Why your Power 5 team is playing at some mid-major stadium

College football is about two things: money and wins. Teams have found different ways to schedule with both in mind.

In the first three weeks of the 2018 season, 16 college football teams from power conferences will play road games against mid-majors. None of them is as jarring as when Miami showed up in Boone, North Carolina, to play Appalachian State a few years ago, but still: Why are the Hurricanes playing at Toledo? What’s Maryland doing at Bowling Green?

The guarantee game — AKA “the cupcake game” — is a longtime staple. For the right price, Power 5 teams don’t have to leave their campuses.

These are simple, one-off arrangements. A team from a power conference pays a six-figure (or occasionally seven-figure) sum to a lesser team for a visit. These payouts range from $200,000 or $300,000 for an FCS team to $500,000 to $1 million-ish for a mid-major from the AAC, Mountain West, or the like. The power team is supposed to get an easy win, and the smaller program gets money that makes up a big chunk of its athletic budget.

“Obviously the biggest [reason] is to help your budget, no question about that,” Russ Huesman, a longtime FCS head coach who’s now at Richmond, says. “And anybody who says that they play them for any [other] reason are probably not telling the truth.”

Other coaches have cited a recruiting bounce. It’s cool for an FCS player to play a game in an SEC stadium and to get the scouting exposure that goes along with it.

But the dollar sums are expensive, so Power 5 teams sometimes go outside the box to achieve their goals of money and wins.

One newer-school approach: Schedule a two-for-one.

It works for Power 5 teams because there’s less cost involved. Let’s take for example a series between Oklahoma State and South Alabama. According to the terms of a three-game contract between the schools, obtained by SB Nation, these are the pay values:

• 2017: USA hosted and paid OSU $300,000
• 2018: OSU will host and pay USA $625,000
• 2023: OSU will host and pay USA $300,000

Oklahoma State gets two home games against a Sun Belt team it should always beat (though Mississippi State didn’t) for an average guarantee cost of $462,500. That’s a normal amount for a game like this. But the Cowboys got $300,000 back for the road game they played and won in Mobile last year. They’ll pay $162,500 for a net one home game against an FBS opponent. They had to give up a ‘17 home date and the associated revenue, when they could’ve just scheduled another mid-major to visit Stillwater in 2017.

For a Group of 5 team like South Alabama, the arrangement has one big perk. The Jaguars don’t run off with the up-front payday they could in a one-off game, but they get to have a home game against a name-brand opponent that should put butts in seats.

“When you’re driving around town and on billboards and on advertising and on radio and electronic and print advertising, when you see a Jaguar helmet facing a Cowboy helmet, that sends a certain message,” Joel Erdmann, South Alabama’s AD, said before the 2017 game. “And I think it excites the people of Mobile and our region.”

Still, Power 5 teams appear to be scheduling one-for-ones even more often.

Pretty much any time you see a power-conference school playing in a mid-major’s stadium, there’s at least one return trip involved in the deal. The series breakdown for all of the power-at-mid-major games scheduled up through Week 3 in the 2018 season:

• Wake Forest at Tulane (2-for-1)
• Syracuse at Western Michigan (1-for-1)
• Washington State at Wyoming (1-for-1)
• Indiana at FIU (2-for-2)
• North Carolina at ECU (ongoing, alternating sites)
• TCU at SMU (ongoing rivalry game)
• Kansas at Central Michigan (2-for-1)
• Maryland at Bowling Green (2-for-1)
• Arizona at Houston (1-for-1)
• Arkansas at Colorado State (1-for-1, but Arkansas had to schedule it in a pinch)
• Utah at NIU (1-for-1)
• Baylor at UTSA (2-for-1)
• Georgia Tech at USF (1/1)
• Miami at Toledo (1-for-1)
• Oregon State at Nevada (1-for-1, though OSU’s home date was canceled)
• Arizona State at San Diego State (1-for-1, plus another 1/1 later)

A one-for-one achieves similar ends to a two-for-one. The smaller program still gets its home game, and it pays a smaller guarantee for that game that somewhat defrays the net cost to the Power 5 team. That team also retains scheduling flexibility in other years.

On the whole, there aren’t many more Power 5-at-mid-major games now than there were a decade ago. The total consistently falls in the teens nationally.

tl;dr: Why is that big school playing at that little school?

To strike the best balance possible between getting rich and winning.