Let’s Talk a Little About the BYU Cancellation & Why There Hasn’t Been a Make-Up Scheduled

A couple of guys were arguing about this on my Twitter timeline, and it got maddeningly acrimonious. Typical Twitter slap-fight maybe, but it’s still one of those things were both guys were mashing the PUSH TO TALK button without actually receiving anything. Obviously, both sides have a particular point of view, so that approach accomplished nothing.

Welcome to America.

So.  Army and BYU aren’t necessarily friends.  True, both programs are prominent independents who therefore split affiliation with the Independence Bowl as of this past bowl realignment.  Beyond that, though, there aren’t a lot of ties.  

Overall, it might seem like these teams should play each other kind of regularly, but that’s not the way things have played out.  First, because the schools aren’t exactly geographical neighbors, and second, because nobody is necessarily looking to schedule another loss without a good reason.  Army in particular is not typically worried about its strength of schedule.  The Black Knights aren’t headed to a New Year’s Six Bowl anytime soon, and beyond that, who cares?

Really, Army Football is trying to accomplish four things most years.

1. Beat Navy
2. Win the Commander in Chief’s Trophy
3. Defend Michie Stadium
4. Fund the Army Athletic Association

Adding BYU serves exactly one of those ends.

In 2020, though, funding the Athletic Association became a seriously pressing concern.  Army Athletics lost millions of dollars when it lost the Oklahoma game, and it lost even more when it lost the gate revenue for the Air Force home game.  Thus, adding BYU as a home game in the big-money 3:30 pm timeslot on CBS was the masterstroke of the offseason.  Mike Buddie’s office also managed to get an away game at Cincinnati on ESPN and to get the Air Force game onto the main network at CBS.  All of that helped quite a bit.  Absent at least some of those moves, we might be in a bad way right now.

Recall, Army can’t just cancel Men’s Swimming and Gymnastics to balance the athletic budget.  Every cadet is an athlete. There are actually a whole series of graduation requirements tied to this idea.  The Academy wants its cadets to go out for Corps and Club Squad sports, and some form of athletics is actually mandatory.  If nothing else, you must go out for intramurals at least once per semester.  Not only that, you actually have to take a Team Contact Collision Sport at some point over the course of your cadet career, hence my semester playing Flickerball as a cow for Company E-1.

When BYU cancelled, that blew a potential hole in the budget, and that sucked.  The Cougars had a minimal number of players actually test positive for coronavirus, but New York State’s very strict quarantine policies would have axed a bunch more because of contact tracing.  This is why the game was cancelled.  Not so much positive tests as contact tracing.  Army fans got salty, and at As For Football, we certainly did our best to fan the flames, but I don’t think there was any nefarious intent here.

There were two potential makeup dates for the lost game.  Both were immediately before Army’s biggest games of the season, during planned bye weeks prior to Army-Air Force and Army-Navy.  I do not think anyone ever seriously considered playing over those particular weeks, especially the one last weekend when BYU wound up playing at Coastal Carolina.  There was literally zero chance that the Black Knights were going to voluntarily reschedule one of their toughest opponents of the season the week before the most important game of the year.  

Was never gonna happen, folks.

Given that Air Force wound up rescheduling for the week after Army-Navy, the Black Knights probably should have tried to put BYU back in during their other planned week off.  However, who thought the Zoomies were going to cancel the game like that?  I still find it kind of amazing that it actually happened.

At this point, any potential match-up with the Cougars has to come next year.  This was probably always the case, but it definitely is now.  Over the next three weeks, we have Army-Navy, Army-Air Force, and then the Independence Bowl.  As noted above, Army’s strength-of-schedule remains irrelevant to any of the team’s goals.  This is doubly true because of the bowl game.  In fact, Army was the first team in the country to accept a bowl invite.

The moral of this story remains that in the year of COVID-19, you have to play whenever you can.  That’s still true for pretty much everybody all the time.