Doing the Math: An Analysis of College Football Strengths-of-Schedule

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 [e-mail].