The committee has shown us all that they are either unwilling (too lazy) or unable (too stupid) to evaluate quality of opposition so now ALL schools have been put on notice that Bill Snyder was right, NEVER SCHEDULE A LOSS.
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The problem is that, as always, you will get more of what you reward and less of what you punish. The committee has rewarded crap scheduling and punished tough scheduling.
So, this is actually pretty interesting, and could be more so without the extra commentary and over-emphasis on what transpired this year.
UW fans were discussing this at one point in the offseason. Greg Gard likes to schedule hard games, but in a big conference, you can put your win volume at risk (a few years back UW had the Q1/2 wins, one Q3 loss, but at 17-14 with poor predictives, got left out). So you probably can't schedule all good teams, go 13-20 and say "it's a super tough 13-20, lemme in."
But if you schedule just to chase win volume, there are, in fact, two sorts of punishments. The first is that teams with solid win numbers are often left out. OSU was out with 20 wins a few years back. South Carolina missed with 24 about 10 years ago. That usually reflects schedules and such. The second is that most good teams schedule some good teams, and when they win, they're rewarded with good seeds. If you bodybag your way to 11-0 and then end up 20-11, you're gonna be much lower seeded than a team that tried.
It's a funny one because you can't know exactly what you should've done until after. Like, Auburn didn't expect to be right on the bubble, so they're likely not building their team that way. Similarly, a team like Miami, Ohio is such a historical accident, there's not much intention in a soft schedule (as we've seen, they didn't even intend to have what they did).
To a degree, for a team that could reasonably compete for an at-large should schedule enough tough games to push the ceiling, but not so many they might really kneecap themselves in the larger conference schedule era. The only thing that works against this is sometimes a desperate coach will fill the non-con with cupcakes to say "hey, I know we didn't make the dance, but I was 19-11, so please don't fire me." Low-bid league stuff is in it's own odd place because you're hunting as many buy games as make sense, looking for anyone who will pay you for a neutral game and then trying to make sure you have a somewhat functional home slate economically (and if you can sneak in a cool mid-major on mid-major for yourself if you can get it).
One interesting space going forward is going to be if behaviors around Christmas games ever change. For a while, no one has wanted to play those, so bigger teams tend to get really desperate teams to fill them. Maybe that changes, although maybe the bigger teams would be fine with the status quo.
