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Nothing. U could have a great game between 2 iffy teams and learn nothing about what might happen against quality opponents

Conference data points in a poor conference means nothing.

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They are not P4.

Ole Miss played The Citadel and Georgia St.

Texas had a run of San Jose St, UTEP, and Sam Houston.

Spare us.

I am the last person on this planet to defend Jack, but when building a schedule, there is no way to know who will be good in future years. Each of the teams you cite has had stretches of quality performance.

The ACC is down, no question. But these things are cyclical.

One thing that I do know - when you schedule Tennessee State, you can be assured they will not be a quality opponent.

Who cares? All that matters is how good they were this year. Those teams sucked. If you don’t think that is hurting us right now you are on drugs.

Them. Historically most of these teams are not pushovers. This year collectively they weren’t good but it’s not like we scheduled weak teams intentionally

This year it does hurt us, no argument there

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The ACC is weak right now and that’s 3 or 4 games a year that should be agaisnt better quality opponents

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You DO NOT want a "murderer's row" to establish your greatness during the regular season any longer. That is simply not optimal.

The regular season schedule needs to maximize your chances for the playoffs and, ideally, your team health when (if) you get there.

The perfect schedule gets you in (ideally with a bye while it is at 12 participants) and has your team arrive there as healthy as possible. (It is hard to predict the fortunes of all 12 opponents in advance.)

You do not want to limp in having survived a war of attrition.

If the Irish get in, their schedule this year was just fine. (Sorry, but it achieved the goal.)

If the Irish do not get in...the schedule was slightly too weak on the back end to recover from the sin of opening with 2 losses (which should not have happened)...but it was damned close.

The sweet spot would have had one more top ranked opponent in November this year...but conference powers will NOT want to play the Irish outside of their conference schedule (or maybe local rivalry) later in the year generally. USC used to help provide that every other year...and Stanford did, at least on occasion,...though those days seem less likely now. (The SEC typically schedules FCS and cupcakes prior to their "rivalry games".)

(To that end I was at least happy to see Miami slated for November next year. I was very concerned they were trying to push it towards a Week 0 game.)

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It was just 2 years ago Indiana was 3-9. It's nearly impossible to predict your opponent from year to year. In 2024, Bama played 3 teams with losing records plus Mercer. Georgia played 4 opponents with losing records plus Tennessee Tech. Ohio State played 5 teams with losing records including Western Michigan.

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