With new coaches and teams on the rise, 2017 feels like it could be a good year for C-USA football. To be a truly great year requires winning non-conference games, including some against the Power 5. Last year only saw two such wins, with Southern Miss coming back to defeat Kentucky and Middle Tennessee winning a shootout with Mizzou.
In 2017, C-USA will have 22 regular season opportunities. Five of these are C-USA home games, and if Rice-Stanford hadn’t been changed to a neutral site game in Australia, there would have been six. The SEC leads the way with three of the five C-USA home games and seven total games, most of any of the five.