you can't, but remember....these games are scheduled well in advance...so you are "projecting" how good a team will be, likely a year or more ahead (and with free agency...even more of a crapshoot)...and then if they underperform, you are sunk.So this is another hot button topic that is coming out of all of this.
Did we really have a challenging OOC schedule?
We had 6 home quad 4 games. Only two we didn’t win by more than 20. And remember the starters needed to be benched during the Monmouth game to prove a point. Everyone points to the Rutgers game as a the turning point. I say it was this game. This board was calling for all the minutes to go to Brown, Coleman, and Sanders after this 9 point win.
We had a tough (road) game for the B12/BE challenge against Baylor - fairly standard.
We had our normal game vs Rutgers (home)
preason Big 10 prediction of 10th
We had our MTE
USC (Pac 12 - 2nd prediction)
Iowa (B10 - 9th prediction)
Oklahoma (B12 - 11th prediction)
Neutral Site Missouri (SEC - 9th prediction)
Our OOC SOS finished at 226. But were we really expecting it to be that much higher?
This is a very realistic type schedule to potential win a few decent games and gel as a team in the NIL era.
You just can’t go 7-4 against it.
I dont know what the answer is, but seemingly having Quad 2/3 games...not awful, but decent looking on the resume...that you win, even at home, might serve better than a bounty of Quad 4 games.
And again....you dont know what Quad a team will end up in...but here is where some additional Admin staff would help (someone say GM?), you can run analytics as to where school A, B, C, etc., have ended up the last 5 years, where they are trending, etc. So it is not a totally blind, or "reputation" call...an informed decision, with these precise metrics in mind.
Perhaps something our Conference Admins can do as it benefits the conference as a whole to get more bids, and to max out the metrics.
You have to play the game....