Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark speaks at the opening of the NCAA college football Big 12 media days in Arlington, Texas, Wednesday, July 12, 2023. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

Arlington, Texas — The Kansas State High School Activities Association Twitter account is, generally, a beacon of positivity. The association is quite liberal in its use of exclamation points, exhorting its followers to “Become a high school official!” or urging “Don’t miss out!” on a coaching clinic or wishing “Good luck!” as its member schools engage in high-level competition.

So what prompted KSHSAA to tweet a thumbs-down emoji Wednesday, apparently just the second in its account’s 12-year history?

KSHSAA was responding to news from the Big 12 Conference Football Media Days as it had been relayed by Topeka sports radio host Jake Lebahn: Brett Yormark said that the conference’s new media rights deal will include football games on Thursday and Friday nights.

This wasn’t totally new information. The Big 12’s deal with ESPN and Fox, which Yormark also said Wednesday is “heavy on the linear (television, but) certainly has a digital component” and gets Fox more involved in basketball, was widely reported back in October. College football reporter Ross Dellenger, late of Sports Illustrated, tweeted June 30 that “As part of the finalization of its TV deal, the Big 12 expects to play weekday football games including Friday nights.”

And so it came to pass that Yormark stated, in his opening question-and-answer session Wednesday at AT&T Stadium, that the deal includes the chance to “explore different days of the week for football games, Thursday and Friday.”

Scheduling college football on weeknights requires a complex calculus. Schools and their conferences must weigh the interests of the television-watching public, who have so many football options to choose from on the traditional Saturdays and so few on most other days, against those of local fans who must contend with work and travel inconveniences to attend games during the week — many of which don’t exist during the weekend. Not to mention that other sporting events have long claimed those weeknights as their own — most relevantly, high school football, which is synonymous with Friday nights, and which is where KSHSAA comes in.

Yormark’s declaration struck a chord with KSHSAA Assistant Executive Director Jeremy Holaday, who sent the tweet. He told the Journal-World Thursday that the association is “not naïve enough” to think it can seriously influence the decision-making of college football leaders. But he said that he had a sense that even before he started at KSHSAA in 2012, there was a “gentleman’s agreement” between Big 12 athletic directors and state associations that colleges would leave weeknights alone.

“But obviously times change and people change and people’s values change as opposed to what they may have been a decade or more ago, and that kind of understanding got lost,” Holaday said.

The number of regular-season college football games played on Friday nights ballooned from seven in 1998 to 52 in 2014, according to Sports Reference data previously analyzed by the Journal-World. The NFL is prohibited by act of Congress from expanding to Friday nights or Saturdays for most of the year; no such restriction constrains the NCAA. As such, Division I football teams have increasingly frequently sought out temporally distinct windows throughout the week. These have long been the provenance of so-called Group of Five conferences but now top leagues like the Big Ten and Big 12 are seeking them out.

Asked about balancing in-person attendance and television viewership when it comes to weeknight games, Yormark said that the Big 12 consults its athletic directors and board of directors on all such decisions.

“And when you think about the tonnage of college football on air on a Saturday, it provides a lot of opportunity for us to kind of build our profile on a Friday night,” Yormark said. “But there’s a lot that goes into that decision … it’s not just about visibility, it is all about the fans and what’s right for our schools and their campuses, so all that is part of the consideration set in how we move forward.”

He also noted that night games are less subject to the late-summer, early-fall intense heat that pervades many of the Big 12’s host cities.

One potential response to KSHSAA’s complaint — and one that it got on Twitter — is that high schools could respond by playing on weekends. Holaday said that high schools have played some games on Saturdays already due to a limited number of officiating crews, and that they may have to go further in that direction if weeknight football proliferates. But he pointed out that high school kids are already in school and have a level of accountability to coaches during the week that could be harder to replicate on Saturdays.

He added that weeknight high school basketball games that conflict with KU, for example, don’t suffer the same effects as football because fewer people can attend college basketball games as compared to college football.

“I guess I would just (say), ‘Those student-athletes before they were on campus, they were on a high school (team),'” Holaday said. “‘And now you’re taking away the light from them. So remember where they came from.'”

Holaday said he doesn’t think it’s likely that KU or Kansas State would play three weeknight games in a year: “So is it once? Is it twice? I guess that’s kind of the number we need to look at.”

This year, it’s twice. The Big 12’s “consideration set” led to Kansas moving its Week 2 game against Illinois and consequently its Week 1 game against Missouri State to Friday nights this September.

KU athletic director Travis Goff, who had previously apologized to fans for the change, said in an interview with the Journal-World on Monday that Kansas has to take such decisions seriously because it has not historically been a program that can reliably sell out its venue any day of the week. (He said he expects the Illinois game to sell out.) Television exposure, however, via ESPN’s College GameDay and otherwise, was a key part of building the hype during the Jayhawks’ season-opening undefeated run.

“The ratings on our games at the peak this past fall tell a heck of a story, and they don’t just benefit the football program or recruiting or alumni engagement, they benefit broader student applications and enrollment in the university,” Goff said. “They benefit (the) Lawrence community and the region.”

He added that Kansas has opened on the Friday night before Labor Day each year since he arrived, and that it helps maximize attendance while accounting for weekend travel.

But Goff acknowledged that it remains “a bit of a balancing act” to pursue Friday games while cultivating connections with state high schools — even if the current coaching staff has built good relationships with them by engaging in “an authentic manner.”

“We’ve talked about, ‘Well hey, (with a) new stadium coming online, how can we give more access to what we think’s going to be one of the best stadiums in the country to high schools or local high schools?’ Goff said. “‘What are some other opportunities to afford our venue, so to speak, to the high schools, and how can you kind of find the right balance there, to where they do truly benefit from new partnerships, new opportunities, given the fact that Fridays aren’t going away in college football and in the Big 12?'”

Kansas stakeholders at all levels will have plenty of time to mull over such questions before the new deal takes effect in 2025. In the meantime, all KSHSAA can do is express its vague displeasure in emoji form.

“It may be a little lighthearted, obviously, but it gets people’s attention — that this is not where you belong,” Holaday said. “You belong on the weekend, we belong here. Let us have our time.”

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