The Inferno: Destroying Boise State’s Title Hopes
Recently, TBG wrote a post on how the college football world should get ready because Boise State was on their way to bust the BCS bubble. While I agree with TBG that this is a distinct possibility, I also agree with KP in his comments to TBG’s post which discussed the weakness that is Boise State’s schedule and how they don’t deserve to be mentioned with the big boys. So I decided to do a little research to see just how weak their schedule really is compared to the other top 10 teams. Low and behold, KP was right on the money. Here is how the numbers play out…
Taking the teams from this week’s AP Top 10, here are the rankings of the best teams in the country from hardest schedule to easiest schedule:
1. USC (Average Rank of Opponents: 44, Toughest Opponent: #6 Ohio State)
2. Oklahoma (45, #2 Texas)
3. LSU (48, #1 Florida)
4. Ohio State (50, #10 USC)
5. Virginia Tech (51, #3 Alabama)
6. Alabama (54, #5 LSU)
7. Texas (56, #7 Oklahoma)
8. Florida (58, #5 LSU)
9. Cincinnati (65, #28 South Florida)
10. Boise State (86, #21 Oregon)
(It should be noted that I had to use the CBSSports.com 120 Poll for opponent rankings as I could not find an AP or Coaches Poll that went beyond the traditional top 25. In addition, I gave all non-FBS teams a #121 ranking for calculation purposes.)
Two things stand out from me when looking at this data:
1. The top 8 teams are pretty close in strength of schedule. An average opponent ranking of only 14 spots separates the first 8 teams. It was a little surprising to me that Florida was the lowest of these top 8 teams, but given the fact that our OOC schedule is crap this year and the fact that we don’t play either Alabama or Ole Miss, I guess that is to be expected.
2. Cincinnati and Boise State should be ashamed of themselves! To actually look at the body-of-work of either of these teams and try to predict how they would do week-in and week-out against quality opponents is almost impossible. Every team other than these two has at least one team on their schedule currently ranked in the top 10. As it stands right now, Cincy doesn’t even play a team in the top 25! And as for Boise State, just think about what the numbers are saying. The AVERAGE opponent of Boise State is currently ranked 86th in the nation. 86! That’s not decent competition…that’s not mediocre competition…that’s downright garbage completion. Just for comparison purposes, some teams that are ranked above #86 in the country include Arkansas State, Northern Illinois, Idaho, Louisiana Tech, and UNLV. Wow!
So cry about Boise State deserving a chance to play in the big game all you want. For my money, I would still rather see Florida vs. USC and let Boise State play in the Fiesta Bowl where they belong.
Oh yeah, just for fun I wanted to look at how the rankings change taking into account the conference championship games. So, I looked at Alabama vs. Florida (SEC), Texas vs. Kansas (Big 12), and Virginia Tech vs. Boston College (ACC) to see how the rankings would change. Here are the results:
1. USC (44)
2. Oklahoma (45)
3. LSU (48)
4. Alabama (49.8)
5. Ohio State (50.0)
6. Virginia Tech (50.1)
7. Texas (52.8)
8. Florida (53.3)
9. Cincinnati (65)
10. Boise State (86)
Not too much changed – Alabama jumped up a couple of spots after playing the #1 team in the country and the spread between the #1 and #8 teams narrowed to a 9. Oh yeah, and Cincy and Boise State still suck. Go figure!