(10-30-2018 01:42 PM)33laszlo99 Wrote: Both you and the author of this article make the mistake of seeing football scheduling as an exercise in search of competitive balance. Football schedules are business strategies which include some secondary consideration to competition and ranking consequences.
Yep.
The best you can hope for is for your own conference to be pro-active in this area.
CUSA's new basketball format could conceivably offer some guardrails for football as well. But as far as I can think of it, it would require some collaboration with another conference, and most plausibly, the MAC.
Out-of-conference, an idea in that vein I'd like to see advanced is for the conference itself to explore entering into new contracts with individual higher profile schools, each with language that says the actual CUSA team playing the game will be determined prior to that season based on something relatively objective like the conference coaches' preseason predictions.
So, for instance, the conference might contract for 2019 games on a specific weekend with Colorado to play #1 West, Texas A&M to play #2 West, and then Rutgers to play #1 East and Iowa State to play #2 East for 2019 games... and as-of the conference's announcement that North Texas and Southern Miss were #1 and #2 in the preseason poll for the West, and Charlotte and UAB were #1 and #2 for the East, those games' match-ups would be determined.
Doing this kind of thing more would seem to put us in a better position both to raise SOS of our likely-better teams, while reducing the likelihood of "bodybag" games.