2010 Pre-season look at schedule and conference strength

As performed last year, I've analyzed the schedules of every college football team, building a hypothetical strength-of-schedule ("SOS") using the 2010 schedule for each team, but assuming their opponents posted records identical to their 2009 win/loss record. For example, when looking at Texas' 12 opponents in 2010, we are using UCLA's 7 win 6 loss record as one of the 12 pieces of Texas' SOS.

Obviously, there are mathematical imperfections and qualitative flaws in such an analysis (teams that were 12-1 last year may have lost a lot to graduation, etc., and they may end up being much worse in 2010), but I think it still gives a good pre-season feel for how each team's schedule stacks up.


As you can see, I've ranked the contenders' schedules from strongest to weakest in two clusters... the presumed top 10 (strong national title contenders) and the presumed 11-25 (potential teams that can make a move, not unlike OU in 2000). I've used the collegefootballpoll.com survey of available preseason magazine rankings to group the two clusters.A few observations on the above. Alabama, Oklahoma, and Virginia Tech will obviously be in prime position if they put together undefeated seasons. Florida, Texas and Ohio State rank in the middle of the pack. Nebraska's schedule is fairly poor, althought the 73th place ranking would be improved by a likely conference title game. TCU and Boise St, despite all of the pre-season hoopla, continue to be hamstrung by particularly weak schedules.

I find the offseason to also be a good time to "keep score" on how the eleven FBS conferences performed in out-of-conference ("OOC") games. The SEC continues to dominate, but we saw a lot of changes below the top dog. The Big 10 and Pac 10 saw improvements in their OOC winning percentage, while the Big XII, MWC and ACC all took significant steps back.

The OOC games can have huge impacts on BCS posturing, but much of the impact comes via strength of the conference. Even if Texas schedules creampuffs on its own OOC schedule, if the Big XII is winning 80% of its games against OOC opponents, Texas will stand to benefit tremendously by playing in a stronger conference. After all, you play twice as many conference games as you do OOC games, and it helps more if your conference is "strong" than it might if your OOC schedule is strong. Basically, this phenomenon happened for Texas in 2008... despite not really playing anyone all that great OOC, the Big XII had a banner year. To me, this is why the month of September is so fascinating and critical. It can help set the stage for so many important developments down the road.

Only 8 weeks until the madness starts again. Giddy up.

Note: All of the above analysis uses the convention of counting all sub-FBS (FCS, DivII, DivIII, etc.) losses in the strength of schedule calculation, but ignoring wins against sub-FBS foes. Strength of schedule is calculated with 2/3 weighting derived from opponents' win-loss records, and 1/3 weighting derived from opponents' opponents' win-loss records.