Toughest Schedule in the Country?

I haven’t looked around at other schedules, but FSU’s early sched stood out to me:

USC
UCLA
Florida
UNC
Notre Dame

Then typical ACC schedule.

 

USC:
Florida
Florida State
Pepperdine
Stanford
UCLA

UCLA:
Florida
Florida State
Penn State
Stanford
USC

 

Whether the games are home or away adds significantly to the relative difficulty. I didn’t check but I am guessing most of Ohio States games challenging are away.

 

As a USC guy (4-5 games above on road plus Cal) I’ll give the toughest schedule to UCLA. All of the above posted are road games with the addition of Pepperdine at home and the rest of the Pac 12 conference schedule

 

Wake Forest

 

Yeah probably. They've got...

Penn State
South Carolina
Notre Dame
Virginia
Duke
Florida State
North Carolina

Plus the rest of the ACC plus games against Tennessee and Michigan.

UNC announced their schedule this week too. They have a relatively light ACC schedule this year, then play Stanford as the only top tier program outside of conference (also Santa Clara historically good, but not lately). Def won't be on the toughest schedules list.

 

Agreed! WakeForest had better be ready! At one point they have ND, UVA, Duke and FSU all in a two week span!
http://www.wakeforestsports.com/sports/w-soccer/sched/wake-w-soccer-sched.html

 

Seriously! I don’t know what Da Luz was thinking! This is the type of schedule you come up with if your going to be a preseason #1, or Stanford, not a middle of the pack ACC team. Da Luz might have just screwed them out of a ncaa tourney spot. I can see them ending up with a losing record

 

True, its not an unusual schedule for an ACC team by any stretch. They did beat South Carolina, Notre Dame and Florida State last year too.

 

The ACC portion of the schedule is a function of random selection. Each team plays 10 matches with opponents selected randomly (e.g. ping pong balls). There are 14 ACC teams so each year every team will not play all opponents. Wake just got "unlucky" and UNC got "lucky" this year (although for RPI purposes UNC probably doesn't feel like they got "lucky"). For UNC this year no Duke, no UVA. Both opponents are big rivals and most UNC fans would have probably preferred to have them on the schedule. For strength of schedule purposes, I am sure that Anson would have liked to have them on the schedule also.

 

They also have Tennessee at #25

 

Including NC State, who finished ahead of Virginia, Notre Dame, and Florida State in the league standings last season.

 

So what is a hard schedule? All is see is talk about ACC teams playing other ACC teams.

If a SWAC team plays 1-2 Big 12 teams, for example, and then a few decent to solid mid majors, would that make it a hard schedule?

I always find this thread silly....a tough schedule for top teams can be just as tough for small teams, all relative.

Hampton playing in the big south is a tough schedule!

 

The ACC gauntlet is already very tough. So a “tough” schedule would be scheduling out if conference teams that are top20 programs . If you look at Wake’s schedule, you’ll understand. If it were a smaller school in a non Power 5 conference, they’d be considered having a tough schedule if their OOC matches were against multiple power 5 teams

 

You are right, it's all relative. And if we judge on a relative scale, then whoever the worst team in the country is, they've got the hardest schedule. Literally all of their opponents are better than they are.

A more objective way to phrase it is 'Who plays the most games against teams who could viably make a deep run into the national tournament?'

 

I agree with the first paragraph.

For the second, it doesn't quite do it. Here's why:

Team A plays 10 teams that viably could make a deep run into the national tournament. The average rank of its other opponents is 250.

Team B plays 10 teams that viably could make a deep run. The average rank of its other opponents is 75.

Team C plays 9 teams that viably could make a deep run. The average rank of its other opponents is 55.

I argue that the toughest schedules are:

C, B, A.

I don't think you can identify tough schedules without considering all of teams' opponents.

This is how coaches think when they're scheduling.

 

I wonder if looking at the Median would also be useful, especially for selection criteria (or seeding)? Teams schedule 1 or 2 really tough or really bad games can really help/hurt their average, so would the median possibly give us a more complete picture of how difficult a team's schedule is game by game? Though I guess looking at the median would probably also heavily favor the P5 conferences. And schedules are probably not skewed enough for it to be a useful metric?

 

A fairly good measure -- at least from the Committee's perspective -- may be opponents' average rank. I'm referring here to end-of-season rank, not beginning of season predicted rank -- and actually, the thread's question appears really to refer to toughest predicted schedule since all we have now is opponents' predicted strength.

Here are Committee numbers from the last 11 years:

#1 seeds: Opponents' average rank: 62
#2 seeds: 72
#3 seeds: 75
#4 seeds: 82
Unseeded at large selections: 89
Top 60 teams not getting at large selections: 115

Bonus: Top 60 teams disqualified from consideration due to records below 0.500: 72

 

Everything else aside, here is a really great five game sequence for Santa Clara:

9/2/18 TexasA&M away
9/7/18 NorthCarolinaU home
9/9/18 NotreDame home
9/13/18 TCU home
9/16/18 Stanford away

 

Regarding UCLA's schedule, we are definitely a road team this year with all of those games I believe AWAY this season which will make them that much more challenging.