http://www.foxsports.com/college-football/story/texas-stanford-michigan-...
8. (tie) Virginia Tech Hokies (2.88)
The opener's brutal, against the defending national champion Ohio State Buckeyes, who return almost everyone. After that the Hokies get two 3-9 teams in FCS Furman (home) and Purdue (road). The other non-conference game is at ECU, which has won 26 games in the past three years and is 4-2 against ACC teams in its last six meetings.
Hmmm. Half the list is from the #ACC. Only 1 SEC team... And they make it by playing 2 games vs ACC. https://t.co/YneMfCvgaE— David Hale (@DavidHaleESPN) July 29, 2015
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I am enjoying how the SEC is finally getting pushed off their pedistal by some of the media. Their bowl game performances, cupcake out of conference schedules, and BS excuses are finally catching up with them. This can only mean one thing, Good Things...
Outside OSU none of the other teams will be good.
Bet they're better then JMU. Good is a relative term my friend.
Good to me means at the worst they will be a bowl team. I don't think ECU will even make a bowl next year. OSU is the only one of the 4 that will. Can't honestly see our OOC schedule being anywhere near the top in terms of difficulty next season.
Are you always this Debbie downer, glass is shattered on the floor about everything?
Are you ever realistic about talking VT football? Do you really think when the season is over that our OOC schedule will be considered among the best in the country when we have Furman, Purdue (bottom feeder of the b10) and an ECU team that lost their whole offense? Believe it or not, not everything has to be rainbows and unicorns...
You have to COMPARE the schedule to other teams, while the schedule isn't a list of top 15 teams look at the actual list and tell me who plays a harder OOC schedule and should be listed much higher.
My issue with the ranking is how much credit they are giving to ECU. I follow ECU and don't think they will be nearly as good as they getting credit for. It's a rebuilding year for them. We play OSU who is obviously going to be in contention for the playoff again and then 2 very poor teams (furman/purdue) and one team that will probably be a 6-7 win type team in ECU. If ECU was to hit their win total over the last 3 stretch as this article suggests I would probably agree with them.
Here are three that don't mention us as being in the top 10 or even 25 in some cases:
http://collegespun.com/national/the-15-toughest-schedules-in-college-foo...
http://www.fbschedules.com/2015/03/2015-college-football-strength-of-sch...
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2368401-ranking-college-footballs-25-...
Those are TOTAL schedules I mean they list UF as having a tough schedule, in conference yes out I mean come on, New Mexico, FAU, FSU and o wait look ECU.
Here is where we finished last year:
https://www.teamrankings.com/college-football/ranking/non-conference-sos...
Replace W&M with furman (W&M 7-5, furman 3-9)
Western Michigan with Purdue (Western Michigan was 8-5, 6-2 in the MAC; Purdue was 3-9; 1-7 in the BIG10 they did beat WM though)
the other 2 remain the same.
Those rankings include the bowl games, as well as the playoff games, which is a little different than just ranking the OOC games a team actually schedules
Fair enough, but the playoff games only impact a few of those teams and our bowl game should have helped us in comparison to some of our weaker opponents.
Just saying outside of OSU is there a team on that non-conference schedule that we shouldn't handle easily next year? An example of one of our better years non-conference wise was 2013 where 3 of the 4 teams ended up with 10+ wins (bama, marshall, ecu) and the 4th was a FCS creampuff.
As someone who reads other boards where this guy posts... I'm fairly confident that the answer to your question is yes.
so you believe our OOC schedule this year is "brutal"?
The 8th most, to be exact.
I think that's probably telling that most P5 schools go easy on their OOC scheduling. I mean, look at how many on the list are ACC schools that are forced to play ND and got points for that? Get ND in the ACC for football and all of a sudden we've got relatively weak OOC schedules only buoyed by SEC rivalry games.
The same is reflected in Bitter's OOC rankings
They SHOULD get credit for Notre Dame, since it's a good team, and it's OOC, even if it's part of the rotation agreement.
I don't see how you can figure it otherwise.
I'd LOVE to have the problem of ND increasing difficulty of in-conference-schedule schedules for the ACC.
That was kind of my point. Ranking OOC schedules is dumb considering your conference schedule or other dictated games determines who you choose to play with your free games. People who know they're going to play tough teams in conference or contractually will probably shedule cupcakes to balance things out
I agree.
I don't agree
It seems about the other the same schedule as the other teams at #8. A really good team, a not so good Big 5 team, a better team from a not Big 5 conference, and an FCS. I don't care how good/bad the FCS team is, its FCS and you should beat them if you're not FCS.
Only one Big12 team (Texas ) too. It'll be interesting to see the bottom 10 next week. I'll bet we see some SEC, some Big12, Duke (one of the secret ingredients to their recent success...)
UVA is bound to be there.
I mean, yeah, they have some good teams on their schedule, but can it really considered tough sledding if there is no expectation of winning, you don't like to
sweatperspire, this is how you drink your Gatorade......And your head coach is moonlighting on Saturday nights to pad his retirement fund?
When you add London's factor, LOLUVA might have the toughest schedule.
If you consider the London factor, they have the toughest schedule EVERY YEAR.
When you factor in that UVa bring's everyone else's SOS down, they have to be up there
Finally, a #GoSEC tweet.
You realize that after we beat Purdue in a close match they are going to go on and sweep the B1G, right? That is just the way things are going to play out.
I am okay with this, as long as we also beat OSU and sweep the ACC. And win the ACCCG. And go to the playoffs.
WTF, David Hale. Who said you could use my likeness as your avatar?
Says a lot about how weak OOC scheduling is across the board. This is one reason why I like the 4 team playoff right now. It should encourage teams to think about strength of schedule. We could probably go as high as an 8 team playoff before it starts going the other way and teams schedule as soft as possible.
Weird, espn radio just started talking about this very thing after I finished typing.