August 23, 2010 - I’m devoting more time to my website this year, adding content and writing these articles. I have not written here in years. For 4 years I worked full time on the ESPN College Football Encyclopedia and for one season wrote articles for Sporting News. There just wan’t any time left for my own site, other than posting rankings. Fans have really been encouraging me to get back to writing. Seems some of you value my opinion.....hmmm...I hope you all feel the same way after I say some of the things I have to say. In the future you will find Billingsley’s Encyclopedia posted online, but that is a massive project that I’m only half way through working on. I can only devote time to it in the off season so I hope to have it online by late spring next year.
And the Pre-season strength of schedule award goes to....Over the course of each summer I’m always excited about pre-season magazines. They are great fun to read. Some of my favorites are Sporting News, Athlon, and of course, Blue Ribbon Yearbook (of which I am a contributor). My good friends over at Sporting News had an interesting ongoing piece last month previewing each conference and breaking the schedules down based on whether a team was playing a FCS opponent, a “non BCS” opponent, or a “BCS” opponent. Interesting stuff.
The most accepted way of gauging opponent strength seems to be through wins and losses, or as in the above account, conference affiliation. As most of you may know, I’m not a fan of using wins and losses. Generally speaking, a #5 team would be a prohibitive favorite to beat a #55 team, so why should a team get the same credit for playing #55 as they would for playing #5? I prefer to use a team’s RANK and RATING as a reference point rather than wins and losses. This creates a much different strength of schedule ranking between the Billingsley Report and other computer models (and the NCAA). For the first time ever, I decided to run a pre-season report on schedule strength. It’s broken down by non-conference, conference, and overall on the season. It’s a very interesting study. Here are the top rated results in all 3 categories:
Non-Conference SOS
No. 1 San Jose State
No. 2 La. Lafayette
No. 3 Florida State
No. 4 Miami (Ohio)
No. 5 SMU
Top Rated Within Conference SOS
ACC - Virginia
Big 10 - Minnesota
Big 12 - Texas A&M
Big East - Syracuse
C-USA - Tulsa
MAC - Miami (Ohio)
MWC - San Diego State
Pac 10 - Arizona State
SEC - Mississippi State
Sun Belt - Western Kentucky
WAC - San Jose State
Overall SOS
No. 1 Mississippi State
No. 2 Oregon State
No. 3 Tennessee
No. 4 Vanderbilt
No. 5 Alabama
It will be interesting to compare these lists to a final report on December 11 and see how much (or how little) the rankings changed.