Strength of Schedule

When people don't like certain rankings or bowl matchups, they offer point to a team's schedule and ask who they beat.  Like many other aspects of college football, that's not a fair argument.

Let's look at two teams that are currently in the  middle of an opinion controversy:  Virginia Tech (going to the Sugar Bowl), and Boise State (going to the MAACO Bowl).

Boise fans are mad that Tech is going to a BCS bowl with two losses.  "Tech didn't have any signature wins," they say.  Outside of the win against Georgia, who did Boise play?  They lost to the only team in their conference worth a damn.  The rest of their nonconference schedule was a joke.  Even Georgia during the first two weeks of the season was looking kind of sad.

This was Boise's first year in the Mountain West, after moving over from the WAC.  Really, Boise?  In the middle of a massive conference realignment that has affected every AQ conference, you complain about not getting respect from the big boys, and your big conference move is from one bad mid-major to another.

Meanwhile, Virginia Tech didn't have the best schedule, but for a team breaking in a new quarterback, it was a good schedule.  They started off with a highly respected FCS team in Appalachian State.  For a sport with no preseason, I can't fault a team for picking a "cupcake" to open the season with.  It gives the team time to work out some of the kinks before jumping into the harder part of the schedule, and if all goes well, it gives fans a nice feel good win to start the season.

The two games against C-USA opponents were part of multi-year deals, and both happened to fall in the same season.  But also remember that just two years ago, East Carolina was regarded highly enough that the VT/ECU matchup was put on Thursday night.

I can't make an argument about Arkansas State being on the schedule, other than a lot of these games are put on the schedule years in advance.  Why would Tech have any incentive to swap out some of these games knowing they had a new quarterback and a young team?  After starting two seasons in a row at a neutral site against a highly ranked opponent and losing with Tyrod Taylor as quarterback, why would they want to risk that again with a rookie under center?

And then there's the conference schedule.  How can Tech be faulted for the rest of the teams in the conference not living up to their potential?  Miami was a college football powerhouse in the 80s and 90s, but have fallen into mediocrity since joining the ACC.  Plus, most every other team is so up and down that you never know how they will perform in a given season.  Which is a lot different from the MW, where it's expected for them to all suck.

But at least Tech is willing to schedule a big nonconference game on occassion and put it in the middle of the schedule.  There was the home-and-home series they swept against Nebraska.  Both of those games came in the middle of the season.  Has Boise State played any of their big games outside of the first week or a bowl game?

Let's move to the "mighty" SEC and their scheduling tactics.  Everyone talks about how great the conference is, but forgets that almost half of it is made up of doormats.  Just look at the SEC West.  Knowing how LSU (no losses), Alabama (1 loss to LSU), and Arkansas (2 losses to LSU and Alabama) performed, you know that the other three teams each lost a minimum of three games without having to look anything up.  Since those three teams played each other, that means at least two of those teams got 4 losses.  That's before getting into the other division and non-conference games.

In the division that produced the top two teams in the country, there's at least two teams with 4 guaranteed losses.  Actually looking it up, there are 5, 6, and 10 loss teams in that division.  And the SEC East wasn't so great, with four teams having losing conference records, and the two that actually had a shot at playing in the championship game managed to avoid LSU and Alabama.

So the strength of schedule argument isn't as strong, or as cut and dry, as some want to believe.