ve been obsessed with Georgia since we got back on Sunday.”
About the Author
