When it was announced earlier in the week that North Carolina State had added a future home-and-home series against Troy, it was reported that NCSU’s future series with LSU would need to be “adjusted.”
That “adjustment,” as it turns out, was an outright cancellation.
According to the Baton Rouge Advocate, LSU paid NCSU a $100,000 penalty for cancelling the pair of games scheduled for the 2017 and 2020 seasons. In fairness to LSU, the Advocate writes, the Tigers “wanted to move the series back, but NC State did not.”
“We tried to move them back,” senior associate athletic director Verge Ausberry told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “It got to the point where we wanted to move forward. We have some other things we want to do. It was just the 2017 date that was the issue.”
The SEC announced over the weekend that, while it would keep its current eight-game conference schedule model, the league would, beginning in 2016, require all members to schedule at least one opponent from the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten or Pac-12 on an annual basis. LSU has a 2017 game scheduled against Syracuse (ACC) and a 2020 game against Penn State (Big Ten) already on its future slates.
Like most schools, LSU tries to avoid scheduling two regular season, nonconference games against the so-called Big Five conferences the same season.
