Georgia State Panthers To Face Alabama in 2020, Auburn in 2021

Well, so this has happened now.

Look, I understand that in the process of building a football program, there is a period early on where building the program and being able to afford fielding a team is much more important that winning games. You head on the road to play a team that is clearly superior to you, take your lumps and your paycheck, and head back home.

The Georgia State Panthers are going to collect a total of $2.55 million into their coffers for these games, and that's a lot more than they would have if they scheduled some lesser foes. There also, in a college football world of "have"s and "have not"s, needs to perpetually be a group of teams that fill that latter role.

That being said, don't you eventually need to stop scheduling these games if you want to no longer be that team?

I'm not saying that the Panthers should never again schedule a team like Alabama or Auburn. And who knows, maybe five years from now these two teams are on the down cycle and are highly beatable. But right now this looks like extending the "taking your lumps" gig a little too far.

I appreciate that right now, Georgia State is a building program, and so I get that they're playing Oregon this year and Wisconsin next year. They're also balancing that out with the likes of Charlotte, Tennessee-Martin, and so on, such that those two body bag games stand alone.

But even if they fill out the schedule similarly, when does the program stop adding games that clearly serve no purpose beyond the paycheck? Am I naive to think that a program that is growing as it is supposed to shouldn't need to schedule games like that five and six years into the future?

I'm legitimately asking, because I don't know.