What to do about our future Non-Con schedule?
- Thread starter AussieTy
- Start date
It's an easy answer, stop scheduling them and put in games where you can develop talent without it costing you a game. That's what I would do. We already will be playing a nine game schedule so it's not like we'll be playing a "cupcake" schedule.
One think that is inevitable is for the committee to be influenced by media.
In the second half of our game, Herbstreit opened up the can of worms that Bama might be putting themselves in danger of being lept by Miami and ND.
I don't think KH is against Bama (and usually speaks favorably) but he is saying these things (along with every other talking head on every network) and the committee is listening to it.
To be as "un-influenced" as they need to be, they need to be sequestered during the last few weeks...which is impossible!
Basically, the committee needs to go and we need the computer models - similar to the BCS - to come back!
Dump them all.
There's no reward, and Alabama won't be punished nearly as severely on SoS simply by virtue of playing in the SEC. It's worth the trade of the "powerhouse years" versus "the SEC isn't quite as tough this year" years.
Schedule four teams the likes of Oregon State (they'll take the payday and we've never played them) and New Mexico. Maybe Purdue or Rutgers if you want an easy-to-beat B1G team. Tell them the game is at BDS or to get bent. If we lose to any of those four teams, we don't have a playoff team anyway.
I'm serious. I don't go to the games in person anymore anyway. Sure it'll drive down ticket prices, who said this is all a bad thing? They'll still require a signature loan from Loan Shark Corporate to go to games like LSU and aTm and Texas.
There's no reward, and Alabama won't be punished nearly as severely on SoS simply by virtue of playing in the SEC. It's worth the trade of the "powerhouse years" versus "the SEC isn't quite as tough this year" years.
Schedule four teams the likes of Oregon State (they'll take the payday and we've never played them) and New Mexico. Maybe Purdue or Rutgers if you want an easy-to-beat B1G team. Tell them the game is at BDS or to get bent. If we lose to any of those four teams, we don't have a playoff team anyway.
I'm serious. I don't go to the games in person anymore anyway. Sure it'll drive down ticket prices, who said this is all a bad thing? They'll still require a signature loan from Loan Shark Corporate to go to games like LSU and aTm and Texas.
A team can make the playoff by just scheduling non-conference cupcakes and then winning the conference games they're expected to win. Had we played a cupcake FCS school in week 1 we'd have been 11-1 regular season and easily made the playoff. Look at Notre Dame. They decided to play TAMU and lost. Had they played a cupcake instead they would have finished 11-1 and easily made the playoff. Last season Penn State appeared in the playoff by playing just cupcake non-conference games and after the first 3 cupcake games this season they were ranked #2 before the wheels fell off in conference play. I'd say drop Ohio State and Notre Dame. Those games would hurt us more than help.
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I just saw where the Dawgs have cancelled future series with NC State and Louisville, and is trying to cancel the 27/28 series with Free Shoes.
www.on3.com
Georgia cancels future home-and-home series with Louisville, NC State
Two of Georgia's future non-conference home-and-home series have been cancelled, starting with the 2026 season.
I would tell the SEC to pound sand.
It is a dumb rule that the mighty B1G doesn't have. For all their bragging about scheduling they ignore this. michigan and ohio state do try, but not anyone else. The funny thing is they accuse the SEC of soft scheduling.
Somebody has to step up and tell the SEC (specifically Sankey) to take a hike. The SEC teams already enter the playoffs with one hand tied behind their backs due to massive injury lists as the regular season schedule is so much more difficult.
At some point, these ADs need to get together and say "nope, you have to change that rule, we're not doing that as it's stupid."
Even Indiana, who is a good team, played only 1 ranked team during the regular season, essentially avoiding the wear and tear of having to play tough game after tough game. By the time they got to Ohio State, they were probably the most rested ranked team in the country.
My concern is if the conference isolates itself from the rest of the college football world, then how does the committee or whatever future ranking mechanism that’s in place determine how the SEC is different from any other P4 conference? In other words, how do we get 4 or 5 teams in a 12 team playoff or 6 or 7 teams in a 16 team playoff if there is no measurement of our conference strength relative to any other outside of “it just means more.”
Look, the earliest thing I can find about whining about somebody's schedule - and I'm sure it happened before, I just haven't seen it yet - was Woody Hayes declaring Auburn didn't face a tough enough schedule to be national champions in 1957. Sit down now, Selma's on the soapbox, and you will leave this post smarter.
1) The ONLY time ANYONE whines about "strength of schedule" is when they (wait for it) LOST A GAME!!
You never hear this argument from an undefeated team. Well, okay, maybe 2023 FSU. But "we played a tougher schedule" is pretty much exclusively when a team: a) lost a game; b) wants to invent a way to get ranked ahead of a team with a better record.
It's not that the argument is WRONG, it's that the argument is so CONVENIENT!!!
Woody Hayes used this argument because his powerhouse lost AT HOME to a 5-4-1 TCU team that in four of their games was held to a TD or less but scored 18 on the Buckeyes. Auburn never allowed a team to score more than 7 points all year long and shut out six opponents. The basic argument THEN was "but Northern football is better than Southern football." Well, maybe it was. Maybe Woody was right.
But Woody was only using the schedule argument to cover the fact his team got beat, too.
(Btw - the Ohio State QB who fumbled away the TCU game was Galen Cisco, who was later a pitching coach on those Blue Jays teams that won the 1992 and 1993 World Series).
2) Strength of schedule only matters IF YOU ACTUALLY BEAT A GOOD TEAM.
Notre Dame is the latest example. "We played a tough schedule." Yes, but you didn't BEAT a tough schedule, you lost pretty much the only "games" on your cupcake slate. Bevacqua was whining about their "dominant ten-game season" as if the Irish were the equivalent of 2019 LSU or 2020 Alabama. But you don't get to play ONE GOOD TEAM, lose, get a higher SoS because you "played" them and then say that beating a ton of trash makes you a good team.
3) We are seeing the excuses of Yankeedom continue - and it's always been this way.
OK, let's go through history, shall we? Let's take this step by step.
a) Northern teams wouldn't play Southern teams because of segregation
Now - because of some tragic occurrences (like all the white guys gang tackling the black player who didn't even have the ball to injure him on the first play - yes, folks, it happened), this one is legit. Now never mind that if you go look at the team photos of most of the B1G teams, the black guy (yes, I said GUY, not guys) sticks out in the picture like a sore thumb. They weren't really any better on the whole than the South was, they just didn't have a written law preventing it, that's all. But the first excuse was segregation. This is the ONE I'll grant some legitimacy.
b) then the excuse became stadium size in the days of smaller SEC venues
OK, this has a bit of legitimacy, too, but those days are long gone. Ole Miss and MSU once had to share the stadium in Jackson and Auburn played half of their games off campus, too. YEARS ago.
Anybody see Michigan volunteering to open their season in Tuscaloosa in 102-degree heat on September 5? No? Of course you don't.
c) then the excuse became that the SEC is overrated because look at the bowl record
SEC bowl record:
1960-66: 18-9-1 (excluding two all-SEC bowls, which are a wash)
1967-91: 59-62 (excluding all-SEC bowls)
Note: Big Ten teams began playing in non-Rose Bowls in 1974.
1996-2001: 39-25
2002-06: 20-15
2007-15: 57-28 (excludes Alabama vs LSU BCSNCG game)
The SEC had a losing bowl record in 2016 (6-7) and then in 2017, the B1G finally got the best of the SEC in bowl wins (7-1 vs 5-6); of course, the SEC had both teams in the national title game, too. It was around this time "opt outs" began to become a big thing, so the argument doesn't have the same clout it once did.
But Big Ten fans fixated on that 25-year span of the SEC having a losing bowl record, often failing to show up and do their very best. (Of course during that same time frame, the Big Ten was 6-19 in the Rose Bowl, too, so "the SEC is overrated" was a distraction from their own problems).
But once the SEC began blasting teams regularly - the two only met twice prior to 1980 in a bowl and it was 1-1 - a new excuse had to be found. When the Big Ten went 9-20 against the SEC in bowl games, they had to come up with a new excuse. And that new excuse was...
d) the SEC only has the bowl advantage because the games are all in warm weather venues down south
Now what's so funny about this is that not one time did the Big Ten EVER suggest, "We should move the Rose Bowl to the center of Lake Superior in Duluth, Minnesota so the Pac-10 team won't have an advantage." The whine then was, "well, when it's UCLA or USC, it's a home game for them!" No, it was only SEC teams that got an advantage because the bowls were in Orlando or Dallas or Miami. Never mind that the Sugar Bowl was an indoor game, it was because of the weather. But once they kept getting creamed that one evolved into....
e) "the SEC is afraid to play games up north in November!"
This is where we are now, it's a safe tautology that can never, ever be disproven. That it took such academic eggheads 70-something years to develop this excuse might say more about how the IQ up there isn't as much above ours as they like to pretend.
Of course, the INSINUATION with this is that November is some sort of horrible time of snowstorms in Columbus and Ann Arbor (surely they don't apply this argument to West Lafayette, right? Or Evanston, right along Lake Michigan?). And YES, it happens. RARELY. What they're trying to do is suggest that the January and February weeks of cold that make six weeks feel like six months occur in November and SEC teams are scared to come play in bad weather.
Never mind that one of the best games I ever saw was MSU vs aTm in the 2000 Independence Bowl when a snowstorm blanketed Shreveport. It's not like those teams have a lot of practice in it, either.
One wonders what will happen the first time an SEC goes up north in the playoff and severs the head of a Big Ten team.
What will the excuse be then?
They think Ohio State's win against Tennessee last December in the playoff game has verified this argument. Never mind that Ohio State team was beating that Tennessee team anywhere on any day, in any weather.
I read about more and more teams/coaches wanting to ditch the non-con games. They don't serve any real purpose. I get it some, like Mercer, need the money. Georgia just dropped games with Louisville and NC State. But that may be to prepare for the 9 conference games.
Yeah, that game could have been played on the surface of the sun - and the Vols weren't winning.
A few thoughts:
1. The cumulative effect of the SEC schedule is the repeated "body blows" a team receives over the course of the season. I think Bama is a great example of this. That 4 game run was historic and yes we won, but the impact of those games was probably most felt in November. This of course will only get worse with a 9 game schedule.
2. The talk of SOS is important, but at some point the metric for making a playoff field needs to be as objective as possible, which means using some modernized AI version of the BCS Formula. Then developing an actual playoff system that honors league champions and the objectively best at large teams beyond those champions.
3. Therefore the question really is 16 or 24 and which one best allows for access and getting the best teams all in. I believe 16 can get your best if you don't reward conference champs, but 24 best balances both sides of argument. However 24 also adds one more week of games for teams which brings us back to the cumulative punishment nature of football.
4. At some point we will likely be at 24 with a similar set up to D1 that currently exists or we will have that power 4-5 break away and go to 16. Either way bowls are likely toast and will likely soon be a fond memory of the past college football experience.
5. Lastly all of this will play a role in what we do with future schedules. but I would venture to guess that we see a lot of changes to future schedules as soon as new criteria for the playoffs are established.
1. The cumulative effect of the SEC schedule is the repeated "body blows" a team receives over the course of the season. I think Bama is a great example of this. That 4 game run was historic and yes we won, but the impact of those games was probably most felt in November. This of course will only get worse with a 9 game schedule.
2. The talk of SOS is important, but at some point the metric for making a playoff field needs to be as objective as possible, which means using some modernized AI version of the BCS Formula. Then developing an actual playoff system that honors league champions and the objectively best at large teams beyond those champions.
3. Therefore the question really is 16 or 24 and which one best allows for access and getting the best teams all in. I believe 16 can get your best if you don't reward conference champs, but 24 best balances both sides of argument. However 24 also adds one more week of games for teams which brings us back to the cumulative punishment nature of football.
4. At some point we will likely be at 24 with a similar set up to D1 that currently exists or we will have that power 4-5 break away and go to 16. Either way bowls are likely toast and will likely soon be a fond memory of the past college football experience.
5. Lastly all of this will play a role in what we do with future schedules. but I would venture to guess that we see a lot of changes to future schedules as soon as new criteria for the playoffs are established.
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