College football scheduling can be weird, and the University of West Georgia just proved it by landing a hefty double-payday. The Wolves recently moved up from Division II, and they just booked two big-time road games for the 2029 season against SEC powerhouses. Even though West Georgia is playing both teams in the same year, one school’s paying a lot more for the privilege.

Mississippi State is cutting a check for a cool $550,000 to get the Wolves to come to Starkville, according to FBS Schedules. Meanwhile, Auburn managed to book the same opponent for just $450,000. That’s like a $100k difference for the same matchup, which has a lot of fans scratching their heads wondering how Auburn got such a discount while Mississippi didn’t.

Well, apparently, it all comes down to the calendar and timing.

Mississippi State locked West Georgia in for September 1st, which is the coveted season opener. Needless to say, everybody wants an easy home game to start the year with a win. So the demand for opponents in Week 1 is incredibly high. Because of that competition, Mississippi State had to pay a premium price.

Auburn, on the other hand, played the long game and booked the Wolves for late October. If you follow SEC football, you know exactly what this is: the classic late-season ‘breather’ game, especially in this new 9-conference game schedule era.

SEC teams love to schedule a lower-tier opponent right before their rivalry games in November so their star players can rest up. Since most smaller schools already have their schedules locked in by October, Auburn had all the leverage and snagged a bargain.

Why is it a win for West Georgia even if they get decimated?

Don’t feel too bad for West Georgia one bit, though. Because they are absolutely winning here. For a program that was in Division II just two years ago, $1 million from two road games is transformative, which should bless their athletic department for a while.

When the Wolves run out of the tunnel at Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium in 2029, it will officially be the first time in school history that their football team faces off against an SEC opponent.

They also have an older deal lined up to play Vanderbilt in 2031 for $415,000, so they are really loading up on SEC cash.

End of the day, it shows just how wild the business side of college football can be. It is a win-win all around: the big SEC schools get the specific home dates they want, and West Georgia gets a life-changing chunk of change to build up their program.

The University of West Georgia (UWG) has to be the Indiana Hoosiers of lower D3

The school went from having no football team to winning a national championship in just two years. Long before anyone was strapping on helmets in Carrollton, Georgia, the school opened its doors in 1906 as the Fourth District Agricultural & Mechanical School.

It was a rural boarding high school built on a former plantation. It slowly grew over the decades, becoming a junior college in 1933, a four-year school in 1957, and finally a full university in 1996. Today, the University of West Georgia has over 13k students, apparently.

For the first 75 years of the school’s existence, it did not even have an intercollegiate football program. That changed in 1981 when the school, then known as the West Georgia Braves, finally launched a team at the NCAA Division III level.

In their first season of existence, they caught everybody off guard by going undefeated (9-0) in the regular season.

In just their second year ever playing football, head coach Bobby Pate led the team to an undefeated season and won the NCAA Division III National Championship by beating Augustana 14-0 in the Stagg Bowl.

Even though it’s only a D3, it’s quite impressive for a team that didn’t exist two years before winning their natty!

However, they later moved up to D2 in 1983. And after decades of giving a good fight in Division II, West Georgia made the ultimate leap on July 1, 2024, to officially become an NCAA Division I FCS football program.