"A Politics Major Attempts to Do Math" or "Numbers You May Not Care About"
 
So I've been adding up the RPI of the out of conference opponents that PL teams face.  I did it last year when I had all the schedules, and I've done it so far for LC and LU (see below).  But is it fair to judge the toughness of a team's schedule based on those numbers? 

Here's the order of OOC toughness that I predicted last year before the season started for the teams in the league:

PLBlog Predicted OOC Toughness for Last Year
1. HC - 157
2. Navy- 170
3. Lafayette - 176
4. Bucknell - 179
5. AU - 180
6. Colgate - 217
7. Lehigh - 220
8. Army - 256

And here's what the strength of schedule numbers ended up being (thanks to teamrankings.com):

Last year's SOS
232. Bucknell
239. Navy
249. American
253. Lafayette
276. Holy Cross
294. Army
299. Colgate
312. Lehigh

As you can see, all the numbers went down, mostly because all the teams had to play the lousy teams in the league twice.  Of note is that Lehigh's schedule strength was one of the worst in the nation last year-- maybe that's a reason that they ended up in the Play-In game?  Oh, and they had a similar lousy SOS two years ago too:

Two Years Ago SOS
206. American
227. Holy Cross
241. Navy
259. Bucknell
267. Lafayette
277. Army
285. Colgate
309. Lehigh

Looks like Lehigh has a tendency to have a weak out of conference schedule.  Is it because no one will come to Stabler (including their students, who couldn't fill it up when they were on ESPN), or is it for a reason? 

Hell, just to make things that much more confusing, and because it's a slow day at work, let's check out the average SOS for the league in the last two years.

227.5 American
240    Navy
245.5 Bucknell
251.5 Holy Cross
260    Lafayette
285.5 Army
292    Colgate
310.5 Lehigh

Any thoughts?  It looks like BU, HC, Navy and AU's ability to schedule games with nearby schools improves their schedule strength.  But who knows, my head hurts from all this math.

  @ 2:54 PM