It’s an extremely easy one for a top-20 team.

Let’s take a look at two schedules:

A) The top six teams in America and the worst six teams in America.

B) The average 12 teams in America.

Any above average team would easily rather schedule B. Any below average/bad team would easily rather schedule A. But they’re probably rated the same difficulty.

Sagarin can’t differentiate that. He can’t tell that while our schedule would be very difficult for, say, Northwestern or Texas Tech, it’s not difficult for any good team (which we are good, we’re just not great/elite, which is the problem). He can’t differentiate that, while yeah we don’t play an FCS team, Toledo is not (well… shouldn’t be) a challenge for any good team. There’s no practical difference between Toledo and an FCS team for a ranked team. There IS a difference between Toledo and an FCS team for an average Group of 5 or below average Power 5.

Sagarin’s rankings can’t go into that nuance.

Which is not horrible - of the teams in the top 15 of the CFP rankings, 5 are higher (Auburn (11), Alabama (13), Oregon (22), Georgia (27), Oklahoma St (35)) and 9 are lower (Michigan (45), Mich St (53), BYU (59), Baylor (60), Oklahoma (73), Ohio St (78), WF (97), Cincinnati (101)). Of course, every team besides us (66), BYU (103), and Cincinnati (80) are in the top 30 for the remaining SOS - so we may end up with the 3rd-worst SOS out of those 15 teams.

Excellent explanation, by the way.

Ranked teams do lose to sub par “crappy” teams from time to time (take Miss State losing to Memphis for example or Pitt losing to Western Michigan). They almost never lost to FCS teams.

But yes, I understand our schedule didn’t turn out to be too difficult. It looked like a pretty decent schedule on paper, but didn’t wind up that way.

as other teams start to accumulate games vs. better opponents.