Boise's SOS since moving from the Big West to the WAC in 2000/2001:
96th
113
112
72
103
86
105
95
97
71
74
114
76
67
105
70
69
Are these not high school schedules? What's preventing Appy St. from winning lots of games against crap slates like these? I honestly don't know.
Compare to a random-ass team pulled out of a hat.....Iowa. Let's look at their SOS in the same time-frame:
38
41
30
16
20
52
77....jesus, Hawkeyes, wtf?
58
50
45
40
48
47
68
55
49
3rd
So I'm gonna go ahead and call those SOS numbers embarrassing for Iowa. Maybe it's having ISU as a rival, I don't know, but those are pretty gross numbers.
You don't think Iowa has some hardware if they traded schedules with Boise? I know they're apples and oranges, but still. Any defense of the Broncos or support for the Broncos has a big, brick wall in the way - and it's SOS.
Let's run through this
A. Those are college schedules. Until one of them says something like 500th, they're college schedules. Florida did not host a high school a few weeks back. It hosted a damn college.
B. This does not mean those are robust schedules by any measure. It reflects the basic unbalances of the sport. It reflects that FBS is really a two-class system, with a lot of variance within.
C. Calling those schedules embarrassing for Iowa is a good piece of context-less hot takery. If you give me some sort of nuance beyond, loogit them numbers, I'll read something into it. If not, I'll assume it's shooting from the hip.
D. App State will win lots of game against non-P5 teams. That's who it's allowed to play.
E. The schedule flip game is always just an avenue to say what we want. Most counter factuals are bad. I dunno if Iowa would have hardware. I've seen it lose to NIU and a great FCS team. It's the same silly game of "if team X were in Conference Y" and then we say whatever our worldview supports.
F. You're playing this game that schools have some kind of control over their schedules. They don't. Historically, they've controlled, what? One third or one fourth of the schedule depending on a historical rivalry. And even that you have limited control of because of the sports ups and downs. Lets say a team controls three games because of a historical rivalry, and it picks Western Carolina, Southern Miss and a 4-win UCF team. Then let's say they schedule Western Kentucky, Troy and FAU the next year. That's how you get back-to-back Top-5 schedules.
G. The final question is this defense or support of Boise. What it, and this is just an idea, we assume Boise is a perfectly good football programs maximizing a situation that puts a cap on what it is? Not that it's some fraud. But that it's simply a program that because of the structures of the sport has little way to escape the kids table. Boise doesn't WANT to have a MWC schedule. But no one's offering anything else. SOS is a nice crutch, a sort of washing of the hands of a simple truth: The sport is built to ensure more than half the teams in FBS have no path to compete at the highest level. Boise could have a dang NFL team, and it couldn't change its situation. (Interestingly, the team with the worst SOS in the NFC last year won the Super Bowl, so perhaps, maybe just maybe, a team with poor SOS can actually be worth something)
