Cats Stats: Starting with BYU, Arizona faces one of the Big 12’s hardest schedules

In fact, they’re more disparate and unbalanced than ever.

The math is simple. In the last days of the Pac-10 (2006-10), you had nine possible league opponents, and every team played nine conference games. Therefore, each team’s league schedule was different from the others by only one opponent. Arizona faced everyone in the league besides itself. Likewise, ASU, USC, etc.

Since the latest round of realignment, the power conferences have ballooned. The Big Ten has 18 teams, the ACC 17, the Big 12 and SEC 16 apiece.

As such, two teams might have only a handful of common league opponents as conferences try to avoid repeating the same matchups year after year. For example, BYU and Cincinnati have only three common foes: Arizona — which visits Provo on Saturday — Iowa State and Utah.

These scheduling disparities have had a profound impact on season-long records and College Football Playoff participation. One example: Texas A&M didn’t face Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Ole Miss or Vanderbilt last season. The only team the Aggies faced that finished 6-2 or better in the league (besides themselves) was Texas. A&M went 11-1 (7-1 in the SEC), made the CFP and lost in the first round at home to Miami.

With Arizona and BYU set to open Big 12 play Saturday, we wanted to figure out a way to determine conference strength of schedule. There are many ways to do this, including calculating your opponents’ collective winning percentage from the previous season.

But since there’s so much turnover in college football these days, we sought something more forward-leaning. So the research team here at “Cats Stats” devised a formula.

Using Athlon Sports’ predicted order of finish — subjective, yes, but we had to start somewhere — we assigned each team a value inversely proportional to its forecast. First-place Texas Tech, for example, was worth 16 points, second-place BYU 15, etc.

Here’s what that looks like:

1. Texas Tech (16 points)

2. BYU (15)

3. Houston (14)

4. Utah (13)

5. Kansas State (12)

6. Arizona (11)

7. ASU (10)

8. Oklahoma State (9)

9. TCU (8)

10. West Virginia (7)

11. Kansas (6)

12. Baylor (5)

13. Cincinnati (4)

14. Colorado (3)

15. UCF (2)

16. Iowa State (1)

We then applied those values to each team’s slate and added up the numbers. The higher the total, the harder the schedule — at least on paper.

Using that formula, here’s the strength-of-schedule ranking, from hardest to easiest:

1. Cincinnati (92 points)

2. TCU (87)

3. Arizona (86)

4. Colorado (85)

5. West Virginia (82)

6. Kansas (81)

7. ASU (79)

8. Iowa State (78)

9. Baylor (75)

T10. Houston (71)

T10. Oklahoma State (71)

T10. Texas Tech (71)

T10. UCF (71)

14. Utah (69)

15. Kansas State (66)

16. BYU (60)

The headline here, for UA fans anyway, is that the Wildcats have the third-hardest schedule in the Big 12 — and that this week’s opponent, BYU, has the easiest.

Per Athlon’s projection, Arizona faces four of the top five teams in the league: Texas Tech, BYU, Utah and Kansas State. The Wildcats face only two of the bottom four: Cincinnati and Iowa State.

BYU, meanwhile, faces three of the bottom four: Cincinnati, Iowa State and UCF — plus the teams picked to finish 11th (Kansas) and 12th (Baylor). The Cougars face only one of the top four — Utah — while missing Texas Tech and Houston.

Bear(cats) of a slate

We broke down our strength-of-schedule findings in multiple ways. Here’s what else stood out:

– We’re not sure what Cincinnati did to irk the league office, but the Bearcats are the only team set to face the top six projected finishers. Only one other team, Colorado, faces six of the top eight. Cincinnati and Colorado are also the only teams that face just three of the bottom eight.

– Two teams face only three of the top eight projected finishers: BYU and Utah. The Utes face one more top-four team than the Cougars, but both of those games are in Salt Lake City, including the Holy War. BYU and Utah are also the only teams that face six teams in the bottom eight.

– While Cincinnati is the only team to face all of the top four, three teams face just one of those squads: BYU, Kansas State and Texas Tech. Only the Cougars have to go on the road for that game. Four teams don’t have a single away game against a projected top four finisher: Colorado, Kansas State, Texas Tech and Utah.

– Four teams have just one road game against the top eight: BYU, Kansas State, Texas Tech and Utah. The Red Raiders’ lone game in that category is against Oklahoma State, which was picked to finish eighth but looked terrible in its opener against Tulsa (24-10 loss).

– Only two teams face Texas Tech and BYU — projected to finish 1-2 — on the road. Those two teams are Arizona and ASU. The Wildcats and Sun Devils are two of six teams that have two road games against the top four projected finishers. Everyone else has one or none.

‘Luck of the draw’

Is any of this fair? Probably not. But not much can be done about it aside from breaking up conferences into divisions again — in which case you’d at least have a similar schedule to the other teams in your division — or completely reorganizing the sport. We’d love to see a world in which college football featured seven or eight 10-team conferences based mainly on geography, but that’s another story for another time.

It’s also entirely possible — likely even — that Athlon’s projections will be totally off base and we’ll view the Big 12’s strength of schedule differently by season’s end.

“It's interesting,” said UA coach Brent Brennan, who played in the Pac-10 era at UCLA and coached in the 12-team Pac-12 at Oregon State. “Everyone's kind of at the mercy of the luck of the draw. Sometimes the draw is good, and sometimes it's not.

“But at the end of the day, nobody wants to hear you complain about the schedule. So you better get your team ready to play. That's what we're doing.”