Sending out an SOS

The debate I’m seeing about which schools are worthy to play for the MNC and which aren’t seems to be swirling around relative strength of schedule. WVU and OSU, in particular, seem to be getting smacked around pretty good on this front.

I thought I’d take a look at the strength of schedule for the top 10 ranked schools. I looked at four computer rankings (Coffey, Colley, Massey and Sagarin) and took an average for each team. For a suckiness baseline, I’ve compared them to a program that everyone in the western world agrees has a horrible strength of schedule this year, Hawaii.

Here’s what I got:

School*****Coffey***Colley***Massey***Sagarin***Avg.

Missouri………36…………….51…………..42………………34………….40.75

West Va……….38……………44…………..41……………….35…………39.50

Ohio State……59……………67……………55………………56………….59.25

Georgia………..9……………..20…………..13………………22………….16.00

Kansas………….85…………..89…………..71………………90………….83.75

Va. Tech……….43…………..38…………..28………………45………….38.50

LSU……………..25……………23…………..17………………26………….22.75

USC……………..39……………61…………..46………………33………….44.75

Oklahoma…….62……………64…………..54………………67………….61.75

Florida…………..2……………..1……………..1………………..5…………….2.25

Hawaii………..119…………..127………….132…………….142……….130.00

Keeping in mind that we aren’t looking at how close the wins and losses were for each of these teams, (or who the wins or losses were against, for that matter) what do those numbers tell us?

• Starting with the one loss group – Missouri, West Virginia, Ohio State and Kansas – only the latter’s SOS seems truly sub-par.   OSU’s number is basically average.
• Taken together, the two loss group – Georgia, Va. Tech, LSU, USC and Oklahoma – sports stronger SOS numbers than does the one loss group.
• Three loss Florida’s SOS average is impressive, no?
• No school on this list has a Hawaii-bad strength of schedule. Even Kansas’ weak number is some 50 slots above the Warriors.

Bottom line, based on SOS considerations alone, what I’d conclude from looking at these numbers is that Kansas is ranked too high, LSU too low and Mergz is spot on when he argues that USC is being taken more seriously than it should be. As for the others, you can nit pick over who should be ranked where, but I don’t see any school in the top 10 other than Kansas that should be disqualified from consideration for the BCS title game purely on the basis of its schedule strength.

(For another point of view on this, have a look at CFN’s Pete Fiutak’s piece on how the BCS teams would perform on Missouri and WVU’s schedules.)

I’ll do a follow up post looking at the schedules more closely after today’s games play out.