Every year the schools that make up the power five conferences of college football schedule two or three “cupcake” games. They play schools that are in lower FBS divisions, usually Division Two, or even the FCS. These games are usually easy wins in which the starters hopefully only have to play three quarters and the fans won’t tune in for more than the first half. Week two is usually the week of the season where the resounding majority of teams have a cupcake game on the schedule and this past weekend was no exception.
This weekend there was not a single top 25 match up on the schedule and 15 of the 25 ranked teams played what many would consider to be a cupcake opponent. The premier match up of the weekend was Virginia Tech vs. #17 Tennessee at Bristol Motor Speedway in from of 150,000 fans but beyond that, this Saturday was flop for college football.
It is easy to schedule these teams and think they’ll be an easy win but that isn’t always the case. Every year a few of these cupcake teams show up to play and steal a win from a big time team. This weekend #22 Oklahoma State lost by three on the final play to Central Michigan. And after moving up to #9 in the rankings Georgia only beat Nicholls State by two points. Playing these teams are really lose-lose situations because a win does nothing for you while a loss or a close game will drop your team’s stock. Losing to a cupcake team can be detrimental to a team’s season and people often won’t forget it long after it happens. The 2007 Appalachian State win over #5 Michigan is one of the most famous wins of this nature and will be for quite some time.
For the cupcake teams, these games are a dream come true. They get paid half a million dollars to play in the biggest stadium of the players’ careers and take a shot at the big schools that didn’t recruit them. These cupcake teams come into packed SEC stadiums with absolutely nothing to lose so it’s no wonder they can pull out a win every now and then.
It’s time that the top teams in football start playing more quality opponents because no one truly wins when the cupcake games come around. Georgia had a 99.9% chance to beat Nicholls State and it wouldn’t have gone down much had they been playing Wake Forest, an ACC team. The NCAA needs to step in and regulate whom the power conference teams are scheduling out of conference. With only four out of conference games each season there is no excuse to schedule cupcakes for three of those. It’s a waste of a valuable college football weekend.
