Which Team Played the Hardest Schedule?

With the regular season over, experts have put forth their idea of which team played the hardest schedule.  The NCAA sets forth that it was Notre Dame.  Phil Steele says it was Oregon State, as does Jeff Sagarin and Ken Massey.  Wes Colley gives it to Oklahoma.  Anderson/Hester gave it to Colorado.

For me, according to my approach, UNLV played the toughest schedule.  You might ask yourself how could this be, given that UNLV plays in the non-AQ Mountain West Conference.  It is rather simple.  For me, based upon my research, games versus bad and average teams are unimportant.  After all, really good teams like Ohio State rarely, if ever lose to bad or average teams (only five losses by the Buckeyes to a bad team in the entire BCS era, the last being the loss to Purdue last season).

For a team like Ohio State, a game versus a 6-6 team is just as easy as a game versus a 3-9 team and just as relevant.  As such, I define a good team as one with seven regular season wins versus FBS schools.  This is not an arbitrary number.  Instead, seven wins mean a winning record.  And games for FCS schools should not count. 

Now, some might say, a team with seven FBS wins in the MWC is not as good as a team with seven FBS wins in the Big 12.  On the contrary, getting seven FBS wins is very hard.  Most non-AQ schools play every hard OOC schedules with most of the games on the road.  This season Air Force, a good school with seven wins over FBS schools, pushed Oklahoma to the limit in Norman, where the Sooners have only lost twice in the last decade. 

So, if we only look at games versus good teams, we get a  very different picture of college football.  Under this standard, the Pac-10 only had three good teams (Oregon, Stanford, and USC), while the MWC had four (TCU, Utah, AFA, and San Diego State).

UNLV played eight games versus good teams (Wisconsin, @ Utah, Nevada, @ West Virginia, TCU, Air Force, @ San Diego State, and @ Hawaii).  UNLV also lost big at average BYU, average Idaho, and bad Colorado State).

UNLV was just a bad team.

However, in comparison, Glendale bound Oregon only played two good teams in the entire season, one of which was at home versus Stanford where the Ducks needed a huge second half to win.  In its 10 games against weak and average competition, the Ducks did not always look exactly dominating.  It is therefore a very open question how the Ducks would have done against a tougher schedule, maybe even UNLV's 2010 schedule. 

Of course, Oregon had two regular season loses in 2009, but it is hard to argue that the 2009 were actually a weaker team.  After all, in 2009, Oregon played seven good games and lost only two regular season games on the road to Stanford and Boise State.

As such, I feel comfortable arguing that the 2009 Ducks team may have been a much, much better team than the 2010 Ducks team, which just skated by with an easy schedule.

Of course, under tradition strength of schedule calculations, the Pac-10 was loaded with top teams, because so many SoS calculations only care about wins-and-losses, and would value a 5-7 Oregon State which lost to Washington State at home as better than a whole lot of eight and nine win teams.  And while the Beavers played a decent schedule (five good games), it was nowhere near the toughest in the country and Oregon State lost three games to average to bad teams.

More to follow....