quote:
One thing that playing 3 easy games does for a team is it makes it so you only have to win 3 games in conference to be bowl eligible. That isn't too hard. Tada, lots of teams bowl eligible.

All I did was look at LSU/UO for that time period. I cannot make a conference vs conference judgement based on that, but only by schools.

LSU's 2010 bowl teams
North Carolina(7-5)
Mississippi St(8-4)
Tennessee(6-6)
Florida(7-5)
Auburn(13-0)
Alabama(9-3)
Arkansas(9-3)

UO's 2010 bowl teams
Tennessee(6-6)
Arizona(6-6)
Stanford(11-1)
Washington(6-6)

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I won't use last year since that was the year that we played two "non-cupcake" teams. So I'll use both of our 2009 schedules for this.

LSU:
Washington(5-7)
Vanderbilt(2-10)
Louisiana(6-6)
Mississippi St(5-7)
Georgia(7-5)
Florida(12-0)
Auburn(7-5)
Tulane(3-9)
Alabama(12-0)
Louisiana Tech(4-8)
Ole Miss(8-4)
Arkansas(7-5)
Total:(78-66) .542
Conference:(65-43) .602
OOC: (13-23) .361
OCC as % of Total Wins: .167

UO:
Boise State(12-0)
Purdue(5-7)
Utah(9-3)
California(8-4)
Washington St(1-11)
UCLA(6-6)
Washington(5-7)
USC(8-4)
Stanford(8-4)
Arizona St(4-8)
Arizona(8-4)
Oregon St(8-4)
Total:(82-62) .569
Conference: (56-52) .519
OOC: (26-10) .722
OCC as % of Total Wins: .317

In order to keep both teams even in terms of conference(since SEC played 8 and the PAC played 9) I added Washington to the conference when I did LSU's. Even with their non-winning record the SEC was huge(better w/o them though). The difference between the overall record is +4 in Oregons case, but our conference has a +9 record in comparison.

This helps us show that we don't need to schedule anymore OOC teams then what we already do. Our conference is hard enough in comparison to others that the addition of another OOC would almost certainly take the SEC out of the national title picture on most years. The PAC depends on the OOC schedule whereas the SEC doesn't need to, and we've proven that. SEC BCS Champions 7/7 whereas the PAC is 1/3 and that 1 is about to get taken away.

This post was edited on 6/3/11 at 8:10 am