Football scheduling an ongoing juggling routine as Chants move to FBS

The Coastal Carolina football program’s new reality as a soon-to-be FBS member is already taking shape in the form of future scheduling agreements with more nationally recognized programs and bigger guaranteed paydays.

The Chanticleers have reached home-and-home agreements with Massachusetts and Alabama-Birmingham for the 2017 and 2018 seasons and have signed on for a $1.1 million contract to play at UCLA in the 2023 season.

That said, the more immediate task for the school’s athletic leadership remains the jigsaw puzzle that is the program’s 2016 schedule as the Chants start their two-year transition to the FBS without any conference games next fall.

Coastal Carolina athletic director Matt Hogue said all of the Big South schools aside from Kennesaw State have now agreed to retain the Chants on the schedule next season, but there is still maneuvering to be done to make that work and at least one additional game still to find.

Hogue said as it’s shaping up, though, the Chants will have more home games next fall than ever before – perhaps as many as eight – and he hopes to have all the pieces in place by next month.

“There’s a couple more things we still need to get ironed out. I feel good that we’re very close to having 11 games wrapped up, but at this point we’re waiting on some confirmations and some date changes so there’s still a few more logistics we’ve got to get ironed out,” he said. “But we’re very close, we’re in good shape compared to where our schedule was looking two months ago. We’re in great shape now compared to then. … Right now I’m a lot less stressed than I was in October.”

In addition to the five Big South schools set to keep Coastal Carolina on the schedule for one more year – those being Gardner-Webb, Liberty, Monmouth, Presbyterian and Charleston Southern, which has a preliminary agreement contingent on the Chants shifting another game to free up a certain weekend – the Chants have non-conference games set with Florida A&M, Furman, Central Connecticut State, Bryant and Hampton for next fall.

In looking toward the future, meanwhile, Hogue reiterated that Coastal Carolina’s move to the Sun Belt Conference and the FBS immediately started opening new doors for the program in scheduling.

The $1.1 million guarantee payout from UCLA is twice as big as any the Chants ever received as an FCS program, and that will be a new revenue stream the athletic department will utilize moving forward.

“I think from the day we announced we were moving to FBS and going to the Sun Belt, it already brought us more into scope for a lot of schools,” Hogue said. “We immediately began getting inquiries and feelers from folks about playing. Some of those, like in the case of UCLA, made sense and we moved forward with that; others simply don’t work because you don’t have the dates or maybe the terms didn’t work the way we wanted. But there’s no question that our status change has changed the way we’re viewed as a potential opponent.”

Coastal Carolina will start playing a Sun Belt schedule in 2017 – although it won’t be eligible for any bowl games until the following year – and Hogue said that will leave the Chants four non-conference games to fill each year.

He said he will take input from the Sun Belt on its collective scheduling goals as well as looking at the common model for Group of Five schools (the collective name for the non-Power Five FBS conferences) of including one payout game with an FCS opponent, a couple of home-and-home series with similar programs and at least one guaranteed money game with a Power Five foe.

“What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to sort of marry a lot of different things,” Hogue said. “You’re trying to first overall achieve your competitive philosophy, which would lend itself to home-and-home games with similar schools, other Group of Five schools perhaps. … We’re also trying to utilize some of these games to help us with finances and budget, and we don’t want to put ourselves in a position where we’re on the road too much.”

As for those agreements already in the works, the Chants are expected to travel to UAB in 2017 and host the Blazers in 2018 while hosting UMass in 2017 and going on the road the next year.

It’s all a juggling routine right now, though, as the Chants play catch-up with so many programs having their football schedules mostly set several years in advance.

“We’re making calls, we’re sending emails, we’re grinding everyday to work on possibilities,” Hogue said. “FBS schedules are set so far in advance, I’ve had schools I’ve reached out to tell me that they’re locked down until 2023 or 2024 and that’s not uncommon. So there is a slight amount of catch-up that we have to do. The good news is we only have to get four games scheduled [each year] as we transition into the Sun Belt and have a pretty healthy conference schedule. So already in ’17 and ’18 we haven’t left ourselves with much work to do, although there is some work there. We will consider playing an FCS opponent once we get up and transition so that would come into play as well. So we’re not too far off on having ’17 and ’18 complete and we’ve already started working on ’19 and ’20 and having conversations. We just don’t have anything that’s locked in at this point.

“But yeah, you spend a lot of time calling folks, reaching out, determining who maybe is looking for a game, who needs a game. It’s an ever evolving prospect and it’s also a very fickle science. If scheduling was something where you could walk in the store and reach on the shelf and say ‘I want this team on this date for this year’ we would have no headaches. But unfortunately, there’s just so many different variables that comes into play. Some tangible, just the physical dates you want to be able to work out, and then there’s some intangible, whether you can convince an opponent to want to play you based on recent success we’ve had. All of that kind of goes into the pot and you try to come up with something that makes sense.”

This story was originally published January 8, 2016 at 5:28 PM with the headline "Football scheduling an ongoing juggling routine as Chants move to FBS."