Ohio State, Texas, Arkansas, Youngstown State - Which one does not belong?
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by user Verbalkint
The top story on ESPN.com details the easiest NCAA football schedules in the upcoming season. A subsequent story covers the 10 toughest schedules.
Arkansas (No. 3), Texas (No. 9), and Ohio State (No. 10) all made the list of easiest schedules, which was compiled by Mark Schlabach. Now, if you look at the rest of this list... how do I put this nicely? They all stink. Connecticut, Kansas, Indiana -- those are basketball schools until further notice.
But I'm pretty sure Ohio State played for the national championship last year. Texas finished No. 13 in the AP poll, and Arkansas came in at fifteenth. Something tells me all three of these teams will be in the Top 25 at some points this year. Maybe the top 10, maybe the top five.
Among the teams Ohio State plays this year: Akron, Youngstown State, and Kent State, all at home. That's three in-state, uh, rivals on it's non-conference schedule. The only thing I can think here is that OSU is aware of the rising gas prices, and doesn't want to make anyone travel too far. Can someone please buy Jim Tressell a map of the REST of the United States?
Texas, meanwhile, is marching Arkansas State and Rice into Austin. I'm sure we'll all remember Arkansas State's classsic 10-6 win last year over Louisiana-Monroe, where four of the nine fans in attendance stayed awake the entire game. And Rice? They might as well be playing rice, the food. The Longhorns are also play a road game at Central Florida, which I can only assume is an opportunity to visit Disneyworld.
Arkansas is probably the worst offender. The Razorbacks have home games against North Texas, Chattanooga, Florida International -- which may or may not be an airport -- and Troy, which I'm pretty sure is just one guy named Troy.
I should point out now that I'm an absolute homer for Notre Dame. Before you rack me: my pops went there undergrad, and I've always liked the way they did things.
Notre Dame made No. 10 on Schlabach's list of toughest schedule. The Irish do have Navy and Air Force on their schedule this season. But I think they've played Navy about 80 times, and that's a serious history. It would be kind of insulting to drop them from the schedule after all these years. It's not exactly Notre Dame's fault that the Navy has better things to concentrate on than recruit football players. (On a side note, it's Don Rumsfeld's fault.) And Air Force seems to score a million points.
Notre Dame also plays Duke, which... yeah, they're terrible. No excuse there. But look at the rest of the schedule: at Penn State, at Michigan, at UCLA, and Georgia Tech, USC, and Michigan State in South Bend. And what should be noted here is that Notre Dame, as an independent, gets to make its schedule up out of thin air. They don't have to play any of these teams, and yet they do.
I know strength of schedule is taken into account now. But if Texas, Arkansas, or OSU win their first seven or eight games, they'll be in the top five and no one will care how they did it.
I'm not sure how you fix all of this, except to do what ESPN.com did - put Jim Tressel's face on the front of your story. These schools should be embarassed.
But they won't be.
(Find more from me at http://mikemullensblog.blogspot.com)
