SCHEDULING
Nobody ever asks why our kickoff times are the ones nobody wants
Every fan base thinks their fixture list is unfair. I used to roll my eyes at that too, until I actually started tracking ours. The early kickoffs. The short turnarounds. The trips nobody else seems to get handed twice in one month. That is not a coincidence anymore.
Somebody sits in a room and decides which fixtures get the good slot and which ones get the leftover time nobody wanted. Call it a conspiracy theory if that makes you comfortable. It is also, literally, how a broadcast schedule gets built. The part that gets treated as paranoid is asking why the same handful of clubs keep landing on the convenient side of that decision, year after year, while the rest of us get told to just be grateful for the coverage.
A short turnaround after a midweek away trip is not the end of the world once. It becomes something else entirely when it is a pattern, and I have watched this pattern for longer than I am comfortable admitting. Somehow the fixture list always finds a way to make the hardest version of the week land on our side of the calendar.
Why nobody wants to actually look at this
Because the moment you map it out properly, the excuse of pure coincidence stops holding up. Scheduling looks neutral right up until you actually track who benefits from it, and then it looks like exactly what it is, a set of choices made by people who never have to defend a single one of them afterward. Nobody in that room gets asked to explain why the extra rest day always seems to land somewhere else.
I am not asking for an easy schedule. I am asking for a fair one, and I have noticed those are apparently two very different requests.
What fair would look like
One season where the awkward slots get spread evenly, not stacked onto the same clubs the broadcasters have already decided are not worth protecting. Until that happens, I am going to keep noticing the pattern out loud, because staying quiet about it has never once made it go away. It will not happen, of course. I know it will not happen. And when it does not, I will be the one holding the list.