Strength of Schedule is Garbage

There's no clear cut top college football team in America, so people are going to be splitting hairs to pick two to play for the national title. The one thing that should not affect the pollsters decisions, though it most surely will, is strength of schedule.

Sure, playing harder teams might indicate a "better" (the least defined, most subjective term in college football) team, but guess what - the schedule is the one thing the players and the coaches don't control. Other than a coach possibly speaking with an AD about an opponent several years in advance, there's nothing you can do about your schedule except win or lose your games. So LSU played against a bunch of SEC teams who beat up (or in Tennessee's position - lost to) crappy out of conference teams. The only way we have to judge a conference is to then see how teams play against each other (and a conference magically always appears to win half of its intra-conference games). So, the SEC has a lot of bowl game eligible teams thanks to beating up on the likes of Gardner-Webb and Northwestern State. Good job - it must mean that you're the toughest conference around.

People will argue that team A could have been undefeated with team B's schedule, but must I remind everyone about certain HOME games involving Stanford, Appalachian State, Pittsburgh and even Arkansas? What team A would have done in the same place as team B is a bunch of garbage - there's no basis for it and it only further screws with peoples understandings of what "better" actually means.

If you want to have a true strength of schedule that matters, you'll have to disband conferences and have teams play NCAA defined schedules where teams play a sampling of all teams in America so that a statistical analysis can actually be done. Until then, steer clear of the SOC (strength of conference) or SOS (strength of schedule) debate focus simply on how teams performed with whomever they stepped on the field with. If you pull out the SOC or SOS card you're just going to trying to pound in a square peg in a round hole.