Will college football realignment be the end of FCS vs. FBS?

Welcome to Week 12, aka the penultimate weekend of the 2022 regular-season schedule, aka the final go-round for one of the most divisive, borderline bar fight-igniting topics among college football fans, especially as the fandom’s collective blood begins to simmer toward boil ahead of Rivalry Week.

FCS vs. FBS matchups.

Saturday, there will be four of them. It begins at noon ET when Austin Peay and East Tennessee State kick it off at Alabama and Mississippi State, respectively, and will wrap up in the evening as the midafternoon matchups of North Alabama at Memphis and Utah Tech at BYU wind down just in time for dinner on the East Coast.

They are the last of this year’s 119 games scheduled between the teams that play at college football’s highest level and those that live their gridiron lives one rung down the ladder. But as the sport as a whole continues to change directions more often and more unpredictably than a Hogwarts staircase, there are questions about when and if that previous sentence, the one that began “They are the last …” might one day end with “… FCS vs. FBS games ever scheduled.”

“Do I think these games are going to go away? Yes, I do.” Russ Huesman said it flatly at the start of this 2022 season. His Richmond Spiders were preparing to travel south to Virginia, a game they lost 34-17. In 14 seasons as head coach at Chattanooga and Richmond, he has taken FCS teams into Auburn, Nebraska, Tennessee, Florida State, Boston College, Virginia Tech and made three trips to Alabama. His teams are 0-13 in those games. “I do know some of those FBS coaches don’t want these games to go away. I think they know that Division I college football, which we play at the FCS level, is really important. We’ll just have to see how important it is to some people.”

Before we get too far down the road of what the future of FCS vs. FBS might look like, let’s dispel some of the more popular myths about these matchups in the here and now.

First, there is a perception that these games have decreased in frequency in recent years, as some coaches (see: Saban, Nick) have become more vocal about the idea of moving to an all-Power 5 schedule, presumably to strengthen their College Football Playoff résumés. But the reality is that not…