Bears Neccessity has examined the out of conference schedules of the six BCS conferences. Guess who got a D-?
Most impressive win: Ohio State 33, Washington 14. I wish I were joking about this. But yes, Ohio State dominating the second half against a team that would eventually finish in last in the Pac-10 provided the Big 10’s shining moment in conference football.
Most embarrassing defeat: Take one guess. (If you said Duke over Northwestern, you are funny and wrong).
Toughest schedule: Michigan. So they have that going for them.
Easiest schedule: Ohio State’s schedule was pathetic, but since they managed to find a big conference opponent, I’ll go easy on them. We’ll go with Penn State, who faced a couple of MAC/Sun Belt teams along with Notre Dame–their combined record was 13-35.
Noteworthy: The Big 10 did not defeat a single team above .500 from the big conferences. Not one. Not any. No no no.
Unfortunately, he is 90% on here. Penn State being 'the worst' is a bit of a stupid distinction when you have schedules like Washington-Kent-Akron-Youngstown State (OSU) or Ball State-Western Michigan-Akron-Indiana St. In fact Indiana State was 0-11 in the Gateway Conference. Notre Dame totally sucks but they were still better than those four teams...and FIU was pretty bad too but they probably could have won one game in the Gateway. Yeah I'm going with Indiana here.
Anyway, back to the point. Yes, the Big Ten played some cupcakes. Not as many as other conferences, but I agree they struggled at the top end this year with the faltering of Notre Dame and Washington (although the very surprising rise of Oregon and Missouri might compensate).
In the end, these scheduling arguments are the result of a pretty crappy championship system. They have these discussions in basketball, but it is to determine who is the 30th and 31st best team instead of the 2nd and 3rd. Besides that, you don't have to have a good schedule to be a good team.
2 comments:
Yeah, hence just why the post was about how well the conference did with the opponents they were given rather than an actual measure of how good each conference was. Even with that metric, the Big 10 performed woefully.
i wasn't bashing the post. it was a very interesting and well done.
My point was just this: you too often hear things, specifically about ohio state, to the affect of "of course they've been blown out in the MNC, look at their schedule, it sucks." But this doesn't make any sense. The NE Patriots could play a Mass HS schedule and it wouldn't make them any less of a quality team.
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