My question was simple: Who goes out and tries to play the toughest schedule in college football? 

 

The Methodology

First, I gathered 10 years of rankings data from Massey Ratings.  I chose these because they are a composite of anywhere from 80 to 100 different rankings, so they should be pretty accurate. 

From this data, I created a weighted strength of opponent chart for all 120 BCS teams. Essentially, this is a simple weighting of their end-of-season rankings over the past 10 years. The top 10 teams look like this:

 

  10-Year Rank 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 Weighted Composite
USC 1 41 52 40 2 2 1 2 4 5 3 41
Oklahoma 2 31 1 7 5 3 3 16 14 8 4 44.3
Texas 3 20 13 5 6 11 5 1 18 14 2 46.7
Ohio State 4 36 20 34 1 5 20 4 2 7 11 54.4
Florida 5 12 8 2 25 23 28 14 1 10 1 62.3
Georgia 6 27 22 17 4 4 10 9 23 6 13 64.9
LSU 7 71 30 9 30 1 16 7 5 1 32 79.7
Virginia Tech 8 3 4 21 19 38 8 5 19 9 18 83.6
Boise State 9 40 32 49 17 14 11 40 6 36 10 120.7
West Virginia 10 69 35 83 24 36 32 6 9 3 26 125.7

 

The weighting calculation takes 100 percent of the 2008 rank, 90 percent of the 2007 rank, down to 10 percent of the 1999 rank.  Since schools schedule years in advance, this gives me a better idea of who went after quality opponents as opposed to just getting lucky (or unlucky) and scheduling an opponent who happens to be up or down that year. 

For schools that were not in top division the whole 10 years, such as Troy and Western Kentucky, I assigned them a rank of 120 for the earlier seasons.

Next, I needed a schedule.  I found what I needed at Simon on Sports. After some manipulation, I had a single spreadsheet with all of the data I needed.  For each game I had to do a bit more manipulation: I marked it as a conference or non-conference game and I gave each opponent their ranking. 

So, all I needed was a little math to come up with the overall strongest schedules and who had the toughest non-conference schedule.  I also included conference data so we could see which conferences had the toughest schedules.

The Results

Overall

Toughest overall schedule:

School Average
Oregon 37.67
Florida State 39.33
Washington 39.67
Georgia 39.75
Stanford 41.25
Kentucky 41.70
UCLA 42.58
Clemson 43.08
USC 43.58
Washington State 43.83
Virginia Tech 46.33
Oklahoma 46.67
Notre Dame 47.00
Arizona 47.17
Purdue 47.25
Miami FL 47.50
Colorado 47.67
Baylor 47.75
California 48.00
Maryland 48.00

 

Average is the average rank of the school's opponents.  I also broke this down by conference:

Conference Overall
Pac-10 13.2
ACC 25
SEC 32.42
Big Ten 40.27
Big XII 40.91
Big East 57.25
Mountain West 70.56
Independent 81
WAC 84.11
Conference USA 91.57
Mid-American 105.45
Sun Belt 111.13

 

The average Pac-10 team was ranked 13.2 in the overall strength-of-schedule comparison.  The worst BCS conference team was Rutgers, followed closely by Penn State.  The overall worst team was North Texas.

 

Non-Conference

One of the big debates recently has been on the weakness of non-conference schedules.  Since these are what schools can best control, who ranks best and worst here?

 

School Average
Oregon 25.33
Miami OH 44.00
USC 45.33
Notre Dame 47.00
Rice 48.00
East Carolina 49.75
Purdue 50.75
Florida State 51.25
Louisiana Tech 51.50
Virginia Tech 52.00
Marshall 52.50
Washington 53.00
Bowling Green 53.25
San Jose State 53.25
Toledo 54.25
UCLA 54.67
Utah State 55.75
Georgia 56.00
Eastern Michigan 56.25
Florida International 56.80

 

Obviously, Notre Dame doesn't have a conference, so every game was used for them.  By conference, we see the following:

 

Conference NC Rank
Pac-10 39.2
Conference USA 40.64
WAC 40.67
Mid-American 45.64
Sun Belt 48.88
Mountain West 61.56
ACC 65
Big East 70.38
Independent 71.25
Big Ten 72.91
SEC 85.25
Big XII 85.5

 

Of the BCS conferences, only the Pac-10 seems to go after strong non-conference opponents.  The typical response to this, from SEC supporters, is that this is because their conference schedules are so brutal, but we saw above that the Pac-10 and ACC both have significantly stronger overall schedules than the SEC. 

Is the SEC conference schedule that much tougher than the ACC and Pac-10?

Conference

Conference CG Rank
SEC 16.36
ACC 19.08
Pac-10 33.5
Big XII 36.08
Big Ten 42.73
Big East 58.38
Mountain West 70
Conference USA 80.71
WAC 81.11
Mid-American 101.64
Sun Belt 112.5

 

The SEC and ACC have comparable conference schedule strengths, but they are significantly stronger than the Pac-10 conference schedule.  The difference, however, does not make up for the weak non-conference schedule, as shown by the overall numbers. 

 

Conclusions

You can make your own conclusions, I think.  The data speaks for itself.  I just wish we'd get more quality non-conference games instead of likely blowouts no one really wants to see.

Finally, if anyone is interested in the raw data, drop me a line at topher@kersting.com.