If there is one man responsible for the sumptuous buffet of college football on the menu for this weekend, it would be Dave Brown, who has been to college football scheduling what LeBron James is to the Cleveland Cavaliers -- the one person indispensable to the subject at hand. Brown may have a low profile outside the business of the sport. But few people in intercollegiate athletics can get a phone call to an athletic director or head football coach returned faster than Brown.
Brown for years was in charge of scheduling college football games for ABC and ESPN (he now is a consultant on college football scheduling with proprietary software that makes the complicated business much easier for his clients). As such, the remarkable array of nonconference games during Kickoff Week -- including Alabama-USC, LSU-Wisconsin, Texas A&M-UCLA, Georgia-North Carolina, Clemson at Auburn, Notre Dame at Texas and Florida State-Ole Miss -- are by and large the work of Brown and the staff with whom he worked at ESPN.
"People will always put themselves out there and play one really big game," Brown said. "That's it in a nutshell. That's what happened."
Well, that's not exactly what happened. Take LSU and Wisconsin playing Saturday at Lambeau Field (ABC, 3:30 p.m. ET), the home of the Green Bay Packers. They originally were scheduled to play next season. The Badgers had been scheduled to play Virginia Tech in Week 2. Virginia Tech agreed to move a home-and-home with Wisconsin to 2019-20, 11 years later than the two programs first agreed to play. By the way, that freed up the Hokies to play Tennessee in the Battle at Bristol in Week 2. Tennessee was supposed to play Nebraska on Sept. 10. However, that home-and-home is now scheduled for 2026-27.
Your head starting to hurt yet?
"We had to move around a lot of things to get it done," Brown said.
There are logistics and there is desire. A tip of the hat to the College Football Playoff is necessary here. The CFP selection committee's emphasis on schedule strength has dissolved the objections of coaches against playing difficult nonconference opponents. It can be like feeding spinach to children -- not many of them ask for seconds.
"You can't ask people to do something that's over and above what everybody else is doing," Brown said. "Everybody else is playing one tough nonconference game? That's what you can ask people to do."
You call and you ask, you listen and you call back, you propose and maybe you wheedle. You call and you ask again. Brown has earned the trust of coaches to the point that they would call him to complain when they didn't like ESPN's coverage, which was not at all his bailiwick and put him in an awkward position. But he is the first to recognize the limits of what he can achieve.
"They really want seven home games," Brown said. "Out of 12 games, with four on the road in the league, you are dealing with a pretty fixed set of scheduling parameters. You can't call somebody up and say, 'Do you mind going down to five home games?' You don't even ask those kinds of questions."
So you figure out which buttons to push. Texas A&M wanted to showcase the newly expanded Kyle Field. UCLA is coming to College Station, the first time the teams will play in the regular season in 61 years.
The Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, which lost its ACC-SEC matchup when it became part of the New Year's Six bowls, wanted to bring the two leagues together in its Kickoff Game. Hello, North Carolina and Georgia this year (and Alabama and Florida State next year).
And the Crimson Tide wanted to open against a nonconference opponent at a neutral site, and is doing so for the fifth consecutive year (Michigan, Virginia Tech, West Virginia, Wisconsin, USC). Note that list of opponents completes the full set of other Power 5 conferences.
You put the puzzle together, and sometimes you get a piece of art that hangs in a museum. That's what Brown did for the opening week of the 2016 season.