Building a schedule takes patience, luck

Steve Guiremand

Tuesday, March 26, 2002 | 10:57 a.m.

Season tickets for the 2002 football season went on sale at UNLV this week.

It's an attractive home slate which includes games against perennial Big Ten heavyweight Wisconsin as well as Kansas of the powerful Big 12 Conference and the annual Fremont Cannon battle with in-state rival Nevada-Reno.

But putting together a nice non-conference schedule for a college football team these days requires vision, patience and a whole lot of luck. That's because most of the schedules are put together six to 10 years in advance.

"A couple of things that I learned about (football scheduling) is that football is a whole lot different than basketball where you go year-to-year," UNLV senior associate athletic director Jerry Koloskie said.

"Right now we're filled out (in football) until 2008 and 2009. That's customary in college football. Our conference recently sent out a schedule where some teams were booking until 2012. In football, it's important to lock in early."

But the early bird doesn't always catch the worm when it comes to scheduling heavyweights such as Nebraska, Notre Dame or Penn State.

"Let's just say the top 50 schools in the country -- the Penn States, the Nebraskas -- most of their schedules are predicated by TV," Koloskie said. "And to get a Notre Dame or a Nebraska to come here would be pretty farfetched. You'd have to guarantee them at least $300,000."

Koloskie said Wisconsin, which also garners a $300,000 guarantee because of its loyal fan following, is traveling to Las Vegas this year in large part due to the influence of former University regent and Badger football star Tom Weisner.

"That connection really helped to pull it off," Koloskie said. "It would be hard to bring in a Top 20 football program like that unless you had some type of connection like that."

One reason for that is that Sam Boyd Stadium has just 36,800 seats, which the Badgers probably could fill themselves if they were allotted that many tickets. Compare that to schools such as Michigan, Penn State and Tennessee, which all have stadiums that regularly sell out more than 100,000 seats.

It doesn't make sense for those schools to play a road game in a much smaller venue that will end up costing them several million dollars in lost revenue.

"If we had a stadium that had 50,000 or 60,000 seats, we'd be in a better position to offer a bigger guarantee and bring in those type of schools," Koloskie said.

"I'd love to play a Notre Dame," UNLV head coach John Robinson said. "You'd like to play a nationally known team like that here. But we need to make our stadium bigger and our program bigger to attract a team like that."

Scheduling philosophy has changed since UNLV hired Robinson as head coach in December 1998 as well as with the refurbishment of Sam Boyd Stadium, which was completed a few months later. UNLV now tries to schedule more of a 50-50 mix of home and away games to give the Rebels a better chance of contending for a postseason bowl berth and also make its season ticket package more attractive.

"Teams that are have-not teams are looking to balance the budget and therefore schedule way over their head," said Robinson, who also took over athletic director duties on Jan. 1. "That's a very dangerous thing. That gets coaches fired. You wind up playing teams that are better than you and it doesn't matter if you play valiantly or not. You lose, you lose. It hurts your chances of going to a bowl and all of those things.

"This year we get Wisconsin and Kansas at home and Oregon State, which is supposed to be very good, and Toledo on the road," Robinson said. "We've got to open with four tough games and then our rival game (Oct. 5 vs. Nevada-Reno). It's a very difficult schedule."

But at least three of those five games are at home. In 1998, when UNLV went 0-11 under Jeff Horton, the Rebels played three of their first four games at Northwestern, Wisconsin and Colorado State.

"One of the things we historically did before Sam Boyd was restored was to play a lot of games on the road so we could get a big guarantee," Koloskie said. "Now with the stadium refurbished we're in position to play more home-and-home series with teams.

"We're also trying to emphasize opening the season with a home game or two. It's tough for any team to open a season with three straight road games at places like Tennessee and Wisconsin. You start your season 0-3, not too many people are going to be excited about going to a game the rest of the year."

So Koloskie has locked into home-and-home series with opponents such as Alabama-Birmingham and Utah State in upcoming years. He also hit the jackpot when he got the Pac-10's top football program and Robinson's alma mater, Oregon, to agree to play at Sam Boyd Stadium in 2006 after the Rebels visit Eugene in 2005.

Other future home games include Hawaii (2003), which returns its 2000 game played at Aloha Stadium; Mississippi (2006), which hosted UNLV in 2000 in Oxford, Miss.; and Wisconsin (2007), which will also host the Rebels in 2003 and 2004.

"Wisconsin loves to come here and their fans love to come here," Robinson said. "We'll be putting in extra bleachers everywhere (for this year's Aug. 31 game) so we can get every person we can into the stadium."