Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I mostly did that for the Iowa fans... so they can follow along.  

I think this is an awfully difficult question to answer.  

Problem #1 is that you need some generally agreed ranking to start from.  

Problem #2 is that once you have that generally people start out with saying things like "team x plays five top-25 teams" but that is problematic.  Listing off the number of top-25 teams has at least two humongous problems:

• It treats a road game against #1 Bama as being exactly the same as a home game against #25 LSU (or OkSU).  
• It treats a road game against the 26th best team in the country (possibly USCe, Florida, or Utah) as being exactly the same as a home game against the worst team in the entire country.  

I do not like treating #1 and #25 as equals and I strongly dislike treating #26 and # 120 (whatever we are up to now) as equals.  That said, there is some validity to ignoring the difference below some level.  If we are arguing SoS among CFP contenders then I would submit that whether you played #96 or #106 is completely irrelevant.  OTOH, if we are arguing the SoS of the #101 team then there is a substantial difference between playing #96 on the road or #106 at home.  In that case, however, there is little or no difference between playing #6 and playing #16.  

Getting into even more complex issues such as the difficulty of playing back-to-back tough games and whatnot just over-complicates the issue.  

I also think that the question of "toughest schedule for a ranked team" is more relevant than the generic "toughest schedule" question because I really don't care whether Rutgers has a tougher schedule than Auburn but whether Michigan has a tougher schedule than Auburn might be important by the end of the season.  Of course, if we are looking at Michigan/Auburn at the end of the season we'll be working from a completely different set of rankings of their opponents based on their performance rather than their expectations.  

Yup, all this is why the (?) is in the title.  I often use a "simple first order approximation" to see how things look in a quick overview and then begin to plug in more variables and considerations.

And yes, at the end of the year, some of these slates won't look that tough and others will.

Is it tougher to play 4 top ten teams and 8 complete pastries or 12 solid teams in the 20-40 range?

Presume the team in question is a top ten team.  

Figure you go 2-2 in the first example and win out to be 10-2.

In the second example, you might get upset once or twice, and be 10.5-1.5 or something (like 3.2 children).

The first LOOKS tougher, but is it?

Presume the rankings are magically correct.