You won't believe this one. There are 347 D-1 schools in the country. Of those, Fayetteville Strength of Schedule is #339. Pine Bluff's SOS is #3. Third toughest schedule in the entire country! And they actually won a game. Hats off to the Golden Lions.

Do us all a favor. Every 2 weeks for the next 2 months, post the SOS of UAF, UALR and UAPB teams. We'll talk the first week in March.

I suspect once the Hogs play Oklahoma, Texas and a few regular season games, the table will look dramatically different.

And of course, that's what the OOC is for, to get ready for conference play.

I'm sure Fayetteville's SOS will shoot up in a couple of weeks. The amazing thing is that Pine Bluff's is so high. I knew their schedule was tough, but third in the entire nation?! Pretty amazing what those kids have to go through to raise money.

All three schools are in very different places regarding OOC scheduling.

UAPB - play every money game available. Make the budget. To hell with OOC record.

UALR - demanding respect. Refusing to play the money game. Looking for other mid-Majors to play.

UAF - start soft and build to the rigors of the SEC. Buy as many games possible. Why travel when you don't have to..?

Actually, this year at least, what Fayetteville is doing is not unusual for the SEC. Only one SEC school (Tennessee) has an SOS in the top 100. Four of them are above 300. The rest are in the 200's.

There seems to be more and more of a trend of the better mid-level schools not wanting to play money games, and so more and more the BCS schools are having to play low-level teams. The very rich playing the very poor, the middle class playing each other.

(12-26-2008 10:40 AM)MICHAELSPAPPY Wrote:  There seems to be more and more of a trend of the better mid-level schools not wanting to play money games, and so more and more the BCS schools are having to play low-level teams. The very rich playing the very poor, the middle class playing each other.

Agreed. I think not playing those money games elevates our program to that "better" level. That's a HUGE thank you to Coach Petterson for getting us to the point where this is a possibility.

As it turned out, even Memphis was a game we might have won (although I would not have said that going into the season.) That's a lot better than thinking you are going to have to get beat up two or three games a year.

The SEC understands basic math.

#1. They can make more money at home than on the road, so they stay home a lot.
#2. The bulk of your schedule for RPI purposes is conference games. For the SEC thats 16 games plus whatever they play in the league tournament. If everyone loads on soft home games then pretty much everyone comes into league play well above .500 so they then have at least 17 games (regular season plus at least one tournament) against other teams that are around or above .500, therefore their strength of schedule ends up being strong.

(12-26-2008 12:03 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  The SEC understands basic math.

Agreed. SOS and RPI is all about the math.