I can remember just a few football games the last few decades that had any overlap with a session of General Conference, and typically then at night and/or at an away venue.

It has often been a USU on a Friday, or a week with a Thurs game.

I think the relationship with BYU being a part of the church’s public image means that we really, really don’t want to be in a situation where we’re hosting a sporting event at a church campus that has 60K+ attendees plus a few thousand (BYU/church) employees plus a million other TV viewers— right when we’ve got the prophet at the pulpit.

During Independence, we tailored the schedule of nearly every game individually with very little room for flex timing.

In our new setup, it seems that the majority of conference games are subject to some flex timing, and by October our preseason games are almost always likely to be wrapped up.

To whatever degree our AD has a say in our conference scheduling and bye week, I’m expecting that we’ll really be pushing to simply keep GenConf week open, and it does seem to be at a beneficial point in the season, or we might be doing a one-off with an OOC school on a Friday.