An SOS For Strength Of Schedule

Okay, this one has bothered me for a while.

At Florida's official website, you can find complete football schedules for 2007 and 2008, but no further. Florida State's website lists complete ACC schedules for the Seminoles out to 2015, with sporadic one-offs and two-game series penciled in - a home-and-home with Colorado in '07 and '08, another one with BYU in '09 and '10 - but no game times, and no full 12-game slates decided beyond next season.

Point being, football schedules are fluid, rarely set in stone more than two years out. Everyone knows this. Why, then, do I routinely hear the experts tell me that Rutgers' chances of playing for a national title are weakened by their non-conference schedule?

Hear me out. The unbeaten Scarlet Knights opened their 2006 schedule with a non-conference murderer's row of North Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, Howard, and Navy. Let's agree that Rutgers set this schedule two years ago. It may have been earlier, but I'm going with the Florida/FSU model.

In 2004 - when Rutgers' 2006 schedule was most likely finalized - North Carolina was a 6-6 team, with wins over Georgia Tech and Miami(!), plus a 3-point loss to Virginia Tech. Navy had a renaissance year in '04, going 10-2 with a decisive win over New Mexico in the Emerald Bowl. For what it's worth, Howard was a winning team in 2004, albeit a winning team in I-AA. Surely you remember that the Bison had the best scoring defense and total defense in the MEAC (hey, who didn't know that?)

Illinois and Ohio were terrible in 2004, just as Rutgers placed them on the schedule for 2006. No getting around it. However, you could argue that the other three non-conference games that Rutgers scheduled for the 2006 season looked halfway decent on paper when said paper was written two years ago.

Think about it. In 2004, Rutgers was a 4-7 team, coming off five straight years of 7 losses or more, including a stellar 1-11 campaign in '02. You're Greg Schiano. You went 3-24 in conference games in your first four years on the job. Now you've got to fill out your schedule for 2006, still two years away.

After all the phone calls and exchanging of contracts, here's what you came up with for non-conference games in 2006: an ACC school (on the road), a Big 10 school, two layups against Ohio and Howard (well, layups for schools that didn't go 3-24 in their conference in the previous four years), and a road game against a service academy with a recent run of success and a bowl bid that year. Is that so embarrassing? Would you not consider that to be a decent non-conference test, remembering that your program has been utter dreck for the last ten years, and you're basing your '06 schedule at least partially on '04 performance?

In other words: why does Rutgers get punished now because the teams they scheduled two years ago happened to suck when it finally came to game time '06? It's not like Schiano was ducking anybody. To repeat: he was 3-24 in his conference by the time he set his schedule for 2006. If I were in his shoes, I'd be scheduling twelve Howards and Ohios for '06. But he didn't.

Let's be honest. Rutgers' non-conference schedule isn't the problem. The problem is still the Big East, or the perception of the Big East. Louisville and West Virginia (and, to some extent, Pittsburgh) have been lavished with love this year because they're familiar, successful programs. They play on national television on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. They're fun to watch. The assumption that their success somehow lifts the entire Big East football landscape is dicey, however, and Rutgers proves it. For that matter, so does USF, a program less than ten years old with back-to-back bowl-eligible seasons and zero recognition outside of Florida.

Based solely on wins and losses, we should be talking about Rutgers as a potential national championship participant, and we should be talking about USF as the first school in Florida with a legit shot at expanding the Big Three. The fact that we're not doing so is more a testament to the Big East's image problem than any concern about non-conference scheduling. This is not an indictment of the Big East, by the way - it's an indictment of the hundreds of stupid mitigating factors that continue to exclude the great majority of the 119 Division I programs from any conversation involving the phrase "national championship." Stuff like non-conference schedules.

The solution? Play it off. Don't get me started.

But should you happen to be near a television this coming Monday at 6pm, "Tailgate Overtime" on Sun Sports may have a little something for you.