College Football Non-Conference Power Rankings: Week 1

I'm taking another brief break from the NFL previews for a little bit for some college football talk. If you've been a reader for a while you know I have a heavy anti-BCS bias and that led to my not paying attention to college football until my senior year of high school. Even to this day I don't really pay attention to the recruiting and thus none to preseason rankings, as they really hurt the process of deciding who should play for a national title.

So as to not by hypocritical, I'm not doing a preview of who I think would make the "Death to the BCS" Playoffs, though I was tempted to do that. I instead decided to do an investigation this year into the scheduling of non-conference games in the FBS. One of the major attacks on the current system points out the importance of going undefeated, and often we see this applied in the form of weak non-conference schedules for teams. So week by week I will go through the schedule of all 124 FBS level teams and try to somewhat objectively rank their schedules outside of their respective conferences.

Since I'm not ranking teams before the season starts I needed a somewhat fair system to look at these slates of games in terms of credibility. I came up with the following point system:

• 0 points if team is on a bye or playing a conference opponent
• -1 point if the team is playing a D-IAA opponent or lower
• 1 point if the team is playing an FBS opponent (credit for playing someone)
• 1 point if the team is playing an opponent from a major conference (ACC, Big East, Big 10, Big XII, Pac 12, SEC)
• 1 point if the team is playing on the road.

The system is by no means perfect nor is it very advanced. It's enough to get a general idea of how each school is scheduling its non conference games even if it doesn't tell the whole story.

The general consensus from this opening week is actually better than many people would have you believe (and better than I expected). Of the 124 teams in D-IA, there were 41 games (82 teams) between D-IA teams scheduled and not postponed for this opening week. But there were still some teams that upheld the stereotype of scheduling cupcakes at home.

So without further ado, here's the rankings for Week 1:

1. Mid-American Conference (22): The MAC is doing a lot of traveling this week, with Bowling Green, Buffalo, UMass, Miami-Ohio, Ohio, Toledo and Western Michigan all hitting the road to face major conference opponents. That's 7 of the 12 teams in the conference by the way. 2 teams though (Kent State and Central Michigan) already beat D-IAA teams, taking the overall score down a bit.
2. Conference USA (20): Not as many teams took the money to go face the big boys from here, with only 4 teams (Marshall, Tulsa, Southern Miss, and SMU) all up against major conference opponents on the road. Rice (already lost to UCLA) and UTEP (hosts Oklahoma) get some points as well for getting to bring the big boys to their house. The conference was penalized by East Carolina and Memphis hosting DI-AA squads.
3. Mountain West Conference (17): Sense a theme here? Boise State, Colorado State (in a rivalry game with Colorado), Hawaii, Nevada, San Diego State and Wyoming all travel to the big schools, and UNLV gets points for hosting Minnesota (take those points with a grain of salt). Air Force, Fresno State and New Mexico all were penalized for home FCS contests.
4. Big Ten (11): A decent spot for the first of the major conferences. Northwestern deserves much of the credit for the scoring by traveling to Syracuse (again, maybe some point inflation), but Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota contributed nicely as well. Blame Purdue and Wisconsin (our first "for-shame" school) for knocking off a couple points.
5. Pac-12 (9): This spot was a tough call with the next finisher with no schools traveling to face other big time opposition, though Washington State and UCLA did hit the road to face some of the mid majors. This helps offset Arizona State and Utah hosting cupcakes.
6. SEC (8): The Pac-12 got the nod because even with no major conference road games, they didn't schedule as many cupcakes as the SEC did (Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi State and Ole Miss), but they do get credit for having Kentucky going on the road to face Louisville and Tennessee facing NC State. The conference that seems to get a lot of flak for lackadaisical scheduling finishes in the middle of the pack.
7. Sun Belt (8): They have a trio of teams (Florida Atlantic, Louisiana-Lafayette and Western Kentucky) hosting the lower tier teams while Arkansas State, Florida International and North Texas go off to be sacrificial lambs (except probably FIU, who plays Duke. Yes, I went there.)
8. Big East (5): Has a bit of an asterisk with Cincinnati and Pittsburgh delaying their seasons until they play each other next week. No major road trips in the works, though Louisville and Syracuse have higher profile guests this week and Rutgers was willing to open on the road. Given how many teams have imbalance between home and away games, this deserves some sort of bonus points.
9. WAC (4): Surprisingly only one WAC team went to play a big school (San Jose State) and that was promptly offset by Idaho, New Mexico State and Utah State hosting FCS teams. Texas State heading to last year's 1-loss Houston helps.
10. Big XII (2): Oklahoma's trip is pretty much the scoring here, with FBS games getting offset by Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State and Texas Tech scheduling the lower schools. To their credit, power schools like Texas and Baylor did stay in the FBS.
11. ACC (0): Pretty amazing when a conference gets so offset that it evens out. To be fair, there's 2 conference games to open up with Georgia Tech-Virginia Tech and BC-Miami. But major gains by Clemson (Auburn) and NC State (Tennessee) at neutral sites are offset by 5 teams playing FCS schools.

As the season goes on I'll tally up the scores just to see if the big conferences really sweeten up their schedule with lots of cupcakes. I'm pretty impressed with how they've scheduled overall so far, but we'll see as time goes on. Granted the schedules are already out, but with the amount of research needed to go into this every week, I'll keep it a weekly feature. And obviously, this formula is not the end-all, be-all guide to how well scheduling is going, but I do think it helps paint a pretty accurate picture.

Enjoy your fight songs and great atmospheres, college football fans! Tomorrow morning I'll be back with more NFL previews.