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Publication Date: February 3, 2004
Those Were the Days
You know, in a lot of ways there's never been a better athletic schedule than the one for Major League Baseball from 1901 to 1960. Two leagues of eight teams each, everybody played everyone else in their league twenty-two times, no playoffs except the World Series (and if you read press coverage up through the 1930's, at least, you'll see that the Series was widely regarded as a fun exhibition with no real hope of determining who the better team was) -- when the season was over, you knew who had been the best team in each league over the last six months, by golly, and it wasn't hard to tell.
We don't have that any more, of course -- the current Major League schedule with unbalanced schedules and wild cards make it almost impossible to tell who the best team is, other than that it's a fairly safe bet to not be the team that wins the World Series -- and we've never had it at the college level, so let's stop mooning over days that passed before I was born and take a look at who's playing who this year and what it's likely to mean.
Schedule Strength
The whole intended strength of schedule report is up over in its usual place. This is, for those of you who are fairly new here, a measure of how tough a schedule each team intended to play this year based on this year's schedule and last year's ISR ratings. Reality will play out a bit differently, of course, but it's a fairly useful measure this time of year. Here are the twenty toughest:
All Non-conf
Rank SoS SD Rank SoS SD Team
1 115.2 6.7 4 114.4 6.1 Southern California
2 114.5 8.3 7 113.5 9.7 Arizona
3 113.7 7.0 2 115.3 5.4 Cal State Fullerton
4 113.4 6.9 9 113.4 4.7 UC Irvine
5 113.2 8.3 5 113.7 9.4 Texas
6 113.2 8.9 18 110.8 10.5 UCLA
7 113.0 7.1 3 114.5 3.4 Long Beach State
8 112.8 6.7 15 111.4 8.1 Stanford
9 112.5 7.8 31 108.7 6.1 California
10 112.4 6.7 14 111.9 6.4 Baylor
11 112.0 6.7 19 110.5 4.9 Cal State Northridge
12 111.9 6.9 24 109.8 6.9 Arizona State
13 111.6 6.6 21 110.2 5.6 Texas A&M
14 111.3 10.3 1 118.4 8.5 Houston
15 111.3 10.6 20 110.5 13.0 Fresno State
16 111.2 7.8 30 108.7 7.6 Louisiana Tech
17 110.9 8.2 68 104.0 4.9 Washington State
18 110.8 7.6 32 108.3 6.2 San Jose State
19 110.7 9.4 38 107.3 9.9 Oklahoma
20 110.4 6.4 11 112.2 8.0 Rice
You remember last year, when the team with the toughest schedule in the nation finished at .500 and was excluded from the tournament, despite being one of the twenty-five best teams in the country? You'd think they'd make some adjustments after that, but USC West is lined up again to make that charge into the Valley of Death. I suspect this year's team will manage a slightly better record, but it won't be fun.
The ten toughest non-conference schedules, in case you don't feel like wading through it:
1. Houston 2. Cal State Fullerton 3. Long Beach State 4. Southern California (*) 5. Texas 6. Loyola Marymount 7. Arizona 8. Santa Clara 9. UC Irvine 10. New Mexico
Southern California's non-conference schedule is actually slightly tougher than this, because this doesn't include the non-conference series against Stanford and UCLA; life's too short to make special arrangements in the software for things like that.
In the Miami/Florida State Cup standings for the teams with the greatest variation in their schedule, here are the teams with the highest standard deviations in their opponents' ratings, which means they'll be hard to measure accurately:
1. Mississippi Valley State 2. Oral Roberts 3. Bethune-Cookman 4. Maryland 5. Grambling State 6. Florida A&M 7. St. John's 8. Missouri 9. Iona 10. Kansas
It's worth noting that for the ISR's to have trouble with you, the way they did with Florida State last year, you have to be both good and better than most of your schedule, so the two Big Twelve teams and Oral Roberts are the only ones that may fit into that category in the list above. Further down the list, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina could be trouble as well.
Over-Rated! Over-Rated!
Finally, a couple of lists I started running last year -- the teams most likely to be overrated and underrated by the RPI's. There's a lot of explanatory material I won't rehash that you can find starting with last year's link there. The most likely to overrated:
1. Pennsylvania 2. St. Peter's 3. Fairfield 4. Yale 5. Holy Cross 6. St. Bonaventure 7. Dartmouth 8. Lehigh 9. Pace 10. Manhattan 11. New York Tech 12. Mount St. Mary's 13. Bowling Green State 14. Fairleigh Dickinson 15. Army 16. Columbia 17. Vermont 18. Albany 19. Long Island 20. Sacred Heart 21. Maine 22. Cornell 23. Central Connecticut State 24. Canisius 25. Buffalo
And the more interesting list, those likely to be underrated, usually tragically:
1. Louisiana Tech 2. Southern California 3. UCLA 4. Baylor 5. Texas 6. Clemson 7. Georgia 8. Florida State 9. Arizona 10. Louisiana State 11. Houston 12. Auburn 13. Rice 14. Texas A&M 15. Arizona State 16. Arkansas 17. Fresno State 18. Georgia Tech 19. Hawaii 20. Mississippi 21. Vanderbilt 22. Mississippi State 23. Cal State Fullerton 24. Stanford 25. Long Beach State
This list is extra interesting this year, because it actually contains a number of SEC and ACC teams. I can't quite put my finger on why just yet, but it could have some definite effects if those teams start being rated badly as well. None of the RPI changes for this year affect this measure (and therefore don't really fix any of the problems), so that's not it. It'll bear watching.
By the way, the ten most schedulable teams in the country this year are Binghamton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, Iona, Buffalo, Toledo, Central Michigan, Bowling Green State, and Brown.
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