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It's So Hard to Schedule Good Teams

I haven't seen it anywhere in a Louisiana paper, but the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colo., is reporting that LSU and Colorado's home-and-home meetings in football in 2011 and 2012 are no longer:

The Colorado football program postponed a planned home-and-home series with Louisiana State in 2011 and 2012 and replaced it by renewing a series with Fresno State.

Although contracts still must be signed, Fresno State recently agreed to a two-for-one, home-and-home series beginning in Boulder in 2011, at Fresno in 2012 and returning to Boulder in 2013, CU associate athletic director for sports information Dave Plati said.

Colorado did not have to pay LSU a penalty to get out of the series with the defending national champion because the contract with the Tigers, first announced in 2006, had not been signed. Plati said CU still hopes to add LSU to future schedules, but it would likely be more than a decade from now.

If this turns out to be true, it's very unfortunate. It's hard enough to get another BCS team on the schedule and other teams jockeying in and out makes it even tougher.

Personally, I'm disappointed because I love watching LSU take on powers from other conferences that it doesn't normally face. The Tigers and Buffaloes met six times between 1962 and 1980, but haven't faced off since.

In recent years, LSU has played Arizona, Arizona State, Oregon, Virginia Tech and even Notre Dame if you go back to the late 90s. Coming up over the next few years will be Washington (2009, 2012) and Colorado was supposed to help fill out that bill a couple years. However, now the Tigers have a hole in their schedule that will be very difficult to fill with a top-quality opponent.

It would be great over the next decade or two to see LSU rekindle its rivalry with the Fighting Irish or Texas A&M, or to add a some big-name teams to the slate that we don't get to see that much like Oklahoma, Nebraska, Michigan (never played), Ohio State, etc.