“Scheduling is stupid”: Josh Pate calls out CFB plans amid increased conference sizes

College football has always been a challenging sport to schedule compared to other North American pro sports. Since there are so many conferences and only 12 regular-season games played, not all teams have equal schedules.

These days, with expanded conferences, even teams within the same conference can have vast differences in terms of their strength of schedule.

On Saturday, CFB analyst Josh Pate released an episode of 'Josh Pate's College Football Show.' On the episode, he called CFB out for its scheduling. He pointed directly to the difference in strength of schedule between Florida and Missouri last season as an example. Notably, he called out CFB for increasing conference sizes, making scheduling more difficult (starts at 0:10):

"College football was never meant for a conference to be coast to coast. College football was never meant to have conferences that were 16 or 18 teams deep, but yet here we are. And so, scheduling is stupid right now. Even league scheduling is stupid right now. Do we all agree on that?

"Do we all at least agree that it's pretty dumb to have 18 teams or 16 teams in a conference and have the vast disparity of strength of schedule, team A to team B. I mean last year, I looked at Florida and then I looked at Missouri. These schedules were from different planets and yet allegedly they played in the same conference."

Josh Pate explains what he would do to fix CFB scheduling

Josh Pate did more than complain about college football scheduling. After pointing out the problem, he said what he wants done (starts at 0:50).

"Here's what I would love to do and we've been working on this internally. I am really passionate. ... I'm really aggressive about properly defining strength of schedule for our own purposes in house. I just want to know that for my own self.

"However, I also wish college football was a lot more dutiful about defining strength of schedule. There's a problem, but we want solutions."

He continued:

"So, in-house we've been working on blending the proper criteria to properly define strength of schedule. I just want to be able to pull up your one through 12, who are you playing this year, and I want to know how tough your schedule is."

Josh Pate went on to say that he wants strength of schedule to be defined by more than just the combined record of a team's opponents. Instead, he wants strength of schedule to be defined by a combination of data and mathematics.